Once again, there were two tracks of seminars on the day, all of which were filmed so none of the attendees should miss out when they are made available in the next few weeks. Here’s the path I took:

•  - You are a Channel (The Standardistas)
• - A Responsive Process (Steve Fisher)
• - Code Literacy for Designers (Jonathan Berger)
• - Designing for Flexible Web (Laura Kalbag)
• - The Future of Beautiful iOS Design (Sarah Parmenter)
• - HTML5 and Human Interaction (Martin Beeby)
• - Failing and Doing it Well (Mark Boulton)

The keynote of the day being the Standardista’s ‘You are a Channel’ which focussed on the way we as Designers deal with the research and development stage of design, with some interesting tips on how we absorb information and digest it.

The highlight for me however was the final talk of the day – Failing and Doing it Well by Mark Boulton. Mark runs a small design agency in South Wales and works clients such as ESPN, BBC, Warner Brothers and Drupal. Mark took us through a couple of case studies such as the redesign process of drupal.org which highlighted how little time was actually spent in Photoshop but rather pen and paper prototyping.

Moreso than day one, the topic of responsive web design was prominent which was of particular interest to me, being that responsive web design is now an integral part of the web design process that we offer our own clients. The main issue that was demonstrated was the process by which we design for multiple devices. Designing for multiple breakpoints of a web page can be hugely time consuming and although we are passionate about having the sites we make being responsive, we don’t necessarily want to spend all of our time in Photoshop designing dozens of iterations of templates, and you can bet your bottom dollar the client won’t want to pay for it.

We therefore need to come up with an efficient process by which we can design and obviously develop our sites by swaying our focus to style guides rather than static visuals that will ultimately help the designers and developers to work collaboratively. Because as any developer will tell you, as nice as a visual concept may look, it may not always work that way in the browser.

It was extremely humbling to see that the very first page that existed on the world wide web was indeed responsive, so where the idea of fixed width web pages has come from is anybody’s guess. Simply put, the web is not fixed width and with the multitude of devices that are available today (and i’m not just talking iPhones and iPads) we must think about how content can best be served for the end user, whatever device they may be viewing it on.

Overall, FOWD was certainly eye-opening for me. It’s easy to get yourself into routines of doing certain things which may not always be for the best. I’ve had the chance to speak to some incredibly accomplished people in the industry, heard of ways I, as a designer can improve the way I work and how Athernet as a company can grow.

Watch this space for more posts about some of the stuff i’ve learnt when I have chance to fully absorb the mass of information i’ve consumed over the last two days, not to mention the massive caffeine come-down i’m likely to experience in the next 24 hours or so.

A cookie is a small file that is placed on a user’s computer or mobile device. There are two main types of cookies:

Session cookies – These are used to store information while a user is accessing a website and are usually deleted when the session ends.

Persistent Cookies – These are used to store information between visits to the website. They can store information such as user preferences or can be used to target advertising.

Cookies could be first party or third party – The former are placed by the site you are visiting and the latter by another site. A Google Analytics cookie is an example of a third party cookie. The new law states that it is the website placing the cookie that must obtain the consent.

The ICO has said that its approach to Cookies will depend on privacy concerns and what the cookies are used for. They are more likely to be concerned if cookies are used surreptitiously to track users without their knowledge. Most sites do not do this as it does not represent best practice.

The first thing you should do is to identify the cookies that are on your website and check whether they are absolutely necessary. This is known as a cookie audit – it normally needs to be done by a web developer. Any cookies which are not used should be removed.

Cookies should be assessed to see how intrusive they are. Once you have this information, you can decide the best way of getting consent for placing the cookies.

There are a number of ways of getting consent. To follow the law strictly you should follow the example of the ICO website. This has a banner that appears before any cookies are placed requesting a user to tick a box. However this led to a 90% drop in analytical data received by the ICO as users just ignored the request. An alternative is to have a splash screen informing users that Cookies are used on the site – in some cases this informs users that some cookies have already been placed. We feel that both of these solutions detract from the user experience so the approach that Athernet has used is to have a popout screen on all pages that allows a user to switch tracking off. This is accessible from every page. The reasoning behind this approach is that it does not detract from a user’s experience but the information is clear and accessible.

