I know this because my Reading List is getting unfeasibly long, which means I haven’t had ‘spare’ time to read.

If you’re a web designer or developer and you’re up for some self-directed professional development reading, the following list should prove fruitful.

Title: HTML5 & CSS3 for the Real World
Author: Alexis Goldstein, Louis Lazaris & Estelle Weyl
Publisher: SitePoint
Publication date: May 2011
Link: http://www.sitepoint.com/books/htmlcss1/

Title: Adaptive Web Design
Author: Aaron Gustafson
Publisher: Easy Readers
Publication date: May 2011
Link: http://easy-readers.net/

Title: The Elements of Content Strategy
Author: Erin Kissane
Publisher: A Book Apart
Publication date: March 2011
Link: http://www.abookapart.com/products/the-elements-of-content-strategy

Title: The Smashing Book #2
Author: Various, via Smashing Magazine
Publisher: Smashing Media
Publication date: February 2011
Link: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/02/01/smashing-book-2/

Title: 24 Ways Annual 2010
Author: Edited by Drew McLennan & Brian Suda
Publisher: 5 Simple Steps
Publication date: January 2011
Link: http://www.fivesimplesteps.com/books/the-24-ways-2010-annual/

Title: Hardboiled Web Design
Author: Andy Clarke
Publisher: 5 Simple Steps
Publication date: October 2010
Link: http://hardboiledwebdesign.com

Title: A Practical Guide to Designing for the Web
Author: Mark Boulton
Publisher: 5 Simple Steps
Publication date: February 2009
Link: http://www.fivesimplesteps.com/books/practical-guide-designing-for-the-web

Title: Weaving the Web
Author: Tim Berners-Lee
Publisher: Orion Business
Publication date: November 1999
Link: http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/Weaving/Overview.html

The first was a passing comment made by a person I admire greatly, Miles Burke, who has graduated from being a web design freelancer to a full-on entrepreneur, businessman and model of success in the web industry in remarkably few years.

Miles was a guest on the 100th podcast by the SitePoint panel, an aural magazine that canvasses what’s interesting and important in web development. The 100th podcast was live, with vision, and featured Australian and international guests who have been pivotal in the web world over the past few years. That comfortably includes Miles, who I also consider a personal friend.

Asked whether it was still possible for someone to find success as a web freelancer, Miles said it was probably not – or at least it was much harder – because the indsutry had grown to support specialisation to such a degree that being a jack-of-all-trades freelancer might now be untenable. As a comment, it was off the cuff and on the spot, but I suspect it is a commonly held belief.

I have to disagree.

In my opinion, the market has grown with the industry – in fact the industry of web professionals has hardly kept up with the expansion of the market for web services – creating market segments that include one of customers who prefer and seek out a single point of contact who can meet all their web needs. This could be a project manager for a small or large web agency of some sort, but it could also be the sole trader who specialises only in understanding and meeting his or her clients’ every possible need.

Personalised service and customised products based on an intimate understanding of the client’s business needs and aspirations is actually easier to deliver when you don’t have to explain it to several staff members or send it through a process of departmental approvals.

As I built my business, I made two conscious decisions. The first was that when my web design clients asked me about domain name registration, web hosting, print design, logo design, copy writing, email newsletters or implementing the right ecommerce options, I chose to say “Yes, I can do that for you”. Sometimes I had to buy in a product or some expertise, most times I had to knuckle down and learn something new. Each time, I made sure I delivered at least what my client wanted and often just that little bit more than they were expecting.

The second decision I made was to build every web site so that my client could run it themselves, either using an HTML editing suite like Dreamweaver or a dynamic content management system like WordPress. You know what’s coming next. Sure enough, as soon as I delivered the site, two out three clients would say, “Great! Can you run it for me?” So they pay me a fee, a retainer of sorts, to manage their content, tweak a page here and there and deal with any issues that may come up.

Not only does this, over time and with a growing stable of clients, add up to a tidy, steady income, but when the time comes for a complete redesign because my client’s business has grown or just becuase they want a new look, I’m there in the box seat. They know they can trust me, they know I understand their business and they know I deliver good product. And, because of my first decision, I’m the one hosting the website and renewing their domain names for them, so there’s no pain for my clients.

This approach also ties in to the second item that made me think about my business today.

Ross Honeywill is an extremely astute observer and analyst of business practices. He has come up with ways of understanding how cosumers behave that have radically changed the way his clients have operated, to their great benefit. He published an article today on his personal website about how Mark Rubbo, owner of Readings Books and Music, fought off an incursion into his Melbourne market by the multinational corporate giant Borders.

