I’m also going to be heading off to Dundee in a couple of weeks time to present to the students on the Web Design and Development course at The University of Abertay. I’m really looking forward to speaking to these students and I’ll be taking lots of your advice with me.

I would love to include some tips from other people working in the industry. It would be great to hear the thoughts of employers, of experienced web professionals and of recent graduates. Please leave a comment and let me know what piece of advice you would give to someone who will be graduating in a years time, what would you suggest they are thinking about now to help them be as employable as possible upon graduation?

I also took the chance to have a play with Typekit to render a font for the heading. I haven’t used Typekit before and clients have been asking me about it so I thought this was a chance to see how well it works and how tricky it is to implement. I was really impressed with the ease in which I could implement Typekit, it really is as simple as choosing a font, adding a couple of lines of JavaScript and then assigning which bits of text will be rendered. After battling with sIFR on a number of projects this was a breeze.

To try and make my text more readable I read through and implemented some tips from The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web, the background image is from istockphoto member smilewithjul and I found COLOURlovers helpful in coming up with a neutral colour scheme. I thought I might use some different background images in future so I wanted to have a colour scheme that would work with different backgrounds. I used the Starkers theme by Elliot Jay Stocks as a starting point to save me having to clean up Wordpress templates myself.

This was a very quick attempt to tidy up the site over the weekend, and if I get chance I’d like to add some things to it. Your comments are very welcome, especially with regard to the readability of the blog posts as that was something I wanted to sort out.

Honestly, I’m shocked that in 2010 I’m still coming across ‘web designers’ who can’t code their own designs. No excuse.

Elliott has also gone on to clarify his thoughts in a blog post and I thought I’d add my thoughts to the debate given that I spend most of my time working with designers.

At edgeofmyseat.com we specialise in developing web applications using PHP, and the majority of our clients are web designers and agencies who subcontract to us the development side of their projects. For many projects we develop everything – the mark-up, CSS, JavaScript and back-end code. Given that our job is to build things for designers you might think that we would be very pleased to work with web designers who can’t write mark-up and CSS, more work for us! However in my experience, asking someone to design for the web who has no idea how the web works, will result in frustration for both the designer and the developer, and a substandard end result.

Looking back over the years I have been working with designers I can say that all of my favourite projects, those I as most pleased with, have been those where the designer really understood the medium they were designing for. As a developer it is so refreshing when a designer can fire up Firebug and play around a little themselves to fine tune the end result, has already considered what we will do with IE6 when a particular design will rely heavily on transparent PNGs, or has considered the experience for users without JavaScript on a page that has a slider for some content.

To be clear, I wouldn’t expect someone who is primarily a web designer, to be able to build a cross-browser CSS layout at the speed that I can, develop a complex JavaScript UI, be able to design a database or develop in PHP. In a small agency it may not be commercially sensible to tie up your lead designer doing front-end development, even if they are capable. However being able to put together a layout – even if it does only work well in Firefox – means that the designer has some understanding of the constraints we work under. They will also have ideas as to how something should be implemented in the medium of the web rather than just expecting a replica of their Photoshop comp no matter what text size or screen resolution the user has.

When you move into the field of interaction design a lack of knowledge on the part of the designer becomes even more problematic. How are you supposed to design user experience when you don’t know what tools you have to work with? I understand Mark Boulton’s argument and don’t believe that simply knowing how to write HTML makes a good web designer, and there are many other factors to take into consideration. However, time and time again I have seen designers from a print background struggle with designing for the web. Once they have taken the time to actually play around with HTML and CSS and gain a basic understanding, they start to become far more creative with the medium instead of constantly fighting against it.

In a large agency, or team developing a single product, where a designer who doesn’t know anything about the web can sit next to a developer the whole time and ask questions then I imagine it would be more possible to design for the web, without understanding the web. However it seems to me a very inefficient way of working, and isn’t a situation that many people are in.

Basic mark-up and CSS, even a bit of JavaScript using a library like jQuery, are not difficult to learn. The tricky things – ensuring a complex UI using a lot of JavaScript remains accessible, making sure things don’t blow up in IE6, actually being able to do this stuff really quickly, is what you need developers for.

On the flip side, I would also say that developers – especially front-end developers – should have a basic grasp of design principles. Having an understanding of why certain things are important to the designers you work with will ease the working relationship and ensure that you can work together to create an end result that is visually beautiful as well as being technically solid. I believe that the web needs specialists, but those specialists need to have an awareness of what the other specialists do, be sympathetic towards them and willing to work together to find good solutions to the challenges of working in this medium.