As long as an audit is done and you inform users what cookies are on your site and what they do, it is unlikely the ICO will enforce the law. The only exception is where there are privacy concerns and informed consent is not obtained. The ICO will normally need to have a complaint lodged before it launches an investigation.

More information is available at allaboutcookies.org or give us a call to discuss your website’s approach to Cookies or if you need a Cookie audit.

I’ve followed previous FOWD events with great interest so naturally I was delighted to be attending this year. I’ll likely be posting more detailed thoughts on the individual seminars so in this post i’ll give a quick run-down of my findings from day 1.

Each of the two days show two tracks of seminars, so initially I had a little trouble deciding which of the tracks to go for. Thankfully attendees are allowed to chop and change throughout the day and additionally, the hosts film each of the talks which are then shared with attendees along with the presentation slides after the event.

For the third year running FOWD is being held at The Brewery on Chiswell Street, London. It’s quite a magnificent venue which is perfectly set up for playing host to such an event. Upon registration, attendees were greeted with a light breakfast, some coffee to wake us up and a large sponsor room which was a great opportunity to introduce ourselves and also pick up some freebies (thanks for the pens).

To summarise, this is the series of talks which I took part in today:

• - The UX of HTML5 (Joe Leech
• - Art Direction Vs The Web (James Fenton – Tribal Group)
• - Inform to Inspire (Stephanie Troeth)
• - Web Typography – The Good Bits (Jon Tan)
• - Responsive Redesign: Utilising the power of HTML5 & CSS3 (Vitaly Friedman – Editor-in-Chief of Smashing Magazine)
• - Web Dev the Spotify way (Andy Smith – Spotify)
• - Dr Weblove or: How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Web (Remy Sharp)

A huge number of bases were covered from how HTML5 can help us in the UX of form validation to the way we use fonts and typography on the web. I was particularly interested to hear Stephanie Troeth talk about her creative process.

James Fenton of Tribal Group talked about Art Direction Vs The Web. This is particularly relevant to me, coming from a print background, as he highlighted some of the issues web designers encounter when dealing with brands and guidelines in digital form.

The keynote of the day, entitled “Notes on Design” delivered by the hugely successful designer Brendan Dawes. As a multi-discipline designer, Brendan talked about some of the issues we face as designers, and how we all approach problem-solving in our own quirky ways.

During the lunchtime session, I also took part in a debate hosted by Cat from Carsonified which gathered a small number of attendees to discuss the issues surrounding how design and development isn’t currently being taught in schools. Personally I find it very confusing that the phrase ‘design technology’ in education has a completely different meaning to the type we deal with on a day to day basis. Surely in this day and age, more of the next generation are likely to grow up in some form of digital environment rather than carpentry? The outcome of the discussion being, of course, that in order for action to be taken, we who have some kind of influence need to enforce some kind of voice as part of an ‘inspire-first’ approach. Obviously there is an incredible number of issues surrounding this topic so perhaps it is a topic in itself so i’ll leave it there for now.

So far, then, FOWD is proving to be an incredibly inspiring experience. I feel privileged to be working in such a fast-paced industry that has so much influence on the things around us, not just the digital sector. The term ‘Future of Web Design’ couldn’t be more apt, as even now I have some brilliant ideas for some of the projects that we at Athernet are currently working on.

On that note, i’ll leave you with this quote from Brendan Dawes’ keynote, which particularly struck a cord with my own personal thoughts on tackling the design process:

“It took me a long time to reach the top of the Empire State Building. It was uncomfortable, I wasn’t happy.

But all that was forgotten when I saw the view.”

Yesterday, Ajay and I attended the ‘Men are from Mars’ business lunch hosted by the MPA. The keynote of the event being a debate and Q&A session from the following well respected publication editors:

• Dylan Jones – editor of British GQ
• Charlie Turner – editor of Top Gear
• Dominic Smith – editor of Nuts magazine
• Phil Hilton – editor of Shortlist magazine

It was a very inspiring session, with a great insight into the world of magazine editors with some very funny tales to boot – including an anecdote about a shoot with Daniel Radcliffe portraying him in a different light to his well-known wizard persona was pulled following a focus group in which the audience likened him to Jedward.