Readings is no minnow, of course. Rubbo has, as Ross puts it, “built Australia’s biggest independent book and music group one small step at a time by honouring the local preferences and diverse character of each new neighbourhood.”

In the end, it was Rubbo’s commitment to his Carlton community that engendered a commitment in return from his customers, a willingness to pay full price at Readings rather than half price at the new store across the road. Borders made a few bad public calls about why they had opened directly opposite an independent bookseller, Rubbo invested in an even more personalised, intimate approach than before and a resolve emerged in the book-loving, music-loving, independence-loving local community to support Rubbo.

The bit where a customer hands Rubbo a crumpled note saying “Livres sans Frontieres” (Books without Borders) made me think of nothing so much as Arlo Guthrie’s words in Alice’s Restaurant: “And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day, I said fifty people a day walking in singin’ a bar of Alice’s Restaurant and walking out? And friends they may think it’s a movement. And that’s what it is.”

When I passed around the link to Honeywill’s article a friend responded, “Nice read, but I find it hard to believe so many people will pay full price for Harry Potter when it is half price across the street.” And that’s true, it is hard to believe.

Then again, it’s hard for me to believe that people will seek me out to design their web sites, not get put off by the rates I charge, pay me more to look after their sites and then pay me still more to redesign them over time.

It’s hard for them to believe the difference a well thought out, well constructed and well designed web site can make to their business.

Frankly, even I find it hard to believe how interested I get in what people do and how enthused I become at the prospect of building a web presence that will help them do it.

Ross Honeywill is right. “Loyalty does not come in the shape of a discount card or coupon. Loyalty … comes from believing in something wonderful and being thought wonderful in return.”

And Miles Burke is wrong. There is ample room in the web industry for freelancers who lovingly and painstakingly craft unique web sites that meet their clients’ needs, further their ambitions and exceed their expectations.

Most of the time, it’s a straightforward task to work out what the person wants from their website.

Often, it involves digging into the client’s background, achievements, skills, plans and aspirations in order to properly understand them and their product or service and frame a web presence that will do them justice.

Sometimes, as I have just recently found out, that process can take me a year. Step forward, Professor Iain McCalman.

To say Iain is an over-achiever is an understatement.

Just to give you an idea, his CV runs to 16 pages, including 14 books he has authored, co-authored, edited or co-edited; 46 articles in books or refereed journals (which includes publications such as the Australian Dictionary of Biography, English Historical Review, American Guide to Historical Sources and Dictionary of Literary Biography), another 16 articles in non-refereed journals and the like (New York Times, The Australian, Cosmos, History Magazine, etc); 51 papers delivered at international conferences and seminars; 34 public lectures delivered at symposiums and festivals; 10 international conferences he co-convened; the four international workshops for professionals he has conducted; and the 17 occasions on which has acted as consultant to international art and msueum exhibitions and documentary films and television series.

Then there are the 34 occasions of professional service on councils, boards and committees, 19 of university service and eight of government service.

He is currently Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Sydney and Adjunct Professor at ANU. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, and the Australian Academy of the Humanities, and has held Visiting Research Fellowships in Britain and the US, including at All Souls, Oxford and as a Mellon Visiting Professor at Californian University of Technology, Pasadena.

He is, of course, a teacher – supervising an average of four PhD students a year plus a number of Masters and Honours students, and was awarded the Inaugural Vice Chancellor’s Prize for Teaching Excellence at the Australian National University in 1994. He was made an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2007 for services to history and the humanities.

Iain’s is by no means a dry, academic renown.

His book Darwin’s Armada: Four Voyages and the Battle for the Theory of Evolution (2009) was published in separate editions by Penguin in Australia, Simon and Schuster in the UK and WW Norton in the US. It was favourably reviewed by, among others, the New Yorker, The New York Times, Kirkus Review, The Times Higher Education Supplement, the Guardian, and the Australian Literary Review.

It also attracted glowing reviews from major Darwinist scholars such as Janet Browne (Harvard), Harriet Ritvo (Harvard) and Stephen Rose (University of London). An international conference in its honour, Darwin Across the Disciplines was held at Duke University in November 2009. The book was shortlisted for seven Australian literary awards, including the Age Book of the Year and the Walkley Award for Non-Fiction, and won the Western Australian Premier’s Book Prize for Non-Fiction.

It was the basis of exhibitions at the National Maritime Museum of Australia and at the Macleay Museum, a Film Australia website and a three-part TV series, Darwin’s Brave New World, shown in Australia, Canada, Germany, France and the United Kingdom.

Iain’s literary agent decided it was high time he had a website of his own, and sent Iain to me.

