On average I get around ten New Client Enquiries a week, around 3/4 of the enquiries are from the contact page of my web site.

The number often depends on many factors, the time of year, what my availability shows on my site, and how strongly the client wants to work with me.

I often find, people who ‘generally’ have their act together call me to discuss their initial requirements.

Also other emails are a lot of link requests, and outsourcing to Asia as well which maybe of use to some virtual companies.

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Here’s a step by step list of how you can successfully carry out user tests on a budget and achieve great results.

Example of case study

• Usability test start off with user being asked to find individual item..
• The user/tester is normally paid for this, a real user would not take as much time to look for item.

The Comparison of costs betweeen traditional and remote testing:

• Traditional – testing lab required, specialist equipment, travel costs, user incentives.
• Remote tests – online meeting, recruitment, user incentives, better on budget.

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The annual event held at Earls Court in London, saw many more people attending the event than last years.. Over 3000 people filled the venue each day.

Also probably the least geekiest web event to attend in the web industry calendar.

I attended on the wednesday, when I saw the following presentations:

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I’ve found some time and only gone and added extra functionality to Jayonline.

1/ AJAX functionality – to show the blog feed on the homepage which is in HTML format.

Partly due to Jeremy Keith writing ‘Bulletproof AJAX‘, a book which I have read recently. He has some examples of the code online, which is a great place to start playing around and seeing how the functionality can work for you.

The beauty of progressive enhancement. (more…)

Notes of the inaugural Scottish web conference organised by Alan White

An early start from Brighton to attend a conference in Edinburgh, with an interesting title. As Edinburgh is not in the highlands, but perhaps a great subtitle of progressive enhancement to attract us southerners to make the trip across the borders.

Aim of conference: The first Scottish conference based on progressive enhancement demonstrating what we can do today for tomorrow > learning the correct methods of web development > progressive enhancement of the web.

Photo of Jeremy Keith’s Secret Fling

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Quote from the businessman who turned around Swatch in the 1980’s. Today responsible for around 25% of the worlds watch sales. Also on his portfolio are Calvin Klein, Omega and Tissot.

Best piece of advice

“I never follow advice, That’s because whenever I wanted to take a risk and create something new, I was advised not to do it. But I always went ahead and did it anyway.”