There were some very intriguing questions and answers, covering everything from advertising to the market for which the content is created. What I was particularly interested in was, in an increasingly digital world, as content is constantly becoming richer thanks to mobile devices such as the iPad – would there always be place for a printed publication and how would the impact of these tools affect the magazine’s image over the coming years? I posed this very question to Dylan Jones of GQ magazine.

“Fundamentally, the success of the GQ comes down to it’s brand. The fact that it is a magazine, means there will always be a market for it as that is the basis of the brand.”

Wise words. Since I began my career in design, it has always been one of my core beliefs that a strong brand will always be the basis of a successful company. If you can get that bit right, all other marketing elements will become apparent, depending on the needs of the audience. It was great to hear somebody at the helm of such a successful brand in its own right share the same opinion. See our design and branding section for more info.

Charlie Turner, editor of Top Gear magazine also shared the same thoughts – that the brand is one of the fundamental aspects to the publication’s success – albeit slightly different in this respect as the Top Gear brand has been built on the back of the globally renowned TV show.

Going back to my original question for a moment, I was keen to know what impact the rise of the digital era was having on publications such as those being represented before us. It seemed to be a general consensus that many in the industry were sceptical at first about investing huge amounts into new technologies while they were in their infancy. I recall Betamax being mentioned at this point – which is a fair point, but I personally think that devices such as the iPad and other tablets have long proved themselves and their customer’s needs.

Dylan flagged up the problems caused by the launch of the new iPad. Double the resolution caused huge problems for a graphic intense publication such as GQ as it brings up a whole hoard of problems with sizes of magazines and the problems with people accessing them. Unanimously though, the editors agreed that the flexibility which these devices allow in terms of video and other interactive content is unrivalled and offers up a new avenue in which they can appeal to their current audience as well as new readers.

Overall, it was a fantastic Q&A. It answered a few questions of my own but also left me wondering where we will see magazines such as these go in the next few years. I think there is a huge amount of scope for rich content through digital media, and with the rise of responsive websites, such as those we now build from scratch into our design and development process, the prospects are huge.

What do you think?

Daniel and I were, slightly embarrassingly, first to turn up (contrary to our plan of turning up fashionably late). We were greeted by John, a member of the Connected Studio team who led us up to the fifth floor where the studio was to be held, offered us our introductory packs and the much-coveted meal vouchers. We grabbed some breakfast and settled into what would be our surroundings for the day in the form of the amazing new Quay House.

It’s quite an outstanding place – but I guess that’s to be expected of a facility of this stature. One of the most striking features that stood out to me was how the the whole place steered it’s ambience toward creative thinking and flexible working. A favourite being the somewhat cheesily-titled ‘Thought Wheels’. See pic below.

As a bit of a background, the idea of Connected Studio is that throughout the year a number of these events are to be held, each focussing on a different BBC product. The BBC will work with internal and external teams to develop new ideas which are finely tuned on the day by working with BBC staff, audiences and other people you meet there. This initiative has been commissioned in order to spur creativity and innovation through the collaboration of the BBCs internal staff and other individuals.

After an introduction from Adrian Woolard, we were then guided through the Homepage to date, given a fly-through of the previous iterations and the stats that had led them to the current version of the homepage and some basic information that would help shape things to come. Attendees could either use the following few hours to refine their existing ideas in their teams, or advertise new ideas and build groups based on their concepts in order to collaborate and use mixed expertise for their pitch at the end of the day. It’s worth pointing out at this stage that a number of attendees were there for a closed pitch – including ourselves – so amongst others we used the available resources to change refine aspects of our own concept and use real-world examples in order to prepare our pitch.

Everybody was encouraged to utilise available resources on the day such as ‘Speakers Corner’, where various BBC staff would do a Q&A about their own aspect of the HPSN – such things as Market, Tech and Personalisation. Personally, I found these sessions extremely useful as it gave a great insight into the world of the digital BBC. We also made good use of a live audience Q&A, or ‘focus group’ if you will. Again, this was a fantastic opportunity to ask the right sort of questions to a panel of users who regularly visit the BBC homepage and use their answers to strengthen our own proposition.