I admit I was daunted – by the task, not the man, I should add: Iain is a highly personable and engaging chap, very easy to spend time with – and I admit I dithered and dallied with a range of high falutin’  ideas, before coming back (eventually) to a relatively simple structure that just aimed to make his extraordinary career thus far navigable to the web visitor, and offered scope to include whatever the next chapters of his life may hold.

There is still much work to do in including all the possible content and interlinking it to accommodate as many paths of interest to the visitor as possible, but I am mightily relieved that I have at last been able to launch the site, and that my client is delighted with it.

Phew!

In October last year, Steven Clark – who is not only wise in the ways of the web and in the ways of business but is Tasmanian and therefore infallible – alerted me to the fact that SitePoint had a vacancy for a Tech Editor.

Now, I have been a fan of this publisher of books and online resources relating to web design and development for many years. I wrote admiringly about them back in 2006 and have purchased some two dozen of their print titles over the years.

What I have gleaned from SitePoint books has contributed significantly to the small but meaningful successes I have achieved in the web industry so far. I rank them alongside the Web Directions conferences as my main avenue of ongoing professional development.

So when the opportunity came along to work with them, I thought I’d better give it a go. I believe you can learn a great deal by working with people you admire and who inspire you. I must have done something right because what started as a bit of casual Tech Editing has evolved into recently acquiring the title of Managing Editor, Online Content.

This does not mean I have given up being a web designer. In fact, my part-time work at SitePoints fits hand-in-glove with my own business, as does my continuing involvement with WIPA, the Web Industry Professional Association, of which I am currently and proudly the President.

Not only will I continue to manage and expand the web presence of my stable of long term web clients, which includes people like Anne Summers, Helen Caldicott, Julie McCrossin, Wendy McCarthy, Andrew Buchanan, Peter Wall and Caroline Baum, as well as a hatful of other authors, designers, musicians, theatre performers and broadcasters and the odd financial trainer, school, photographer, winemaker, film-maker, management consultant and a bunch of non-profit organisations – I will continue to take on more work as and when I can fit it in.

Currently, I’m working on two very exciting projects for a rather extraordinary academic and a highly gifted graphic designer, both Australian and both world beaters.

No way am I giving all that up.

So, if you’re interested in writing for one of the world’s leading providers of resources for web professionals: articles, courses, ebooks or print books, please do let me know. Equally, if you’re looking for a web designer and developer to single handedly create an outstanding and effective web presence for you that will grow over time to accommodate your own success, please also get in contact.

I’m glad that’s cleared up.

Yes, the image on the left does come from the prezzo files.

Going under the title The A-Team, the dynamic duo sold out their venues in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Canberra. The Perth event didn’t quite sell out, but was hailed by the presenters as featuring possibly the most intelligent and engaging Q&A session of the lot. Being AWIA‘s home territory, that probably shouldn’t surprise.

Ironically – or maybe typically – I didn’t actually get to any of the workshops myself. I may be President of WIPA but I still have to meet my client deadlines.

You can make bookings on the WIPA site at http://wipa.org.au/html5/.

Seeing as it’s only $60 for WIPA and AWIA members ($90 non-members) for three and a half hours with Steve Faulkner and Bruce Lawson, a couple of deadset international experts in their fields who also happen to be entertaining speakers, I reckon tickets will go pretty quickly.

Here’s the lowdown:

WAI-ARIA: Making the interactive web more accessible

Presenter: Steve Faulkner
I will make a serious attempt to demystify ARIA. Outlining its major aspects and how it works under the hood to improve the user experience. I’ll talk about what it is and what it is not, when and where it should be used, explaining the advantages and the pitfalls. I’ll also go into how it fits into the emerging HTML5 UI ecosystem. Don’t expect any live screen reader demonstrations (but maybe a video or 2).

There will be slides, code and developer tool demonstrations and expect some lively debate on the topics of HTML5, ARIA and accessibility with my co-presenter Bruce.

Steve Faulkner
Steve is the Technical Director at The Paciello Group (TPG). He leads the development of the Web Accessibility Toolbar, Color Contrast Analyser and AViewer accessibility testing tools. He is an active member of the W3C HTML Working Group and W3C Protocols and Formats Working Group. His work in these groups is focused on HTML5 canvas accessibility, use of WAI-ARIA in HTML5 and he is editor of the W3C Draft Specification HTML5: Techniques for providing useful text alternatives. Steve regularly publishes articles and research on accessibility issues on the TPG blog.

