jQuery training course by Richard Powell
I had the chance to go on a jQuery training course recently, led by Richard Powell. jQuery is was one of my weaker areas, and after Shaun had gone on the course the other month and come back happier than he left, I figured it was about turn I went!
I was impressed with Richard’s knowledge of jQuery, and the way the course was designed to suit the pace from those entirely new to jQuery and with little/no knowledge of CSS or HTML to those who had experienced jQuery largely through plugins.
tl;dr: this jQuery training course is definitely recommended, whether you’ve had no experience of jQuery or, like me, just hacked plugins around to suit your needs!
Peacock Carter York
Amongst client work, we’ve been working on the refresh for Peacock Carter York.
This refresh has been one of both content and design; the old site was a few years old (quite how old, I forget), and had been pretty neglected until recently.
We’ve got clients spread fairly widely across the UK, but a noticeable scattering around York and North Yorkshire thanks to their close proximity to us in Newcastle, which we’ve built on in the last few years thanks to this site. I think – though I may be wrong (it’s been known) – that part of our success with this is the lack of web design agencies in York/North Yorkshire who don’t offer (or don’t explicitly advertise) particular services we do, such as Magento websites or WordPress powered websites.
They may well use these technologies, but they’re barely mentioned on websites in the region. This isn’t necessarily, of course, a bad thing: the end client probably doesn’t care what their website is built in, so long as it functions and attracts customers!
One thing I’m particularly pleased with for Peacock Carter York’s website is the clean design: in many ways I feel I prefer it over Peacock Carter’s latest redesign for our main website!
Guide to writing website design tenders
At Peacock Carter, a reasonable percentage of our work in any given year is from website design tenders and requests for proposal, and I see the same few issues year after year.
As such, I’ve taken the time to write a guide to writing website design tenders, with a few pointers – and, hopefully, ample explanation of why I’m recommending to do (or not do) something to potential tender writers. I’ve highlighted some of the major points below, but you can read the full guide on “how to write a website design tender” on Peacock Carter’s website.
- Be open to suggestions; many tendering organisations restrict themselves to a specific content management system or technology without any real thought, and miss out on the potential to work with more suitable technologies or web design agencies for their needs.
- Please don’t ask for designs as part of your tender; by all means ask for a sample of the web design company’s previous design work, or a link to an online portfolio, but don’t require suppliers to supply a full website design (the article adds to reasons as to why you shouldn’t do this!)
- Provide a budget; provide, at the very least, a cost range for your project’s budget; it will save companies unable to deliver the project for that budget from wasting their time, and the quality of your tender responses should increase to companies who are capable of delivering the project you are after for the budget you have available.
Those are just some of the many points I racked my brain for! If you have any more, contact me via Peacock Carter, or tweet @PeacockCarter!
New website for Peacock Carter Ltd
It’s been quite a while in the making – over a year, I think -but I’m happy to finally launch the new website for Peacock Carter Ltd.
Some of the major reasons the website has taken so long to get to a state where it’s live are:
- The business has changed so much in the last year or two. The outcome of this was a restructure of the business so that the newer Richard Carter Consultancy Ltdconcentrates on the majority of the open source consultancy projects we do, such as MediaWiki consultancy.I did this around 6 months ago, and I’m really happy with the results so far – particularly with the caliber of clients – including Breda University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands and Central Milton Keynes Town Council – that the new company is able to attract based on our past experience.
- As a designer, it’s really hard to design something for yourself which you’re happy with.
- It’s a fairly sizable website as we have a large number of case studies of previous clients available. The old website didn’t have a backend, so all content was edited through the database, which became a hassle for us. The website is now running on a highly customised version of our content management system thanks to a lot of back-breaking work/cursing from Shaun.
- Client projects get in the way. Obviously, clients need to be our priority, and even scheduling progress in for our own website as if we were a client didn’t quite work as it can cost you money and/or clients as a small agency. As such, months passed by without much progress being made!
We now have clearer, separate identities for the 2 core services we offer, which I think used to baffle some clients! Despite re-branding Peacock Carter over a year ago to concentrate more on acting like the local design agency for Newcastle upon Tyne/the North East of England we are, the realisation of this on Peacock Carter’s website only shows through now, I think. This is particularly due to a lot of content shuffling to make way for what our statistics show are the more desired pages on our website (e.g., web design, logo design).
As with any website, there’s still work to be done, updating older content and tweaking the design (which I’m still not 100% happy with in places!).
Speaking at DesignInterest, April 2012
I’ll be speaking at next month’s DesignInterest event on April 3rd at PostOffice NE1.
It’ll be an informal talk on one a MediaWiki project I’ve been working on for Richard Carter Consultancy.