What’s happening at Boulder Design

The website for the FUTURAGE group at Sheffield University is online (albeit in a first release version!): http://futurage.group.shef.ac.uk. This has been a great project to work on. The specification required a strict standards-based and accessible construction, which I think we have achieved without sacrificing the aesthetic aspects of the design. Employing the fantastic Google Translator tool reflects the pan-European nature of the site users.

So, a W3C-validating, WCAG-AA conforming site that looks great and works well for both end-users and the group itself, who maintain the content through a customised MODx installation. And all of that created with the support of a well-informed and capable client: what a difference that makes!

The North East Web Design Workshops will come to an end this month. We will have delivered 54 workshops to start-up businesses across the region.

The results have been different for everyone involved. In some cases, the biggest step forward was overcoming the fear of computers and feeling confident to click buttons and see results! For some, the technical aspects of domain servers, web hosting, and dynamic websites opened up a whole new area of knowledge to explore. Others grabbed the opportunity to use an open-source CMS to enhance their existing IT skills and jumped in head-first to create a working website.

For everyone I spoke to though, I hope that the overriding concept of what "website design" meant was the lasting lesson from the workshops. The Introductory and Advanced workshops were based on the idea that creating a web page by whatever means, laying out pictures, text and everything else, is actually the very final step of a process that begins at the identification of business and market objectives. An article is in the offing on this subject!

Boulder has won the contract to design and develop an application to help the team at DDCVS manage contacts and log their activities with charitable and voluntary organisations around the area. We believe that the thing that stood us apart was the focus put on the users of the application in the design process. The success of the application will be its acceptance and take-up by the team members, so making it a joy to use will be vital.

Boulder Design has been included in a successful bid to deliver the regional STEM skills (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) strategy across the North East of England.

Our role will be to design and develop an online portal which will facilitate communication and dissemination and provide a platform from which to support the delivery of the STEM NorthEast integrated framework. The portal will enable educators, stakeholders and employers to cut through the plethora of available schemes, and will raise the profile of STEM qualifications and the progression routes available.

Our experience with the public sector will ensure that the project is completed with creative, and yet relevant and contextual design.

By Ross Hume

On Friday 14th August 2009 I ran the first of our web design workshops in Morpeth, Northumberland. Instead of people with enterprise ideas, the recipients were the Business Advisers who work in offices across the region supporting SMEs. This made things quite tricky, as their motivations for attending were different to the intended audience. The group of 17 ranged in ability from techno-phobe to rockstar computer user.

On the whole things went well. As a result of this pilot the content will probably change slightly (I think the curriculum was a little hopeful). The Introductory workshop will now focus on the role of a website in a business and the impact of design, whilst the advanced workshop will contain all the technical stuff about building a site, customising templates and managing content.

The biggest success for me was the technical implementation. I have written a shell script to install multiple, bespoke copies of Wordpress and setup all the databases so that each learner can work on their own site and can then retrieve it at a later date when they have sorted out a domain name and web hosting etc.