It was a lovely idea, beautifully executed, that included some fascinating and unexpected choices from people not necessarily usually associated with faith and reflection.

It’s four years later, and Ros is about to launch the sequel. A World of Prayer has applied the same principle as Mosaic, only on a global scale.

This time, contributors include Nobel Peace Prize winners Lech Walesa, Mairead Corrigan, Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu, as well as the Dalai Lama, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, Rabbi Jacqueline Tabick, theologian Hans Küng, and writers Richard Rohr and Joan Chittister. Artists and musicians such as Pete Seeger and Yusuf Islam are also included.

It’s another lovely piece of work, sure to find an appreciative audience. The overwhelming impression is of how much the proponents and followers of various faiths and philosophies have in common with each other. Our shared humanity shines through, even as we wonder how such like-minded people can differ so widely – and often so violently – in the way their beliefs are applied.

I’m not a person with a lot of faith in organised religion, nor do I have an unshakeable belief in any one particular deity. If any label can be applied to me, it is probably fair to call me a humanist. Although I do have a sneaking hippy/boomer empathy with pantheism.

Designing the new site did throw up a couple of interesting issues. The site for the first book was based at a domain of that name, ie mosaicbook.com.au. The obvious strategy was to get a new domain for the author (rosbradley.com) and build a new site that incorporated the old one and offered room to cover the new book and anything else that might eventuate.

The shift from a .com.au to a .com domain is largely symbolic, but does give a sense of moving from a local to a global scale.

I was also asked to keep the site very low key. I interpreted this as an invitation and licence to embrace minimalism. Fortunately, I like white.

I followed the path of least resistance in keeping most of the Mosaic site structure intact – except the pages about the author and her links, which I turned into pages linked to from the home page. In this way, the site became focused on the author and the Mosaic site became a sub-site.

It then made sense to set up the pages for A World of Prayer in the same way, using the same styles and structure used for Mosaic adapted to the new book’s colour scheme and the available content (eg no reviews, as yet).

Using this method, the whole thing took very little time. Each book sub-site has its own stylesheet, as does the main site.

I’m sure there are better ways to do this, but it was quick and the result is reasonably elegant.

Until recently I was the day to day Managing Editor of sitepoint.com, the flagship of a growing network of websites devoted to helping professionals and dedicated amateurs keep up with developments in web technology.

Lately, I’ve stepped aside from these duties to focus on building editorial relationships between SitePoint and major web technology companies like Microsoft, Adobe and a few significant others.

In the course of this, I was asked to provide some notes to writers on what makes an article on web design or development great, rather than just good.

“Great” in this context has a meaning fairly specific to web publishing, measured by benchmarks including these:

Pageviews: Unique visitors indicate the number of people who visited, but the number of returning visitors is also an important indicator of popularity among those visitors. It’s important to judge this in comparative terms. For the kind of article we’re talking about, articles should be compared to other articles on the same website, and against articles on similar websites. All things being equal, a great article will not only get pageviews in its first month that might be 10% of the site’s total, but will continue to draw good traffic over time.

Time on page: the time visitors spend on the page indicates how much ‘meat’ the article holds, whether readers are engaged by the content either as they follow the tutorial aspects or as they think about the views presented. It also means advertisers on a page can expect equivalent sustained exposure and a greater chance of clickthroughs.

Sharing: the number of Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Digg, Reddit, emailed links. Obviously, the more the better, as they indicate readers’ willingness to promote the article to an interested audience.

Comments: both the number and nature of comments between readers and the article author. A mediocre article can generate hundreds of comments but, more importantly, a great article will generate comments that are vibrant, positive and relevant.

Followup Action: Good articles tend to include calls to action for the reader through page links, sales and email options. Great articles will get a high clickthrough rate on these.

Influence: Really great articles will be referenced by other writers, bloggers, conference speakers etc not only for their intrinsic value but also jumping off points for new or different ways of doing things. Great articles can themselves become famous for their influence.

Now that we have some ways to judge whether an article is great, we can isolate the factors that contribute to an article achieving greatness. I’ve identified some factors – there may be more.

Credibility

An article author who is known to readers and has a proven track record of producing credible articles has a head start over unknown writers in terms of attracting readers and thus reaching more easily the critical mass that drives an article to greatness. Professional peer respect can be important, but note that respect is more important than notoriety. Being able to articulate facility with a topic is another key to creating a great article. That doesn’t mean writers have to show off their knowledge, rather they need to make it apparent that they know their stuff so well they don’t need to show off.