HTML5: The good, the bad and the quite interesting

Presenter: Bruce Lawson
I’ll introduce the new features of HTML5 and show why it can help you make more robust and accessible web apps using open standards. I’ll look deeply at the new semantic elements, adding intelligent forms that can remove the need for JavaScript validation, and adding native video to a page that doesn’t use plugins (although degrades to Flash in older browsers). We’ll look at the new APIs for canvas, Geolocation, etc – what they can do and how simple the syntax is.

The workshop will be a mixture of slideware, live coding and in-browser demos. It’s intended for those who write mark-up, and doesn’t expect deep JavaScript knowledge (we look at the potential of the APIs but not the intricacies of coding).

We emphasise simplicity of authoring and accessibility of the user experience.

Bruce Lawson
Bruce evangelises Open Web Standards for Opera. He’s been active in Web Standards since 2002, working with the Web Standards Project, the British Standards Institution’s guidance on commissioning accessible web sites. He’s currently on the W3C Mobile Best Practices Working Group and co-authored “Introducing HTML5″ (<a href=”http://www.introducinghtml5.com”>www.introducinghtml5.com</a>), the first full-length book on the subject. He once had a girlfriend named Sheila, although neither were Australian.

Workshop Timetable

Sydney: Tuesday 23 November. 9.00am – 12.30pm
SMC Conference & Function Centre,
66 Goulburn Street, Sydney 2000

Canberra: Wednesday 24November. 12.30pm – 4.00pm
Conference Room, National Library of Australia,
Parkes Place, Parkes, ACT

Melbourne: Thursday 25November. 1.30pm – 5.00pm
Ether Conference Centre (between the Swanston Hotel and Grand Mercure)
265-281 Little Bourke St, Melbourne 3000

Perth: Monday 29November.
(Venue and time still to be finalised)

Brisbane: Wednesday 1December. 1.30pm – 5.00pm
Cliftons Conference and Seminar rooms
288 Edward Street, Brisbane 4000

Cost
WIPA and AWIA members $60.00
Non-members $90
Morning/afternoon teas will be provided

The workshops are being presented by the Web Industry Professionals Association (WIPA) and the Australian Web Industry Association (AWIA).

The web industry, in turn, is fortunate to have people like Andy Clarke, Mark Boulton and Elliot Jay Stocks to inspire us to seek and achieve beauty in our designs.

All three are highly creative visual designers as well as engaging and articulate conference speakers and workshop leaders. They are also the authors of books that highlight not just their own work and philosophies but those of their peers.

I was quick to pre-order a copy of 8 faces, a new magazine project of Elliot’s, and it was just as well I did, as it soon sold out.

No wonder, with people like Jason Santamaria, Jos Buivenga and Erik Spiekermann on board in the first issue to talk about typography: fonts, lettering, type, foundries, faces, treatments, rendering … everything to do with the presentation of words on the web.

Elliot’s idea was to plumb the thoughts of eight key people who work with type on the web, along the way asking each to list the typefaces they would use if they could have only eight.

If you are at all interested in how text is, and can be, presented on web pages and rendered by various browsers on a range of screens – and if you’re a web designer, you should be – this is fascinating and inspiring stuff.

One of the things I like about what Elliot describes as a “niche subject”, is that people who are into typography on the web see themselves as part of a historical chain, the latest practitioners of a craft that goes back beyond books and magazines in print all the way to cuneiform and hieroglyphics, as well as sideways into posters, tickets, timetables and advertising hoardings, and now onward into the digital age.

From choosing and implementing fonts for style and purpose, understanding how different fonts work together, creating illustrative lettering and designing new typefaces, right through to exploring business models for making a living out of all this, 8 Faces is both a wonderful showcase and an instructional guide.

It’s an ambitious project. $22.50 (which is what £8 worked out to) is not cheap for a magazine, but this is not your supermarket checkout kind of magazine. Producing a 210mm square 76pp paperback spinebound magazine in full cover on quality paper stock will set you back a few quid.

It must indeed have been tempting to extend the initial print run of 1,000 when it became clear the demand was there, but Elliot has said that he will keep his word to print no more, although pdf versions are available. And he’ll make sure to print more for #2, before Christmas.

I’m looking forward to it.

WIPA is the Web Industry Professional Association, “an organisation that brings Australian Web professionals together to exchange ideas, participate in debate, advance education and promote ethical practice”.

More information will be made available shortly (ie as soon as I write the next newsletter) about WIPA’s upcoming national workshop tour, but I can tell you now that we have secured the services of Bruce Lawson and Steve Faulkner to hold masterclasses in HTML5 and WAI-ARIA with Australian developers and designers according to the following schedule:

• November 23: Sydney
• November 24: Canberra
• November 26: Melbourne
• November 29: Perth (co-hosted by AWIA)
• December 1: Brisbane

Venues and ticket prices are yet to be finalised. Each workshop will take about three and half hours long, divided into digestible sessions.