Firstly, I did not expect this to touch the nerve it so obviously has with so many people. I wanted to offer my support to the women who had been treated like this, ensure this behaviour does not go uncommented on and also start the discussion in terms of how we can stop this kind of thing happening. I didn’t want it to take the shine off what was an excellent day and achievement for Boagworld, and I apologise if that has happened.

I’m going to pick up on a number of the themes that came through in the comments yesterday. I’ve linked directly to some comments just to save people new to the discussion reading through all of them but generally the same points were made by a number of people, either here, on other blogs or on Twitter.

“We should just ignore this behaviour”

Several commenters suggested that we should just ignore these people and they would go away. I would agree that in many cases ignoring trolls and nasty comments is the way to go. During the show in fact the comments were ignored for the most part, we certainly were not giving air time to these people by detracting from the conversations to respond to it. A backchannel for a conference or chat on a live stream however is different to a normal message board setting. These comments were very visible to people participating and watching, not bringing this subject up in some way would really have meant accepting that this behaviour was ok and that boys being boys is perfectly appropriate in a professional setting.

I do not need to be told to “avoid schoolboy chatrooms“. I was dealing with trolls on usenet when many of the people commenting on Friday were still in primary school, so I have a thick enough skin to not be personally hurt by this stuff. What I am concerned about is the message it gives to other women, particularly young women, who want to work in the industry.

“These aren’t people from our community”

The Boagworld community is a really friendly place. I’m not a participant but have read many threads there and the attitude there always seems incredibly friendly, supportive and helpful towards newcomers – even if they are asking the same questions everyone else has asked a million times before. However the 200th podcast attracted an audience from the wider web community. Some of the nasty comments may well have been from kids who had just discovered a lively stream on Ustream, however some of those commenters quite obviously knew of the people they were making comments about, outside of the podcast, which makes me believe that at least some of those posting are people who work in some way in this industry. In addition, the Boagworld chat was not a unique event. The same attitude has been taken towards women on conference backchannels, by people attending a conference, presumably not 15 year old boys.

“Preventing anonymity is not the answer”

Some commenters were concerned that preventing people from being anonymous just creates another problem. In this setting I disagree. Being able to be anonymous is one of the web’s strengths. There are many reasons and places where hiding behind a nickname is appropriate and allows people to ask questions and get support on sensitive subjects, or speak up when they would be in danger if their identity was known. However, if you are contributing in a professional setting at a web design conference or in a chat, then you should be very happy to be identified and stand behind your words. My suggestion of Facebook Connect was really just a throwaway suggestion – I’m sure we can create better solutions – or offer a range of ways to confirm someone’s identity. I’d love to see more discussion on this.

“Women need to take responsibility as well and not act flirty or suggestively”

I have some difficulties with this point of view, and I don’t think that Jen in her comment meant any of the women on the show. If a woman is overtly flirting and then complaining about attention, well then she probably needs to stop doing the former before she can complain about the latter. However that was not the situation on Friday. The fact that some women, and men, behave in a provocative way does not give anyone a free pass to treat all women like that. If we start down this line then, once again, we are telling people they have to conform to be accepted, that as long as they look dowdy and unattractive we will believe they have a brain. Well, hooray for computer engineer Barbie, is all I can say to that!

“This should have been addressed during the show”

Kimberly makes a very valid point that perhaps it would have been better for this to have been addressed during the show. It’s difficult, obviously the show had a schedule to get all of the participants in and able to do their segment. There were people coming on via Skype from different timezones who had set apart part of their day to come on the show. A discussion about these issues could well have totally derailed the schedule and also taken the whole show to somewhere far less fun and positive.

That said, I think that anyone planning on having any kind of backchannel does need to consider, in the light of this and other situations, how they will deal with issues like this if they arise. Both from a technical point of view – being able to identify people, ban effectively and so on, and from the point of view of how it is dealt with by presenters and those running the channel in terms of what they say in reaction.

