Check 1, 2

It never fails to amaze me the things people miss when finishing up on project, wether they be designers, developers or project managers.

So here's my little list of things to think about next time you'v 'finished' a project.

1. You have tested it on all browsers havn't you, even IE 6?


2. Have you put an analytics package in there. It takes more time to make a tea than it takes to drop in Google analytics


3. Does this site need to be accessible? and if so is it?


4. Have all the depatments and stakeholders involved signed off the final product. Designers, IA's developers all happy?


5. You have done proper 301 re-directsd havn't you? We don't want that valuable page rank dropping off a cliff do we.


6. And those obscure domain names the client bought years ago have been pointed to the new site havn't they?


7. And on that note, have all the incoming links been properly redirected?


8. Have you got a list of common use cases and have you run the site through those cases?


9. What happens when javascript's turned off? and what happens when the user's not got flash?

Listen to Phil Loye Adobe

I've been designing my site comps in illustrator for years now thanks to the direction of the very talented Paul Sonley the as then Creative Director of Razorfish London. It's the perfect tool in my mind for wireframing, laying out and producing components for Flash. Only when a site needs templates producing and final polishing do I turn to Photoshop.

One of Illustrators notable problems, even up until CS and CS2 i'd imagine, has been the inability to underline text a clear usable way. Designers have historically adopted nasty work arounds to try and solve this problem and all create more issues than they solve.

That's is until now, all hail Phil Loye for this work around....Come on Adobe, sort it out.

http://www.philoye.com

To begin...

So, to begin with the first post of this blog.

Creating this template was the first real challenge of the start of what's to come. The aim of the design was to establish a visual design that clearly communicates but also does something beyond basic blog design. The first aspect to get over was Bloggers template language. It reminded me a lot of time speand working with the perl template toolkit www.template-toolkit.org/, which is a really powerful way of extending perl.

Second was to make sure that the typography worked and for this the initial solution was SIFR
www.mikeindustries.com/sifr. However, inital tests stangly enough with Apples Safari browser prooved a little problematic, so a bespoke answer in the form ov very basic Flash text replacements turned out to be the answer.

As always the design's likely to evolve.