Bruce and Steve have also asked for opportunities to chat with the locals in less formal settings, perhaps not totally dissimilar to say, a pub. This will be a unique chance to chew the web fat with two global champions of standards, inclusion and the open web.

WIPA is currently working out how to merge with the Australian Web Industry Association (AWIA) to create a single industry body. I’ve been a Vice President of WIPA for the past year, and was recently elected President.

Steven Bradbury is an Australian ice skater who won an Olympic speed skating gold medal by being the only one in the race not to fall over. My ascension to the WIPA Presidency could also be seen as a case of “last man standing”.

It’s quite a different kettle of code to Jeremy Keith’s HTML5 for Web Designers. That book explained how I could confidently starting using HTML5 with my existing and planned web projects.

This book, Introducing HTML5 by Bruce Lawson and Remy Sharp, goes into much greater detail about how much more I can do with HTML5.

Bruce Lawson is a UK web developer who works for Opera, with an impressive understanding of, and commitment to, the open web, standards and accessibility. Bruce is coming to Australia in November to hold a series of workshops on ARIA-HTML5 for WIPA, of which I am the newly elected President (did someone say ‘Steven Bradbury’?).

Remy Sharp is also a UK web developer with similar passions plus a particular facility with jQuery and JavaScript.

I haven’t even finished this book, but already I find myself extending my expectations of what I can do now and in the future with markup on a web page. That’s pretty exciting.

Significantly, Lawson & Sharp do not believe HTML5 is perfect. They simply focus on what HTML5 can do while noting its limitations, inconsistencies and logical discrepancies.

The examples they provide are clear, useful and relevant, and their language is positive. They inject enough humour and self-awareness to lighten the learning load.

I’m no dab hand with JavaScript but they make me feel I can handle this.

The book isn’t meant to be comprehensive, either in saying what HTML5 is and isn’t, or in defining what can be done with it. But the authors do walk through some of the more interesting APIs that become available.  OK, in the case of ‘canvas’ it’s more like ‘wade through’, but still.

I think what I like most about HTML5, at least as I’ve come to understand it so far via Keith, Lawson, Sharp and others, is that – particularly when used with CSS3 – it seems to greatly empower people like me who genuinely see themselves as designer, developer, information architect and all round web creator.

If there is a future edition of Introducing HTML5, I expect that some sections will be extended as the use of  HTML5 is refined.

In the meantime, this book will do nicely as a guide to practical application of the new markup.

Anyway, Lachlan made perfect sense of it all by explaining it logically and with the passion of someone who doesn’t just understand something but really gets it, and from a perspective close to my own and in a voice that resonated strongly with me.

That’s what this book is like. HTML5 for Web Designers is pitch perfect.

In providing a practical overview of what HTML5 is and how it will affect what web designers do, Jeremy Keith has delivered something that is part conference presentation, part interview and part geeks moving coasters around a pub table.

Common to all of those is the active voice, and this book is very much Jeremy talking to you. He knows the background, he knows the politics and he most especially knows that you, jobbing web designer, just want to know whether it means you have to go back and recode everything you’ve ever done. And then learn Javascript.

What’s also common to those is that they are of a moment: not necessarily perishable, but likely to be superceded sooner or later by the next model. In the meantime, this will be the practical handbook for working with HTML5 for some time to come.

Anyone who’s seen Jeremy presenting at a conference knows he’s funny. It’s a witty, informed and clever funny. And still grounded in practical application. That’s what this book is like.

Look, frankly, I love that this book assumes I already know what I’m doing. It’s for people who are working web designers. If that’s you, you should get it.

HTML5 for Web Designers is badged as No. 1 in the new imprint A Book Apart: “brief books for people who make websites”, and represents an extension of web magazine A List Apart – itself a re-incarnation of a late ’90s web design mailing list which has more recently also moved into the US conference circuit with An Event Apart.

All but the newest or most cloistered web designers will recognise the names of the people behind all this: Zeldman, Meyer, Santa Maria. We’re talking quality, here – standards-compliant, CSS-driven, beautiful, functional quality. Yes, Virginia, web design now has stars.

In his foreword to HTML5 for Web Designers, Zeldman says that the goal of this book – and others to follow in this catalogue – is to “shed clear light on a tricky subject, and do it fast, so you can get back to work.”

That’s what this book is like.