“This is just jealousy”

I have seen suggestions that the comments – particularly those expressing the opinion that someone is only involved because they are attractive – come from jealousy; from the attitude of, “why is SHE there and not me? It must be because she is pretty.”
Sarah has addressed this issue head on in her own post, which is worth a read. The issue of jealousy and bitterness directed towards people who are well known in this industry is a whole other subject, and one I might address here another time. What I would say though, is that in general, the “names” in web design and development are some of the nicest and most open people you could ever hope to meet. Most people you hear of regularly, you hear of because of the huge amount of time and energy they put into their work and in giving away freely their talents and knowledge. Most of us only get to write books and speak at conferences because we spent years giving stuff away for free on our blogs, and it got us noticed.

If you are doing cool stuff tell people about it, write about it, find small events that ask for speakers and talk about it. Find high profile people who are involved in that area on Twitter and drop them an @reply. If what you are doing is good, you’ll be amazed how quickly word spreads. Get yourself involved in discussion forums, help people out, show them you are an expert, and you can get the sort of attention you want. That is the beauty of this community, give something and you will get stuff back. Sit in a corner and whine and you’ll be ignored.

What happened on Friday was not a one off, it was simply a very overt example of this kind of behaviour. Writing it off as a non-issue, and blaming a few bored kids makes light of the fact that this type of thing happens all the time. No-one is suggesting you cannot criticise a person’s work – far from it. However, you criticise their work, you present an argument against their viewpoint, you do not make personal remarks that have absolutely nothing to do with whether they do good work or have a valid point of view.

For those who weren’t following along, at The Barn was an impressive set up of mics and webcams so the whole show could be streamed live as video, in addition to the audio recording. The show was going out live using Ustream, which also has a chatroom displayed under the video so that the room can join in with the show – something that seemed like a great idea as Boagworld is so much about the community around it. There were hundreds of people watching and a good number commenting given the speed the chat would scroll up off the screen.

Early in the day the chat was very positive. A few moans whenever any technical glitch happened, but generally people were enjoying being part of the show. It was quite difficult in the “studio” to really respond to the chat questions because there were so many people commenting and they would scroll off our screen very quickly. There was a really funny moment at the beginning of our section on eCommerce where somehow the camera that was pointing at me was playing a mooing jingle. We couldn’t hear this in the room at all, so people in the chatroom are complaining about this mooing, pointing out that it was in fact me that was mooing, and we were none the wiser as to what was going on.

Drew and I took a break for lunch as Jeremy Keith and Anna Debenham showed up to do a segment, and then came back to chat a bit about the Joel Test. That was our main segments done but as we weren’t on a deadline to get back we hung around to chip in on various things and generally just to enjoy the atmosphere at The Barn.

I’d noticed the odd stupid comment on the chat earlier in the day, I’m pretty thickskinned about personal comments, and so chose to ignore them. However from this point in things started to get really quite unpleasant. During the afternoon Relly Annett-Baker, Sarah Parmenter and Inayaili de León were all doing segments, on copywriting, iPhone design and CSS3 respectively. All three are established professionals in their different fields, with lots to offer, they did excellent segments on the show. Ah yes, and they happen to be women. As Relly later said on Twitter:

Play the #bw200 chatroom drinking game. Everytime someone says ‘it’s a girl!’ in the chat, take a swig of gin and weep for our industry!

I’m not going to repeat any of the things that were said in the chatroom here, but there were a number of comments that basically suggested that the only reason certain women were invited to be on the show was because of the way they looked, there were comments more suited to an AOL chatroom with regard to what people may or may not be wearing. If the room didn’t like what a male contributor was talking about the comments would be that it was boring or arguing against their point of view, for the women there was this idea that they were only there due to their physical appearance.

We, as a community, need to stamp out this attitude whenever we see it.

I believe that women in any industry should be there due to their own merit, and the same for men who wish to follow a traditionally female career path. That is what feminism has given us, equality. We should stand or fall on the contributions that we bring to the industry and as web designers, developers, scientists, systems administrators etc. our physical appearance is not part of the package.

What frequently happens in traditionally male industries is that women who want to be part of that dress down, become like “one of the lads”. What message does that send out to young women who are interested in careers in IT? Are we telling young women who are interested in looking good, in clothes and shoes and taking care of their appearance, that if they want to succeed in web development they will need to make sure they don’t look too good, as otherwise they will not be taken seriously? This is potentially hugely damaging to the cause of getting young women to consider our industry as a career path, and once they are here to get them to consider speaking at conferences, something which we discuss again and again.

