Website design and development
A couple of items today gave me pause for thought, both related to the business of running a business.
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.
Just My Type is, as the cover points out, a book about fonts. More than that, it is a very well-researched and engagingly written account of the still evolving history of type, typography, typefaces and fonts.
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.
I consider myself exceedingly lucky in that quite a few of my web projects are for some very talented people, most of whom find their way to me by means of word of mouth recommendations.
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.
Some clarification is called for.
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.
