I’ve used Fasthosts for the 8 years to host various small sites based in the UK. Initially they were head and shoulders above the competition but in the last 3 years I’ve had too many issues with them, whether it’s the lack of support for command line or htaccess on shared hosting or just their terrible billing ethics.

If you want to cancel or move hosting don’t expect them to help you, in fact they’ll make it difficult and you’ll end up having to pay £235 to get your domain out of redemption.

If you want to cancel hosting make sure you phone up and confirm that your hosting has been canceled, if not you may find yourself having to pay for hosting and they don’t offer any refunds (is that illegal?)!

So I’m thinking that Fasthosts, now the biggest UK hosts, are just crooks and I’m moving anything left over with them away to someone who cares (a bit).

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8562801.stm

For some kinds of sites we need to use card sorting…But what the blazes is it?!.

http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/card_sorting_a_definitive_guide

I haven’t had a chance to blog or kick this site off as i would have liked to because i’ve just moved back to the UK after 5 years in Hong Kong.
I’m now ‘head of web’ at HTB, which is great.
I’m of course going to keep this site running and blog more often, once i’ve found my feet.
I’ll also be adding the latest work the portfolio and be writing more about the design/dev. process.
Just stumbled upon a good article here, which i’ll be expanding on later.

I was talking with a friend recently, he’s an IT project manager for a major oil company, he was telling me about the failure rate of poorly planned projects. I could relate to this so well, most of my projects that aren’t planned properly fail to meet mine or the clients expectations. It’s often the client who is trying reduce the planning phase; but i would bet that in most cases a strong planning/design phase reduces costs down the line. Problems or mistakes that aren’t identified early on are magnified and are more difficult to solve in a construction phase.
My friend was saying that 99% of the time a project would still be pushed ahead because it was in the construction phase although there was a huge hurdle that, perhaps identified earlier, the business case for the project would be quite different!
When i meet a new client or team, the first thing people want to start talking about is outcome rather than the problem or question. I think that the outcome depends on the correct answers to the problem.
I try very hard not to talk about the way something will look or work until we’ve identified the problem, only then can we start to plan and design based on the information/users we’ve identified.
I think i need another meeting with my friend…

This is my first post on my new site. The web development life cycle. In later weeks i will look at each stage in detail, undoubtedly seasoned with some random thoughts along the way.

Over the years I’ve built up standard documents and a methodology for undertaking a web job, no matter how big or small it is; whether I’m working for a company or on a contract basis i think these documents and process are necessary.

It’s always best to be commissioned on a professional basis and I never undertake more than one Pro-Bono job at a time. As someone who works in the online space i find myself getting tapped for information constantly; I find that people respect you more if you are professional all the time. Of course it’s tempting to not jump through all the hoops when you’re not getting paid handsomely or you’re not extremely interested, but not doing so would undermine the point of IA and PM and the end result is likely to be disappointing.

Information architecture is the foundation for great Web design. It is the blueprint of the site upon which all other aspects are built.

The web development life cycle overview:
1. First contact

2. Follow up to capture initial requirements

3. Proposal & Quote

4. Agreement & initial payment

5. Creation of design document (all your research / information capture, stage by stage sign off)

6. Build / Development

7. Review

8. Testing

10. Launch