The chatroom on the Boagworld show was essentially a backchannel, and similar issues have happened in conference backchannels in recent months, I believe this is something that needs to be addressed in two ways. Firstly, the community need to be ready to stamp on this kind of behaviour as soon as it is seen. If you are in a channel that starts to go down this line make sure you are not contributing to it, and speak up against it. Can you help to turn the general mood to something more positive? Or offer constructive criticism? I’m certainly not suggesting we shouldn’t be able to disagree with a female speaker! Quite the opposite, we should be dealing with everyone in exactly the same way, I’m not a fan of positive discrimination either.

Secondly I think there are technical solutions to some of this. If you have a live chat or backchannel, people should not be able to post anonymously, or behind nicknames that do not link back to a real person. As a thought perhaps we could have a system where everyone has to sign in with Facebook Connect? Facebook is about real names, real people. Would yesterday’s commenters have been happy for their comments to go out next to their photo, real name and the company they work for? In a conference situation the organisers usually have all those details, so a system can be created that ensured that comments only go out on a live channel that are identified to individuals. There are some people who will quite happily stand behind unpleasant comments but I would suggest they are far fewer than those who switch personalities when they can hide behind an anonymous nickname.

If we are serious about encouraging young women into our industry then we need the women already in the industry to be visible, and for them to be seen as normal. If the female role models are only of a certain type (the stereotypically geeky type for example) then a young woman would be justified in thinking that you need to be like that to be accepted. This is then reinforced by the sort of comments we saw yesterday when young women who do not fit that stereotype were speaking. As a community we need to ensure this behaviour is called out as wrong, every time we see it.

The main issue I have with these tenders is that they directly ask, or at least insinuate, that what should be submitted is an entire proposal for the development of the application. They often ask large numbers of very detailed questions about technology, approach and the finer points of how we would recommend certain features be implemented. To fully respond to these documents would take a couple of days of time for a senior developer – if we were to really do our response justice – essentially a couple of days of free consulting for the company putting out the tender.

As far as I am concerned this is as much spec work as asking design agencies to pitch with concepts. So when we are asking to put forward a proposal for these jobs, then our response tends to be a polite “no, thank you”. Even when the work looks interesting and very much the sort of project we could do well.

If an agency is spending a lot of time responding to tenders then they have to recoup that cost somehow, in our case it would mean having to charge a higher hourly rate for all jobs to cover the non-billable time used in responding.

In addition to the amount of non-billable time these proposals will consume, this work is in reality free consultancy for the person or company requesting the tenders. They can start the process with very sketchy ideas as to how their application should work, get 10 companies to present their concepts and suggestions and take all that knowledge, research and understanding with them to the final build – without paying a penny. When your input is ideas and experience it would be very difficult to prove that the information came from you, it isn’t the same as someone stealing a design concept. There are the occasional instances where an agency could cry foul over an idea that was so unique it would have been unlikely to have also come from another source, but these are unusual. This post from Solid State Group makes for interesting reading.

When it comes to clients with whom we have an existing relationship we are always happy to discuss ideas and approaches prior to a project beginning – that is all part of a good business relationship. However I will not give away days of consultancy to every company who turns up with a large document and a distant promise of a profitable job.

We have found that often these vague proposals expecting a lot of work are because the end client does not have a clear idea of what they want to do. With projects we have taken on we have found that a good approach is to suggest an initial stage of consultancy work. We work with the client and their designer to come up with a specification for the work, often producing wireframes of functionality; making suggestions for approaches and technology; essentially bringing our experience as developers to their ideas. At the end of that process that work is handed over to the client – along with a quote for our development services if we were to continue and build the project. However if they decide to then take the work elsewhere, there are no hard feelings, we have been paid for our consultancy work and we would hope that our years of experience will help to get the project off to a good start.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this article we are fortunate in that most our our work comes via long-term partnerships with the design agencies we work with, or from people who have already decided that we are the company they would like to work with. I know that many companies do get a lot of their work via responding to tenders and I would be interested in hearing how other people manage responding to RFPs, and balance that with billable work, and not giving away a lot of consultancy time for free in the process.

Clay’s premise is that, “not enough women have what it takes to behave like arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks”. Now I’d hope that most people, male or female, wouldn’t like to be described in that way, but lets get past that statement and look at the examples of the type of behaviour we are discussing. Clay describes how he got started in theatre design, and had to essentially lie about his abilities in order to get his foot in the door. However he then backed the lie up with hard work – running off to learn the drafting skills he knew he needed to be able to back up his initial statement that his skills “were fine”.