We found the BBC staff throughout the day extremely approachable, never finding ourselves without an answer to our questions – which is arguably exactly what the day revolved around.

After our pitch (yes, i’ve tactfully avoided talking about the pitch itself), we made our way back into Speakers Corner where we sat in on another Q&A session, this time about pitching. As you can see good timing was order of the day for Daniel and I.

Before long we found ourselves sat where the day began where we would be watching a series of open pitches, made by the teams who had either collaborated on the day or who had developed their ideas and were happy to share their ideas with the rest of us in the room. A total of 23 pitches went before us, perfectly orchestrated in terms of switching between laptops for the all-singing, all-dancing keynotes to classic pen and paper presentations. It was great to see the results of such a day. How ideas can be developed in such a short amount of time thanks to the resources available and the skill of the people who had come together to make things happen. There were some great ideas, some a little more practical than others but on the whole it was fantastic to see such a spectrum of ideas.

Following the Studio on Friday, just 3 of the 30+ ideas that were pitched in total will go through to the next stage of a 2 day long build of proof-of-concept, so we’re still sat with fingers crossed but regardless of the outcome we got a lot out of the day on the whole. It was great experience to learn from, inspiring surroundings to be in and the resources available for refining our own idea were brilliant.

It remains to be seen how the whole Connected Studio works in the long run, but many large corporates could learn a thing or two from the model as a whole, and we for one would love to go back.

Oh, and the Cheeseburger & Chips in the canteen was top notch. Enjoy the pics.

Inbound links to websites are still important but the way these are obtained is now under more scrutiny from the search engines. Following Google’s Panda update in 2011 low quality links are now being penalised so digital marketing professionals are looking to higher quality sources to promote their sites. As well as media outlets they are looking for respected bloggers to achieve this.

The role of the Public Relations consultant was always to try to obtain editorial coverage for their clients. In the last few months this well defined split between PR and digital marketing is starting to overlap. Digital Marketing professionals are starting to sound more like PR consultants – they are looking at their clients overall business not just their websites. In the past a PR company may have had editorial written in the press and on media sites about their clients. Now that same editorial is worth much more when it also has a link back to the client website.

Digital marketing professionals are now more involved in the whole PR process. If a press release is issued by a company it is now just sent by email with images and video sent with it. But it doesn’t stop there. As well as being sent directly to the media it will be sent to Facebook and Twitter followers and placed on those networks.

As well as a link to the company home page, specific pages relating to the press release and the news itself need to be set up. These pages will need to be optimised in their own right and should be designed to be viewed on mobile devices as well as desktops. The impact of the press release can now also be monitored using analytics programs. These can vary from monitoring the number of visits to complex tracking.

Digital Marketing professionals can also advise on the campaigns themselves. They can look at the campaign from a social media aspect as they are in a good position to judge what kind of stories go viral.

Last night was just one of those occasions, so as the day came to a close we headed on down to Sapporo Teppanyaki on Liverpool Road. A few had been before, for some it was an all new experience as the talented chefs not only cooked right in front of our eyes but also added a touch of theatre to the evening – performing a number of food and utensil inspired tricks.

Needless to say, the food was amazing, the staff at Sapporo were very welcoming and kept us all in good supply of alcohol and everyone had a brilliant night. Except for Michael who found himself stuck in a lift.

Enjoy the pics…

I always enjoy going to conferences, they provide valuable time out of the office to reflect, see what the rest of the industry is doing and talk about the latest trends.  It was good to chew the fat with other search engine experts, including some of the speakers from USA and elsewhere in Europe.

There was lots of talk and reflection on Google’s continuing algorithm changes around filtering out websites out of the search results.  Prompted by the recent round of warnings from Google leading to sites being filtered out of their results for what they deem to be artificial link building profiles.

Following on from that, there was some detailed analysis of how Google might determine a website’s inbound link profile and how to avoid falling foul of what they might expect to see.

