Ben's Blog

Melbourne Massive is the ultimate social/networking event for Melbourne’s web community — a massive end-of-year function that brings together graphic artists, code monkeys, content writers, project managers, interface designers, information architects and other web professionals. And best of all, attendance to Melbourne Massive is free!

Make yourself useful on the 14th of November 2006.

Celebrate usability around the world.

A nice clean site that I helped develop for Euroluce Lighting Environments recently went live.

I looked after the CSS, Flash and JavaScript.

Here is a couple of small sites I have been working on. Event Essentials and Sustainable Tourism.

Right now I am packing my bags head overseas for a 3 month cycling holiday. I can’t wait! One of my first objectives will be to catch up with another web head who loves cycling and climb some of the hillls around San Francisco.

I hope I can keep up.

I am going to be in San Francisco in early August and will be attending WordCamp 2006.

WordCamp is a 1-day conference for WordPress users and developers.

It will be very nerdy but I should learn a lot.

Working for Lemonade I wrote the HTML and CSS the 2006 Melbourne Festival website.

The ‘My Favourite Travel Photo’ exhibition is a fundraising event that will showcase and auction 40 travel photos from members of the public. The photos will be selected by an expert panel of judges including Penny Stephens, photographer for The Age and Christian Pearson, lecturer in photography at CAE.

What a fantastic initiative and cause.

Statistics tell us that reliable access to the web is improving. Dial up subscriptions are gradually being replaced by broadband connections, which means a faster and more seamless experience for the user.

But before we lather our websites with audio, video and other bandwidth intense items we need to understand what broadband means.

In Australia where i’m from they ABS says broadband is:

“An ‘always on’ Internet connection with an access speed equal to or greater than 256kbps.”

Obviously a connection running at 256kbps with a monthly download limit of 500mb per month is going to have a different experience than someone with 24,000kbps/20gb. However as far as the ABS is concerned these users are one and the same. We can’t expect the ABS to supply us with accurate breakdowns of the exact the speeds people are browsing but we can expect website designers to know when and how to use rich media.

I am all for rich media having a stronger presence on the Web but I do think we need to be careful how and when we use it.

We have to be mindful that:

• Many connections that are considered broadband are actually quite slow
• We can’t be sure what speeds people are browsing. It could be anywhere between 56kbs and 28,000kbs
• When you put rich media on your website it must be unobtrusive by letting the user choose if they want to see it. Eg. Don’t put a 4mb Flash or Quicktime file on your homepage
• Because you can add rich media does it mean you should? Often text will communicate the message far quicker and more effectively than video or audio.

A colleague told me that his boss wants at least 1000 videos on their website in the next 18 months. When I asked about the strategy to implement such an expensive task I was told there was none other than they wanted to support the needs of broadband users.

Obviously ABS stats will not be an accurate reflection of your website’ stats. Make sure you check your website’s stats to see how people are using your website.

Some ABS reports for further reading.

A few weeks ago I commenced a 3 day a week position as Front-end Web Developer with Oxfam Australia. It is a varied and challenging position that will keep me on my toes.

In the coming months I will be working on enhancing the website’s interface, web standards compliance, accessibility and information architecture. I think the site is good but there is much to be done.

Oxfam is an excellent cause so I urge you to get active.

This afternoon I am flying to Sydney for WE05. Last year was excellent and this year looks to be even better.

If you are not lucky enough to have a seat you can listen to full sessions via PodCast. This is a very generous gesture from the WE05 organisers and speakers and they deserve to be commended for such. At the same time, if a conference about web development cannot take full advantage of distributing information via the web who can?

If you are going I hope to meet you there and share a beer with you afterwards.