Topics covered are things such as graceful enhancement and graceful failure, designing specifically to allow access on various mobile browsers and adding enhancements to the site to improve user experience on the desktop browser or to allow them to fail gracefully so as still accessible on the mobile platform.

Doing this has inspired me to design a mobile specific version of my own website. Now while I would (ideally) like to create a version that is designed for all mobile platforms, I think I will start with just the iPhone.

Step one is already complete! Which is to say I have set up craigmdennis.com/iPhone/. Really tricky stuff…

The next step is to set up some kind of automatic detection and redirection to make sure if people using an iPhone access my site, they get taken to the iPhone specific version.

There are several tricks and treats (pardon the Halloween pun) available when designing a site for the iPhone that allows for the use of certain javascript functions to make use of the touch screen and the orientation detection. Something that means you can even show completely different content when the orientation of the iPhone changes. A great tutorial from Engage Interactive shows what is needed to do just that.

So I am designing a basic UI to navigate to the various sections of my site: Portfolio, Blog, Photography & CV. I want to make sure of the iPhone style photo navigation but that will be a little later on. I can’t decide what to do for the blog section and whether to have a list of titles, titles and descriptions or just the most recent post.

I also have to figure out how to turn off the iPhone redirection when linking to the ‘normal’ version of the site.

“Yeah I’m a web designer”

That response to a question about your chosen career path used to lead people to think that you live in your parent’s basement, wore square glasses taped together, wore your trousers too high, were bad with girls and were generally a massive nerd.

Oh how times have changed (for some). As has the role of the web designer.

Web design is more than just coding a website, web design is now just a tool in a larger process. More and more is being included in the sphere of web design as the need for conversion on the web is becoming more and more important. Investment in advertising on the web recently overtook advertising on TV for the first time which means that we need to design the user experience rather than design a ‘website’.

During the process of this ‘experience design’, there are many more aspects that are involved than just a website.

You may be designing an entire campaign centred around a site or it may just be that you are AB testing two or three or even five designs for improved conversion. How does a user move through the site. Which pages are they landing on when they reach your site? Which PPC leads them to which section? There is a huge role for analytics on websites to try and determine all of these factors and design / test new ways to increase the number of users reaching an intended goal. More often than not meaning parting with some dosh.

Then there is SEO to consider, something I am learning at the moment. Things like URL structure, alt text, anchor text and conomical URLs can have an effect on the keywords your site is found with. There is a large market for optimising websites for search, and as search engines get better – so too must the way we optimise for them to maintain hight ranking.

One of the most recent and yet important inclusions is that of social media campaigns into the design.

Use of sites such as Facebook and Twitter to promote a brand also promotes brand awareness and gives the market an opportunity to have direct communication on an open platform. This means valuable customer feedback (positive and negative) can be obtained at no extra cost.

The added benefit of social media inclusion is in the realm of search. If you search for a brand on Google you get a list of results related to that brand, but some may be negative from people bitching on forums etc. The more social media sites you have such as Twitter or Facebook push those negative results down and even onto the second results page (and who looks there?).

So the whole process can be done by one person but really you need an entire office of ‘web designers’ each with their own focus in design.

So am I a web designer? Yes… but really I am an experience designer with a specific focus.

When CSS 3.0 is relseased and browsers accept the standards, I will be able to create the slanted text effect without using images and so will be able to turn it into a dynamic menu and therefore a theme. Unless I’ve changed the design again… which is more than likely!

I will keep working on it and post up a more polished picture in another post.

Here are the results, comments are welcome.

Here is the same but inverted. I prefer the impact of this one but unsure as to how the blog will look further down the page when the background is all orange.

Here is the link to the .pdf design proposal.

They are only a concept at this stage and the materials need to be worked out but hopefully you can get an idea of what the project is about. The link to the official RSA page about the project is here.