When designing websites for clients, there is often a tug of war between what I think looks good, what the client thinks and what the projected users will think. There is no right and wrong to what makes a site appeal to certain people, but recent research suggests there might be gender differences.

Press Releases - Key Website Research Highlights Gender Bias

The article states that “websites which might appeal greatly to one sex are a total no-no with the other.” This is an interesting finding, but is gender too blunt a distinction? This is likely to touch on individual colour preferences (Maybe by season, as with House of Colour… ), introversion/extraversion and many other personal characteristics. While this research is good ammo for making a point with the less objective clients, I can’t help feeling that it is more subtle than male/female.

I have taken to looking at what my clients are wearing - this can give an insight into their colour preferences. It is important to stress to them that they are not making a site for themselves, they are making it to appeal to their customers. Therefore I need to know who the site is aimed at and what their preferences might be.

There is a lot of overlap between web design and psychology, providing the scene for a lot of crossover research. However, Psychology is still struggling with modernist concepts and Aristotelian yes/no distinctions. Post-modern and constructionist ideas will have much to say about web design and user interface creation.

Awesome set of Kingston DataTraveler Icons by my homeboy Mr Rick Nunn. He is in the zone at the moment, making websites, widgets, icons and all kinds of other stuff!

Kingston DataTraveler Icons (For OS X) | RickNunn.

FCS websites have been working on www.wilsonfieldmarketing.co.uk recently, for a company that help people reclaim their Payment Protection Insurance (PPI) premiums on loans etc if they were mis-sold the policy.

It is a budget site, but still has an attractive graphic design and a spam protected contact form. Good coding practices mean that it is already ready for search engine optimisation and works on all major web browsers. We also took care of creating print ready artwork for a PPI refund flier and turned the whole thing around in a short time frame to fit in with the shop opening deadline

Sold my PC last week, took the plunge and got myself a 20″ iMac

After using the work MacBook Pro all day, coming home and using Windows was a chore. I thought it would be ok, but alas, it wasn’t to be. Transferred about 200gb of data across on an external drive and was up and running surprisingly quickly. I’m a fan of free and open source software and a lot of the software I used on Windows is also available for the Mac. A few things caught me out though:

• I don’t know how to do a force quit using the keyboard, and I have crashed it a few times. Don’t believe people when they say Macs don’t crash!
• My old scanner and printer don’t work particularly well (yet). I’m on the case.
• I used to use Sage accounting software, which isn’t available for OSX. I hated it anyway, so time to find something else!
• I was really excited by Front Row, but less excited when it wouldn’t play any of my video files. It needs Divx and AC3 codecs installing separately.

I have done some web development on the Mac already, and it is a very capable system. It copes really well with doing lots of things at the same time, which my PC struggled with. I will be posting up a list of the freeware that I have found useful when I get round to it (too busy playing at the moment!)

Nick

I have set up a wiki to serve as a place where I can keep all my Umbraco notes. We have been developing a number of sites using this free .NET content management system, and have learnt a lot during the process.

The existing documentation for Umbraco has been translated by the looks of it, and confused me (especially as a complete noob to it). There is lots of stuff all over the net, but I want to keep it all together to help me while I am developing.

Hopefully, the Umbraco community will also contribute to the wiki, or at least gain some benefit from it! It’s my way of giving something back to the community, as the software is free and various people have helped me out with what must have seemed like stupid questions and problems

Nick