Accuracy

Getting facts straight is essential. This requires not only checking for errors but also considering how the facts are presented and supported.  Links to source material, references in other articles and explanations of how conclusions may have been reached all help to make a reader feel comfortable about a writer’s accuracy. Great articles don’t make fundamental mistakes and don’t carry typographical errors.

Timing

Great articles tap into the zeitgeist, the news of the day, rumours, software and hardware releases, fads and conjecture to make the reader feel they are up with the times, or – even better – ahead of the times.

Context

Great articles often emerge due to reader interest in a topic on which the writer has focused, or sometimes by the writer stepping away from the mainstream focus of attention to create a new topic of interest for readers. Publishing the right article at the right time requires paying attention to context, from big picture commercial considerations and current events through to the publishing outlet and page layout. The purpose is not to change the context so much as accommodate it.

Ideas

Great articles convey ideas – or even just one idea – to readers so that readers start having their own ideas. Readers respond positively to writers who can be articulate about their ideas, how they realised them and where those ideas might lead. Making implications explicit is a hallmark of great articles.

Voice

There is no set voice that a writer can adopt to ensure an article achieves greatness. However, great articles do tend to have a clear voice, whether the voice is that of “the industry insider”, “the teacher”, “the colleague”, “the cynic” or “the careful researcher”. The most successful instructional articles address the reader directly.

Detail

Great articles explain what the writer wants to convey in enough detail to convince the reader that whatever is being written about is feasible. Readers should be allowed and encouraged to work through the detail. Code samples and demonstration pages are often found in great articles.

Solutions

Great articles provide solutions. They may be solutions to long standing problems, new issues, to problems the writer identifies for the first time or even problems the writer deliberately sets up. The solution may be completely new or it may improve on an existing solution. Articles that complain about an issue or point out a problem without offering a solution rarely achieve greatness.

Length

A great article is neither too long nor too short. That’s not much help, I know, but there simply is no template for the length of a great article. It depends on the topic, the writer, their style, the readers, the design of the website on which the article is displayed. I find 1500-2500 words is a good range but I’ve seen great articles of both lesser and greater length.

Action

Great articles not only encourage the reader to do something, they make it easy, often providing the means to do it in the article itself. Many of the other factors of greatness (credibility, accuracy, ideas, detail, solutions) can be enhanced by providing an opportunity for the reader to try something themselves.

Visuals

A huge slab of brilliantly written text displayed in 8 point spread across a wide screen will only rarely be perceived as a great article. Paragraphs need to be short, maybe only a sentence. A layout that corresponds roughly to the proportions of a printed page is common to many great articles. Like a magazine, multiple columns can make reading easier. Photos, screenshots, drawings, graphs etc serve not only to please the eye but also to convey information effectively and to complement the text. Great articles use visuals well.

X Factor

To paraphrase Shakespeare, “Some articles are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them”.

Some hit the key benchmarks without really being great articles, just very popular ones. And some articles are great without ever being recognised as such or hitting any of the benchmarks. Even really great articles can disappear without much attention in the morass of the web.

Ultimately, though, it seems to me most great articles come about as the result of committed research, drafting and editing informed by passion, judgement and connection with the reader.

A couple of weeks ago, I attended a full day workshop in Sydney on responsive web design, presented by Web Directions and run by English designer Andy Clarke.

So was it just an indulgence or did I really get something out out of it?

I have basically three forms of professional development these days.

I still buy books that I can prop open around me, scribble notes in and spill coffee on. The more notes and coffee stains, the better the book. I buy e-books, as well.

I attend conferences that give me anything up to two or three dozen presentations on cutting edge topics by industry veterans, startup parvenus, academics and commentators. Key attractions are that I can focus on specific topics in digestible chunks, I can put them in context with each other across the whole conference, and I get to talk about all of that with my peers.

I also attend workshops.

All three cost significant money – including ancillary costs like postage, transport and accommodation – so I’ve learned to set myself an annual budget and pick and choose fairly carefully among the available options. When it’s an all day workshop in Sydney, I have to organise accommodation for the night before (or entrain myself at dawn: not going to happen, folks), so it had better be worth it.

Andy Clarke’s Downunder and Fashionably Flexible workshop was worth it. And how.