As you’d expect, social media was high on the agenda with lots of discussion and ideas about how it can also benefit search engine marketing. One of my favourite presentations was Lee Odden, CEO of TopRank Online in the USA, talking about how proactive Social inherently prompts reactive searches in Google, providing examples from his new book; Optimised.

Google were also represented with a presentation about Google+, including a live demonstration of its hangouts feature.  Predictably, the questions from the audience focused on how Google+ may or may not affect search rankings but unfortunately there were no new announcements there.  One thing that would be of interest to clients was Google’s statistic that Google+ integration leads to a 10-15% increase in click throughs from their results pages.

For me, a key message from the day was that our own approach to SEO is the right one. Focusing on quality information across different media, with creative idea to encourage inbound links and avoiding low quality link building practices that are all too common elsewhere.

Oh, and the lunch on the day was very good too!

Clair Victory collecting the award pictured with James Cole and Mal Barritt, Directors of Cruise118

The concept was the brainchild of Darryl Victory who sadly passed away in October 2011 at the age of just 39. His widow, Clair Victory and his sister Melanie Hancock collected the award at a travel industry ceremony at the Lancaster Hotel in London.

The award recognised the iCruiseConcierge tool which brings ground-breaking customer service to the cruise industry. Cruisers have their own personal website which details items including their itinerary, ship and other useful information, reviews, facts and figures and even a holiday countdown. From the day they book their cruise, customers have their own unique log in and password, and their cruising experience is brought to life. The website can be accessed via normal web browsers and even downloaded onto their desktop. The system allows users to contact their own personal concierges at any time through a unique email system.

Athernet developed the concept into a working website from scratch in conjunction with Darryl and members of the Cruise118 team. The site took several months to launch as it looks up information from a number of different sources. Cruise118 are looking to keep investing in further developments such as an iPhone App. “Darryl’s legacy will live on in the form his revolutionary customer service tool. We will continue to invest in iCruiseConcierge to ensure that it remains a leader in the industry,” said Director of Cruise118, James Cole.

When someone buys goods on your site you should not take an order. It should be an offer to purchase which will be followed by an order confirmation from you. This may not be needed if you are confident about your stock control and processing system.

Make sure your customers accept your terms and conditions. This is normally done using a tick box with a link to your terms. Customers should also be able to print and store a copy of your terms.

If you sell overseas, ensure that you specify that English Law (if appropriate) applies to the contract. This is not necessary in the European Economic Area as the E-Commerce Regulations 2002 state that the jurisdiction of an online seller is the country where it is based.

As you will probably hold data about your customers you should be registered with the ICO (Information Commissioners Office) under the Data Protection Act 1998. It only costs £35 so don’t be fooled by companies which charge more to register you.

There should be clear information, especially if you are a company identifying who you are. Your company name, postal address, email address, company registration number and VAT registration number should be on your website.  Pricing should make clear whether sales tax and delivery is included. Details if any supervisory body if the service is subject to an authorisation scheme should also be clear.

Online orders are covered by the Distance Selling Regulations 2000. In most cases customers have the right to cancel a contract for seven days after goods are received – although this can be extended to 30 days if not specified in your terms.  In practice this means that goods can be returned for a full refund of their value and delivery charges.

Online marketing communications on Websites are now regulated by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) and claims must be legal, decent, honest and truthful. The ASA code also covers for example protection for young children and vulnerable groups.

Privacy and Electronic Communication regulations apply to your website and email marketing. This also applies to cookies but is still under debate.

Always ensure that you comply with Copyright laws, especially for images. This is one of the areas that photographers are keen to pursue as it is their livelihoods. You also need permission to use music or video on your site.

There are other regulatory bodies which ensure compliance for organisations in certain sectors, for example the Financial Services Authority. You will probably know about these already but it’s worth checking if you start operating in a new area.

Although not legally required there are a number of ways you can add to the visible trustworthiness of your site. For example if you accept credit card payments you should use the logos provided by your payment service. You can also normally use logos of any trade or professional associations you are a member of.

It can be a minefield so if you are in doubt always consult a solicitor.

This post was first published on our blog in October 2011.