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!

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!

peacockcarteryork.co.uk

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!

Some of the major reasons the website has taken so long to get to a state where it’s live are:

1. 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.
2. As a designer, it’s really hard to design something for yourself which you’re happy with.
3. 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.
4. 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!).

It’ll be an informal talk on one a MediaWiki project I’ve been working on for Richard Carter Consultancy.

tl;dr: conference, book, Twedding, Drupal North East, new logo, conference, birthday, new company, conference, birthday, Christmas.

January

It’s nice to have been able to start the year off with a trip down to Nottingham for the New Adventures Conference. There was probably an intercourse-load of snow around, too.

February

Definitive Guide to Drupal 7 book

All my calendar reminds me about in February is work, a lot of it seemingly involving technically reviewing Apress’ Definitive Guide to Drupal 7.

March

I witnessed my first (and, to this day, last) Twitter wedding between @philsherry and @li_sherry.

April

We held the first Drupal North East event at The Bridge Hotel in Newcastle (coincidentally, after talking to Adam Hill at DIBI), which has been running monthly ever since.

Drupal North East user group

May

Peacock Carter logo

Time for a new look for Peacock Carter. Meet Eric, the peacock.

June

Another month, another conference: this time, on my doorstep. The increasingly awesome (and I mean that in the literal sense of the word: the event has become awe-inspiring in the short time it’s been around) Design It Build It conference in Newcastle (well, Gateshead) with the chance to see Zeldman and a host of other talent speak, 20 minutes walk from my flat. Oh, and lots of beer, and pizza.

And Peacock Carter moved offices in to central Newcastle. The week the lift in our new building decided to die.

July

Between the usual British summer rain showers, I spoke at SuperMondays on the topic of ‘Design/CMS integration’.

August

Another year, another birthday. Can’t remember what I did this year, so must have been good!

September

I finally got around to registering Richard Carter Consultancy Ltd as a company, to enable me to start separating the open source consultancy services Peacock Carter offers in to a new entity for simplicity’s sake. Simplicity for my clients’ sake, rather than my bookkeeper’s or the taxman’s sake, that is.

October

October was immensely enjoyable for me, what with the excellent Front Row Conference in Krakow (and an opportunity for me to excite bore a room of people on the topic of open source software theming), as well as meeting the likes of recent Glaswegian convert Rich Quick, Rudy Rigot, and a lot of Polish guys and girls who insisted on buying the beer all night, every night.

November

Another birthday: this time, Peacock Carter’s 5th birthday. Cake, champagne and beer may have been enjoyed in various quantities in an order I have yet to remember (there were definitely balloons).

December

All I seem to remember is a month of Christmas parties, for the Young Entrepreneurs Trust, Peacock Carter, Durham Business Club and various other things I attend. I never want to see a mince pie again (give me 11 months)./h2

The offer pizzas, with a selection of ‘gourmet’ toppings – you can get parma ham, goats cheese and other unusual, middle-class toppings – as well as gourmet burgers, onion rings and ‘proper’ chips. Their menu is online.

Posh takeaway; unposh prices

And yet, their pizzas are still about half the price of equivalents at Domino’s or Papa John’s, and made with more care than I expect the chain pizza takeaways to make!

And yes, I know ‘unposh’ isn’t a real word, but if Shakespeare can make up words, so can I.

Beware, though – they advertise their opening hours as 6pm – 4am everyday, and yet they almost certainly don’t stick to them during the week – they actually seem to close around 12am or 1am during the week. Not that I blame them; a bit on the ambitious side to keep up 7 days a week!

They’ve got a website at gourmet2go.co.uk, though it’s fairly poor (text as images, anyone?), but not poor enough to put me off their pizzas.

I’ve been playing this afternoon, and have created Peacock Carter Ltd’s Google+ page as a playground. You can create your own Google+ page at plus.google.com/pages/create.

It looks like pages in Google+ are treated very much like they are in Facebook, in terms of their ability to interact with individual profiles in Google+; i.e., it’s fairly limited (you’re only able to interact with an account as a page once that account has you in one or more circles).