I won’t go through everything covered in this workshop. Suffice to say, this masterclass for 40 web professionals let us compare notes with one of our industry’s most articulate, informed and outspoken practitioners, who is himself grappling with all the implications as he works.

It was a godsend for anyone trying to understand how responsive web design relates to what we’ve come to understand about adaptive design, user-centred design, standards-based design and just good web design and development in general.

It was like being in a classroom with a really cool teacher and none of the rubbish that goes with the concept of ‘school’.

This is not about rock star web designers raking in the bucks on overseas tours (yes, some people do have that impression). This is about identifying with and learning from a skilled and experienced designer as he comes to grips with what responsive web design can do for him and his clients.

So this post is not meant just to applaud Andy Clarke (although I do – I find him totally inspirational), it’s meant more to encourage you to sign up to workshops with people like Andy Clarke whenever you get the chance and can afford it.

Even in the couple of weeks since that workshop, I’ve been able to apply what I learned on my own design and development projects. I definitely have a much better grip on what responsive web design means and I feel confident that I can present myself to potential clients as incorporating RWD principles into my work.

Ultimately, workshops like this are a form of professional development that helps my bottom line.

Vince Jones says it as a simple statement of fact, and goes on to explain just what that means.

“A soul singer uses a diatonic scale and might interpret a phrase like this”, and his voice is liquid and gospel and calling and falling.

“A blues singer works with that blues scale and might sound like this”, and his voice is aching and frustrated and bending and keening.

“But a jazz singer … well, he can do anything he likes”, and it’s the same phrase but his voice is dancing and looping and pulling and encircling.

And that’s how the show starts.

That I went to this show was only because Hazel gave me Christmas tickets to John Waters’ tribute show to John Lennon, Glass Onion – which was superb and deserves its own review which may come but not right now. What matters here is that there was a sign advertising Vince Jones and his band performing in this theatre in a few weeks.

I’ve listened to Vince Jones’ music for over 25 years. I can remember when he described himself as a trumpeter because he didn’t think he was a very good singer. Now he “also plays trumpet”, which in itself is a serious understatement. I had only seen him live once, at a noisy benefit in Balmain where he played with The Necks (I think). A theatre show would be a treat.

So we bought tickets. Since you ask, yes it was Hazel who actually ordered the tickets. And obtained middle seats, front row.

Also at Glass Onion was my friend Vince the jeweller, like me from Corrimal, who said that Vince Jones would sometimes pop his head into Vince the jeweller’s shop to say hello. I think I actually gasped. Apparently, Vince Jones grew up in Corrimal.

On the night, Vince the jazz singer did indeed mention that he attended Corrimal High School. He referred not only to the fun he and his brother had in and around Wollongong, but to his good fortune in having grown up in such a place, and his sense of loss at how some things have changed.

In fact, Vince had a quite a bit to say. He quietly exhorted us to care more for the environment, for the oppressed, for the dispossessed, to stand up to the corporate culture, to maintain our values.

This was all in small bites, wrapped in the introductions to the songs. And such songs. As always, his own alongside the jazz standards. In fact, it was a real treat as the list included two co-written with Doug de Vries.

But they all become his own, of course. Well, his and the band’s, because this band is not just tight, not just an efficient backing unit – this band is an integral part of the Vince Jones performance. They are all individuals, with idiosyncracies and no less a willingness to take the limelight than the vocalist, who complains, “We rehearse and rehearse, and then they just do what they want”.

Matt McMahon on piano, Simon Barker on drums, James Muller on guitar and Ben Waples on bass all worked together seamlessly and all took time to shine as soloists. That they each managed to emerge as distinct characters even as the singer in the purple shirt held the audience in his sway says much about their personal style.

It was also apparent that while all these musicians are consummate professionals, in command of their instruments to a level of technical proficiency that is breath-taking, songs and arrangements were selected for broad appeal and audience accessibility. It made for a wonderful evening’s entertainment.

Songs included Two Sleepy People, Our Town, Can’t Afford to Die, We Let Them Do It, Rainbow Cake, The Parting Glass, Winter in America (the Gil Scott-Heron one) and more I can’t remember.

On top of all that, Vince squeezed some notes out of that trumpet that fair near made me cry. I’m a sucker for the atmospheric, almost vocal, Miles Davis style of playing and Vince Jones is the finest proponent I’ve ever heard live.

And I know it doesn’t seem fair, but the man can actually hold a note singing even more steadily than with his horn.

Did I mention he’s a Corrimal boy?

