Blogging and all that Malarkey

The wonderfully generous Sean Johnson joins me twice on Unfinished Business this week to first answer a listener’s question about competitive payment terms, then to talk about our downs and ups of 2013.

The Net Awards returns for 2014, but unlike previous years, this time I’d actually appreciate your vote.

The Guardian’s Kaelig Deloumeau-Prigent recently wrote about their struggles and strategy for dealing with Internet Explorer 8. People visiting my site using Internet Explorer 8 are few and far between these days, but those that do could be good customers, so with our redesign I wanted to make a real effort to give them a good experience.

Illustrator Josh Cleland is back on Unfinished Business this week to talk about his work on the new Stuff and Nonsense go, go, go, rillas header, the difficulties of designing our own branding and how we can make visits to our sites more memorable by improving the design of pages we often forget. Nominate Unfinished Business for the Net Awards 2014 One way you can say thanks for the time we take making our podcast every week is to nominate Unfinished Business for Podcast Of The Year at the Net Awards 2014. We’d love, love, love you if you did that.

I’m not going to link to all of the videos from Handheld Conference, but if this one doesn’t make the hairs on your neck stand up, there must be something wrong with you. In fact, the only criticism I have of the conference is that the audience didn’t stand to applaud the end to that excellent day.

Apple doesn’t have what many of us would consider to be a fully responsive website, but that doesn’t mean they don’t sometimes use two of Ethan’s ingredients; flexible media and CSS3 media queries, to improve the placement of some elements on an otherwise fixed page.

One of the most important elements in our recent redesign is our new portfolio. We ran out of time during the redesign week and couldn’t include all of the portfolio pieces we’d planned. This week we’re adding more and while we were doing that I discovered something I hadn’t known before about large images and iOS.

How could you follow this? (With a male voice choir, obviously.)

This week on Unfinished Business, I’m joined by Elliott Kember. We talk about listening to feedback and the differences between client feedback on design projects and customer feedback about apps. Then I amuse Elliott with my adoration for LINGs CARS and that I think Ling is a marketing genius.

I’m not a one man QA department so I sometimes miss minor implementation issues, even on my own sites. Just this week, despite having looked at the Stuff and Nonsense redesign for countless hours, I still kept finding small alignment and padding problems, especially on my iPhone and iPad where those issues are magnified.