Cabin Pressure Website about Michael Wood The English Web Designer and Publisher

Design

Designing websites is about so much more than opening Photoshop, selecting Swiss font and then applying a small amount of motion blur — although all those things can be useful — and is much to do with understanding and negotiating between client and user.

Clients need exposure of their branding and favour larger logos. Users need functions and the ability to find what they are looking for with ease. Between the two mediates the designer.

Design is more than aesthetics but it is heavily yoked into aesthetics. An attractive interface is always better an unattractive one and attractiveness has much to do with simplicity and ease of use.

Usability is good design however far too often the pursuit of usability is used to excuse a lack of aesthetic quality and an ignorance of the effects of branding on a user's experience.

As a designer I seeks to strike this balance in my work.

Build

Creating websites is a three stage process and the middle of that triumvirate — building the HTML/CSS/Script — is frequently overlooked to the detriment of the user experience.

The design is done by designers, the development by the developers and building — alas — is assigned to whichever of those two sections is available leading to designers dabbling in function and developers styling parts of pages.

Building is creating the user experience. It is extrapolation of ideas on design to working models. It is starting with the two or three images of the website design and ending with a HTML prototype of the site.

It is being able to code XHTML that is semantic and reusable. It is comprehending the reuse of CSS on elements and seeing the value of adding AJAX components. It is conceptually linking pages and elements together.

It is where the user's experience is forged and is far too often overlooked in two stage processes used by the vast majority of producers.

In my ten years experience the best websites are the ones that have worked a three stage process separated the building from its peers.

Development

There is a huge benefit in designers and buildings knowing how the development process works and the limitations of it.

My work with The Stuncroft Group gave me the chance to build databases and create a full back end system to house and interrogate data.

This foray into development has informed all my work equipping me with development skills — XSLT, XML, JScript, ASP et al — to giving me a solid understanding of the process, thus enabling me to create XHTML code that is developer friendly and easy to work with.

Community

There was an idea — overreaching and impractical — that Cabin Pressure the company would create what we called in 2002 “A way for people to, like, make profiles and write stuff about football.”

The idea was not uncommon and everyone who has ever coded a line of HTML will claim to have invented MySpace or Facebook in their heads before those Social Networking behemoths came to the public consciousness.

Clients and brands are playing catch up now — the Holy Grain of a branded Facebook still shines bright — and trying to leverage what communities they have attached to current web presences into Social Networks.

I have taken clients down the route of establishing brands on Facebook, Bebo and MySpace and there is some merit in that but other — perhaps braver — clients have developed or are developing full Social Networking Applications.

In these projects the best practice is not yet established. Video blogging around a Premier League football club's ground forms part of one proposal and who can say if it would be more or less popular than the ubiquitous Facebook Zombie?

The best uses of social networking are not yet defined and so working in this area at the moment is exciting and rewarding.

Publishing

Design, building, development are the skills of making code and images appear for a user but they are not the practice of creating an Internet experience.

The practice of creating an Internet experience comes from a commitment to learning about user behaviours in response to the experiences presented rather than blindly believing users will behave in the way which would be most suitable for a website.

My commitment to the user at the heart of the Internet experience started in 1998 when I launched a self-published Bradford City Football Club website called The Boy From Brazil & Other Stories.

How can one value almost ten years of getting to know users, of ten years of recruiting readers to become writers in what is a proudly intelligent publication, of ten years of emails and talks in pubs about their opinions on what they do not like about your work? It is the crucible of experience.

The Boy From Brazil — or BfB to it's 4.5m friends over the last decade — was joined by movie magazine FourEightFours which enjoyed just over a year of publication to an International readership and Dalliance which took a much smaller scope of focusing on music in West Yorkshire (but not all music and not all West Yorkshire).