Liverpool from a Window

]]> http://www.davesgonemental.com/rainy-days-in-liverpool/feed/ 0 http://www.davesgonemental.com/liverpool-skyline/ http://www.davesgonemental.com/liverpool-skyline/#comments Fri, 18 Dec 2009 16:14:23 +0000 Dave http://www.davesgonemental.com/?p=1120 This is the view from our new office in Liverpool, right now.  Well, a few minutes ago.

I consider myself very lucky to have this just behind my desk and it has to rate as the best view of any office I’ve worked in.  You’d think the office would be very expensive, but it’s not, thanks to the way the Liverpool Science Park has been set up and funded.

I can think of worse places to work….

pdf

Well, we’re going to try!  WordCamp is a small, informal conference all about WordPress and its people.

Wordcamp UK 2008 was held in Birmingham last year.  The current list of nominated venues are in Liverpool, Cardiff and London.  Read the pdf attached below, and see what you think.  Feedback would be great, but if you really want the WordCamp to take place in Liverpool on the 18th and 19th of July you’ll need to pipe up on the official mailing lists.  More info at Tony Scott’s blog.

St. George's Hall, Liverpool - not the likely venue. Pic by Me.

Barcamp Liverpool 2008 Official Logo

So… I’ve always meant to be a bit more active within the geek community.  I tried a spell in the late eighties/early nineties with the British Computer Society, CompuServe and CIX but sometimes found it all a bit tiresome.  There were too many who’d earned their stripes in the seventies on heavy iron and, I felt, even at that time were being left behind.  Of course, I must say that that doesn’t apply to all or even a majority of the people back then.  But there wasn’t much of a sense of fun.  It was all a bit… serious.

But you know, technology is cool.  Especially today when almost everyone seems to be a geek these days.  So after a successful trip to Birmingham for the first WordCamp UK I thought it was time to get geeking up in my home town!  Barcamp Liverpool beckoned…

And it was worthwhile.  Sadly I’d been up at 3am in the morning in order to take Romana to the airport, so I was a bit out of it.  But that didn’t prevent me doing a few things anyway…

WordPress for News Sites

I was asked if I wanted to do a presentation on WordPress by one guy.  And I thought… why the heck not.  Now, I know a lot of people at Barcamp know WordPress, so I felt the best approach was to be a little more specific.  So… I decided to talk casually in the Café about how WordPress can be used for the purpose of building a news site.  I covered the basics before showing off the Caribou demo.  To be honest, it wasn’t a perfect talk – I’d had half an hour to prepare and most of that was spent getting the latest WP Trunk installed on my laptop, with everything configured and ready to roll, plus a quick list of key points.  If I hadn’t had a client meeting for half the morning I might have done better.  But still, at one point there seemed to be about 20 people paying good attention.  Frankly I was surprised – I rambled and soon realised that the best approach was to get folk asking questions.  I think people enjoyed it!

Video Interviews

I ended up giving a couple.  I rambled.  I was tired.  Lack of sleep doesn’t help me.  I kept my glasses on so as to disguise the bags under my eyes.

1 Minute Pitch

Instead of pitching something we’re doing I decided to pitch a new concept we’ve been floating around the office.  I was nervous, shakey and tired.  I can’t even remember much about it all to be honest.  The other guys did better.  They had stuff like preparation – I’d had about thirty seconds to think about mine!  But it’s good to practice public speaking, so why not?  It was a good crowd.

But Hey…

I had a good time.  But overslept dramatically as I recovered from Saturday, so didn’t make the Sunday.  I hope everyone had a great time!

Each year, Liverpool Motor Club holds three sprints at the classic Aintree circuit.  It’s a relaxed, sociable and efficient event.

I always thought TVR’s finest moment was the Cerbera – a combination of classic low-rider looks, power, and noise.  Still handled badly, but that can largely be sorted out.

It was great to see everyone at the event.  Hopefully I’ll be driving again in the near future.

When you wake up to an earthquake you don’t really understand what’s happening at first. There’s a bit of noise as things move, and it’s rather odd to feel that all has gone wobbly. It lasted for about ten seconds, but there were no alarms going off, nothing crashing to the ground… as the tremors slowed I realised all was well. I went back to sleep before waking at around 3am. Curious, I ended up whipping out the phone and checking BBC News. Sure enough, the North East of England had been hit by a substantial quake measuring 4.3 (or 4.6 depending on the report at the moment) on the Richter scale.

This morning I wandered around the house checking for damage but there’s nothing visible – not even any new cracks in the plaster.

Would have been great to have been up St John’s tower though – bet the DJ’s had something to say!

We actually use the WordPress platform ourselves – it’s pretty darned good. If you host it on your own site it’s great from a customisation perspective. Yes, there’s limitations, but you can choose to either work within those limitations, or you can blast them to smithereens with good code. We started with blasting, but since chose to go for a more straightforward approach – treating WordPress as a blogging platform, and leaving the heavy lifting websites to the big CMS systems. Seems to be simpler that way.

It’s a funny business, working the web. We know all sorts of cool stuff to make things work very well for clients, but persuading them of this is proving to be something of a challenge. I had one chap recently who had probably seen too many of those adverts that offer websites for £50 or £100 and so thought he could have something pretty sophisticated for £250.

Well here’s the truth… we could do sites for £250. We could even do very sophisticated sites for that price. But we’d need to sell thousands of them, to the same kinds of business. Why? Because no matter which way you do it, if you’re selling original work you’re going to be spending a fair bit of time on it. Few businesses in the UK can get by charging less than £20 an hour, so that would mean the site would have to be completed in about 12 working hours. That means everything, the sales/consultation meeting, the installation of the site, the configuration, purchasing the domain, developing the theme (or, if using an old one, re-jigging it for the client), editing the content to fit, finding images, laying it out and then testing on various browser, with various operating systems.

Website Workload

Web design, let’s face it, is hard. Browsers are truculent and buggy, standards a mess, and accessibility (ie, can anybody view your site, whether disabled or otherwise?) is an issue too. Try and get one thing right, and another thing will break. In the past I could quite cheerfully put together simple but hard to maintain websites. They worked, everything looked ok, and people made suitable noises. But by jove, adding anything meant a lot of pain.

Now we build sites that are driven by databases, wrapped up in sophisticated stylesheets, and managed by increasingly complex pieces of software. The expertise required to get it all just right is significant, yet the rewards appear to be diminishing.

So we have the answer – improved efficiency. I think that increasingly web designers will concentrate on industry niches in order to make the time it takes to build a website. After all, if a dentist needs a web presence then by and large he’s going to have pretty much the same things to say about teeth whitening as any other dentist. Similarly, many design cues will also be more popular within one industry.

It’s only like cars – the very first were quite random in design, built with specific clients in mind. As time passed, the market became ridiculously competitive. To survive, there was a need to generalise designs… and to productionise them. Software, like websites, is a little different, but this is effectively what has to happen now in the web industry. Work out how to do a lot, in as short a time as possible.

Images from that last night are in the gallery section.