I designed the first website for Financial Education Professionals in 2003, when it was a two-person operation run from a home office.

Nowadays, FEP has an office just off Circular Quay in Sydney, with a permanent staff of seven and a team of part-time financial trainers working throughout Australia and South East Asia. And a new website.

As you can imagine, it continues to be a privilege to have a client for long enough to work through several site redesigns – and I’ve written about that before, here and here – but it’s also gratifying to think that my work on the FEP web presence has contributed to their success and ongoing expansion.

For the latest site redesign, I stayed with WordPress as the content management system but took the opportunity to work with a theme called Absolum, which I have previously admired but never used.

I’d recommend Absolum to anyone who wants a robust, flexible theme that will withstand a fair bit of customisation and still look great in all modern browsers. It uses the plain  HTML doctype with divs, and provides a facility to add custom styling – although I still found myself editing style.css directly, and the php files, for that matter.

As well as the usual Akismet, WordPress Automatic Upgrade and WordPress FireWall (version 2) plug-ins, I installed Contact Form 7 as it powers the Contact Form 7 Widget option to easily customise and place a contact form in a sidebar, and NewsTicker Aink for a scrolling display of training courses, again allowing an adequate amount of easy styling.

I used Typekit to display Pragmatica font for the site title.

For the record, I’m not bothered that Internet Explorer won’t display the text-shadow used on the site title and elsewhere. It limits but doesn’t spoil the intended visual effect and, importantly, it doesn’t undermine actionable information bering provided or affect the functionality of the site in general.

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

Elisabeth is an essayist and reviewer who has just published her first novel, Those Who Come After.

The book is based on and extrapolated from Elisabeth’s own experiences, which she previously covered in an essay that won the inaugural Calibre Prize in 2007.

It might sound like overkill – writing a novel based on your own essay about your own upbringing – but Elisabeth’s is quite a story.

The following extract is from another essay of hers, Missing from my own life, published in 2008.

My full name is Elisabeth Miriam Esther de Rijke-Nassau. I am a medieval dinosaur. When I die, a DNA coiling back to Charlemagne will be declared extinct. In 2010 others who claim a more indirect descent from Charlemagne will gather in a place called Vianden, in Luxemburg, to celebrate one thousand years of identity as the Nassaus. Vianden, a castle in the air, was abandoned in the seventeenth century but reconstructed in the 1960s. It is where my ancestors first established their identities as warlords, dukes and princes. Now it is a tourist site.

The Nassaus led the revolt of the Low Countries against the Spanish in a war that lasted the worst part of eighty years, ending in 1588. A century later, another Nassau, William of Oranje-Nassau, became king of England. At the Battle of the Boyne he defeated his father-in-law, James II, the last Catholic king of the English. Among William’s legacies was a divided Ireland and the wearing of the Orange in support of the Protestant cause.

I was born on a freezing day in January 1947 in a place called Middelburg, on the island of Walcheren, the most south-western province of the Netherlands. Middelburg, or Middelbroch as it was known in the Middle Ages, was founded in the twelfth century by Elisabeth Kunigunda, daughter of the king of Thuringia and wife of Wolfert of Nassau. My grandfather, who had many titles but preferred to be known as ‘The Lord of the Islands’, registered my birth the same day. As if he knew I would be the dynasty’s full stop, he added to my birth certificate the title ‘The Lady of the Islands’. The matter of titles is a minefield of arcane conundrums. Only someone born into the family can be known as the Lord of the Islands. As I come from an unbroken male line, there had never been a ‘Lady’ before.

A few days after my birth, I was decked out in eighteenth century lace in preparation for my baptism. The tradition of the Calvinist sect I was born into dictates that one of the godparents should carry the child to church. My godfather, Prince Bernhard, the German-born son-in-law of Queen Wilhelmina – a war hero like my father, who was his close friend – emerged from my grandparents’ house, took one look at the snow and ice in the street and removed his army greatcoat. I was carried to my baptism wrapped in the same coat that Prince Bernhard had worn when he accepted the German surrender at Wageningen.

This should tell you two things: Elisabeth has quite a story to tell, and the telling of it plays a large part in her life.

I suppose this is all the more pertinent for me, because I’m Dutch-born myself. It certainly never occurred to me that when I sang the words of the Dutch national anthem as a child that I would later build a website for a descendant of the king mentioned in the song’s opening lyric.

