Category: Work

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Work

Time

And we all fall down, there’s not enough hours in a day

Smashing has put together a list of tips on Time Management; I wouldn’t say I was bad at time management, I think in many ways I’m quite good at it, but the part I find difficult is how you manage your time when you just don’t know what’s coming.

I suppose the answer is that if you’re in a situation where you can’t even apply most of these tips then there’s something fundamentally wrong with the system. Or perhaps I just need to get better at Number 10:

10. Learn to Say “No”

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Work

Consistency

flow

(via the Petite Mexican)

Categories
Work

How Projects Really Work

From Project Cartoon.

(via Smashing)

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Work

If you want to know why people use your site, take things away and see what they complain about

If having quite a lot of the (work) website down has taught me anything it’s taught me that:

Our website is capable of: running a full virtual ticketing system with dynamic event pages, event brand pages and seating plans where necessary, providing a News feed for each outlet, club, society, forum, committee and department in the Union, running Union-wide elections, Club and Society Elections and Polls for every organisation within the Union, running Sabbatical and Departmental blogs, giving people information of every aspect of us as a membership organisation and a commercial organisation, offering people advertising and sponsorship opportunities, offering our members a place to buy and sell goods as well as find out about local and national services available to them and much much more

People use our site for: the links to the University and Webmail

Brilliant.

Categories
Work

Headers

From my work blog:

I’m currently toying with how big or small to make the header bar (and at the risk of John coming back at me with own words regarding header size, the fold and scrolling here goes…)

My current predicament is the Header Bar, specifically how big it should be and what it should contain. In the current skin something that was criticised was the chunky header – my defence was twofold: firstly it looked good even if it was a little impractical, and secondly, so many of our pages lacked content that actually the more I could eat into the content area the better the limited content would look.

The new skin is going to be opening up a vast content area what with the admin column biting the dust and the header shrinking, which brings me back to the problem at hand: how small should it be? In the screenshot above you can see that it’s tiny, it’s just two lines (discounting the toolbar at the top) – this is of course because it hasn’t been styled – but I do like how it brings content to the fore. As a minimum I’ll need to put the SU logo in there but how big should it be? What amount of pixel space does it need? And what about the ad banner? As a source of revenue it’s important so that sets our header height to at least 70px but then what if the banner went elsewhere?

The options available seem to be:

  • Putting the ad above the left hand content area (so the top of the RH content area is level with the top of the ad) – this keeps the header small and means that some of the pixel height it occupies is not wasted for the RHC
  • putting a double ad banner between the content area and the navigation
  • Tucking it above or below the navigation with the SU logo being the first navigation link as an extra large button
  • Having a similar format to the current one but with the logo (and overall header height) reduced

I think ultimately it doesn’t make a difference – the first two still don’t determine whether how big the logo should be and if it’s at least the height of the banner these alternate locations ultimately waste space so I think the only option is really the last one (which is how it was in my initial mockup – which I should really post here!). I do like the idea of having the Warwick SU navigation tab as the logo though…

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Food Music Sport Work

Busy busy

There’s a lot happening in the next couple of weeks, next week is Birmingham’s Ball and the  Final Fling, both of which I will be cocktail waiting at (though possibly a little more like this) and Saturday is the first Lions Test, which if I had to call my Test 22 right now I’d go for:

Byrne, Bowe, BOD, Roberts, Fitzgerald, Jones, Phillips, Jenkins, Mears, Murray, Wyn-Jones, O’Connell, Croft, Wallace, Heaslip // Rees, Vickery, Hines, Williams, Ellis, O’Gara, Kearney

Then the week after is AMSU conference (for which I need to reinvent Agenda magazine’s online persona) and then Glastonbury.

In amongst all of that I also need to:

  • finish unpacking
  • put whatever I’m not going to unpack in the attic
  • possibly buy a piano
  • start going to the gym and/or running and/or playing basketball
  • watch series 5 of The Wire
  • buy series 2 of Deadwood
  • continue developing the SU site (see new development blog) and,
  • buy more hangers