The only snagging point I’ve found so far is that switching between my individual Google+ account and the page isn’t quite as smooth as it appears in Facebook at the moment – I can easily change back from the page to my own profile, but haven’t found an easy way to switch from my own Google+ profile back to the page at this point.

Next stop: seeing how Google+ copes with multiple pages.

Edit:  page management in Google Plus

Aha, I’ve discovered the trick to switching between pages in Google Plus: it hides the drop-down list until you click your profile’s name in the top-left of the screen. From there, you’ll text along the lines of ’2 pages’, and you can click this and select the relevant page from a drop-down.

Book of CSS3 by Peter Gasston

The book

The book is sold as ‘a developer’s guide to the future of web design‘; a (perhaps acceptable?) bit of marketing guff, since you can use everything in the book now – it just won’t work in certain browsers, yet. The obligatory chapter list is pasted below from the publisher’s website for The Book of CSS3:

• Chapter 1: An Overview of CSS3
• Chapter 2: Media Queries
• Chapter 3: DOM and Attribute selectors
• Chapter 4: Pseudo Classes and Pseudo Elements
• Chapter 5: Web Fonts
• Chapter 6: Text Effects and Typographic Styles
• Chapter 7: Multiple Columns
• Chapter 8: Background Images and Other Decorative Properties
• Chapter 9: Border and Box Effects
• Chapter 10: Color and Opacity
• Chapter 11: Gradients
• Chapter 12: 2D Transformations
• Chapter 13: Transitions and Animations
• Chapter 14: 3D Transformations
• Chapter 15: Flexible Box Layout
• Chapter 16: Template Layout
• Chapter 17: The Future of CSS
• Appendix A: Browser Support
• Appendix B: Online Resources

One of my initial concerns with the book was it’d cover techniques I already knew (most of the books I buy, read and review are more software-specific), but I managed to learn a couple of very useful and previously entirely alien techniques (matrix3d being one). The book also clarified my understanding of some existing CSS. Retrospectively, this is what I would have expected to have get out of reading the book.

The good

Peter’s also put a huge effort in to the companion website for the book, thebookofcss3.com, but that’s not too much of a surprise if you consider he’s a contributor to css3.info too.

The book is extremely thorough; from accessibility concerns to z-axis and ‘zebra striping for tables‘. The book’s index is equally thorough, reinforcing its usefulness as a reference book and just a one-off read.

The CSS and HTML snippets throughout the book are nice and clear, and well explained. I’m particularly keen on the way proprietary attributes (e.g., -o-border-radius) are (generally) omitted from code snippets, which allows you to see the general gist of the CSS without wading through lines of duplicate attributes.

Proprietary attributes are explained in subsequent sections of the chapter, which is especially useful given the discrepancies and inconsistencies between implementations (particularly, I must say, between Mozilla and Webkit implementations). For this in particular, the book is a good go-to resource. The screenshots are also clear throughout the book – a rare achievement for a black-and-white book which deserves some kudos itself.

One of my favourite ‘features’ of the book is the ‘browser support’ section at the end of each chapter, which contains an overview of (surprisingly), the browser support for the various attributes covered within the chapter; an invaluable resource for future reference, again.

A thanks to the publishers, No Starch, too, for their incredibly swift response to my request for an image of the book cover. It was a matter of hours, rather than days, when it can take some publishers a matter of weeks, or even months, to respond!

The bad

I did have one negative; the printed book is entirely black and white, (though you can get the ebook in full colour, obviously). As I said, this isn’t as much of a problem with example screenshots as you’d think, since the examples are very carefully put together to avoid most issues with colour contrast.

And, best of all – I certainly didn’t find any gripes I could classify as ‘ugly’.

The Book of CSS3; overall impression

I’m incredibly impressed with the The Book of CSS3, from the enviable, concise style of writing to the sheer thoroughness of the topics covered, and the clear, consistently presented examples. I’d say it’s a worthwhile buy even more for experienced front-end developers (and, dare I say it, a necessary buy for any back-end developer?).