As an immigrant, there is a further level of interest for me in Elisabeth’s story, in that it is very different to my own. My working class parents emigrated to Australia with the specific aim of providing greater educational, social and career opportunities than might have been available in The Netherlands. The Holdsworth family had very different reasons for emigrating and lived in very different circumstances.

The website itself is not a complex one, but that didn’t make it any easier to create. I think quite a few designers are like me and find sites with lots of content rather easier to build than those that only have a few pages. On a small site, every page seems to carry greater value.

In this case, I have probably ended up placing more emphasis on style, look and feel than I might normally. And there is also a kind of freedom in that.

By the way, the castle in the background of each page is the one Elisabeth refers to in the excerpt above. The presence of this edifice is intended to serve as a visual metaphor for the looming sense of historical imperative that pervades Elisabeth’s writing.

One way I have of showing this is to provide pro bono web services to deserving clients.

I consider myself fortunate that this can range from websites for local community groups with which I’m involved, like scouts, soccer and nippers, through to a couple of websites for Helen Caldicott, probably the world’s foremost anti-nuclear campaigner and an Australian, to boot.

I had been planning to migrate Dr Caldicott’s site from a static site to WordPress in a fairly leisurely fashion when it suddenly became important to get this done pronto.

What happened was, of course, events in Japan where natural disasters had highly deleterious effect on the Fukushima nuclear power stations. Naturally, this made many people want to re-examine the words of those who have warned of such dangers for many years. Dr Caldicott was instantly in high demand for comment and analysis and people flocked to her website for background information and news updates.

When I say “flocked”, I mean traffic went from 25 visitors a day to 1,000, where it still hovers. Fortunately, the hosting account I have with Crucial Paradigm was able to handle this with ease but it did mean that I had to fast-track the site upgrade.

As a result I didn’t re-design the site very much at all, just moved it to WordPress and set up a few things to take advantage of what plugins can do for a site.

There’s a fair bit of work to do yet, but I think everything’s working pretty well.

This means, of course, I will have to weave some similar magic for Dr Caldicott’s other website I host, People for a Nuclear-Free Australia.

At least it’s for a good cause.

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.

That it is classified as both Reference and Humour gives you some idea of its approach. It is always interesting, often surprising and sometimes very funny.

It does carry, however, a very considerable oversight.

The author, Simon Garfield, is a British journalist and the author of 11 other books, including a Somerset Maugham Award-winning study of Aids in Britain called The End of Innocence.

He writes for The Observer and makes various articles available at his website. He also provides extracts from his books but, somewhat surprisingly, doesn’t tell you much about himself at all, although you can download a photo of him.

Anyway, there is a great deal to like about Just My Type. From Gutenberg (the inventor of movable type printing) to Luc(as) de Groot (the designer of Calibri, Microsoft’s default font of choice), Garfield profiles the people behind the fonts we have come to use in print and on the web. He describes the ways in which some of the most famous – and obscure – fonts came into being, and he astutely examines the circumstances which made some successful and others less so: technological advances, social mores, language developments and the roles of politics, religion, advertising and art.

This is complex territory, but Garfield maintains a light touch and an open mind: rather necessary when you look at the lives of some of the people involved.

I have no hesitation in recommending this as an entertaining, diverting and highly informative read.

So, what is the oversight to which I referred earlier?

Well, despite being very clear about how fonts have become vitally important to the web and acknowledging the role that the web now plays in generating new fonts and reviving old ones, and despite showing great awareness of the sometimes difficult circumstances in which font designers ply their trade, Garfield makes no mention of the single most frustrating aspect of font selection and management for web designers, which is the limited control they have over which fonts can actually be displayed on web sites.

As they cannot be sure which fonts a site visitor might have installed on their computer, designers have had to implement a font-stack (at least until the recent advent of hosted fonts and the like). This meant we had to include a line of code in our style sheets that asked a browser to display, for example, Verdana or if the user didn’t have Verdana then Arial or, if the user didn’t have Arial then Helvetica, or at last resort any sans serif font that might be installed.

Herein lies a prime example of the difference between designing for the web and designing for print. Those pixel-perfect type models go out the window in a world defined and limited by browser defaults and user selections.

That such a detailed history of fonts as Just My Type does not even refer to this development, which fundamentally changes the role of the font designer and takes control away from them, seems to me entirely inexplicable.

However, even with that caveat, I still recommend the book: it is guaranteed to make you look twice at the fonts around you in your day to day life.