So here’s my story. Aged 20 I had quit dance and wanted to get into backstage work. I’m in the West End of London, I’ve got no money, no track record and the master carpenter at the show I want to work on says, “so you’ve crewed before then?”

I hadn’t, I had done a bit of rigging, a bit of stage management as part of my courses and while working for small theatre productions as a choreographer – in small teams when you aren’t on stage you are doing some aspect of the technical side of things. However something on the scale of a West End show, or even approaching it? No. I hadn’t even seen a West End show. However, I knew I was physically strong, a quick learner and I knew about theatre so I said yes. I worked that show for 18 months. A lie, one that got my foot in the door, but I worked hard to make sure I followed through with the skills to back it up – just as Clay did with his story of getting into theatre design.

I had the confidence of youth during that period of my life, however I can think of many examples all through my career where my decision to say, “I can do that” when I had absolutely no track record, has worked in my favour. When I got my first IT job, when I wrote my first book, when I started my business – I wouldn’t have got anywhere had I not looked at projects, knowing I had never done anything like it before but said yes, knowing that I could find out, that I could do a good job.

However while a lie or self-promotion without anything to back it up might work to get your foot in the door, I don’t believe it to be something you can build a career out of doing repeatedly. You will be found out. If you are found out at the point at which you have proved yourself, it is likely that people will forgive the lie, however if you get known for being the sort of person who will say anything to get the gig, who is all mouth and no action, you will find that pretty soon no-one will believe a word you say.

I also think that there is a difference between the ability to use a lie to get your foot in a hard to open door, and the kind of ongoing over-inflation of one’s abilities and skills that Tom describes in his post. If you get your foot in the door and then knuckle down and get on with the job in hand, contribute something, create something, then you have proved your confidence in yourself has substance and you will be respected for that. If your reputation is based purely on what you say about yourself, that is a fragile place to be in terms of any kind of longevity in your career.

Despite my ability to blag my way through firmly closed doors every so often, I’m no great self publicist. I prefer doing to talking and sometimes need a bit of a push to remember that self promotion to one degree or another is important in any career. However I’m not too worried about that, ultimately I’d rather be thought of as a doer than a talker, and perhaps that is because I’m a woman. If so, that’s ok.

At edgeofmyseat.com we pride ourselves in developing efficient, scalable applications. Our CMS framework has been developed to be able to run on almost any PHP hosting, but just because something can run on cheap hosting doesn’t make it a good idea to get cheap hosting. There is more to selecting hosting than if it meets the minimum requirements of your application or script. Rather than just have a rant about dodgy hosting I thought I’d write a bit about how to go about choosing decent hosting, and the sort of solutions we recommend.

Ask around

Where hosting is concerned a good recommendation is a positive sign, especially if the person making the recommendation has used the host for a number of years.

It is always worth doing some searching using Google on a hosting company name. If people are having trouble with a host then it is likely they will be posting in forums or on their blog about it, so a bit of research can prove very interesting. If you see a lot of bad experiences with a particular company it would be wise to look elsewhere. Twitter is another good source of information, particularly as people tend to post to Twitter in real time when they are having problems, even if they might not write a lengthy blog or forum post about their trouble or positive experience.

Cost

It is possible to get some very cheap webhosting, which is fine if you are setting up a personal site or something for a friend, however if your site is at all important to you or your client’s business it is worth remembering that you do indeed get what you pay for. If you want to have support available and to have any issues fixed quickly it is worth paying a little bit extra for that.

Support

Find out how the host deals with support. Some hosts may have email only support which you may be happy with but if you prefer to be able to phone make sure the host offers this. If you know someone who uses the host find out if they have ever had to contact support and what the experience was like.

Up to date servers

Check the versions of software the host uses on their servers. If a host is using very old versions of languages it may be that their servers are not very up to date and so might be less secure. You may also run into problems installing scripts that rely on up to date versions.

Uptime guarantees

Many hosts offer an ‘uptime guarantee’ usually as a percentage, a ‘100% uptime guarantee’ means that they guarantee your site to be up 100% of the time. These guarantees tend not to mean a lot. They generally will offer compensation if your site is down for longer than their guaranteed amount – however you usually have to have contacted the host to say that your site is down before the timer starts. Not a lot of good if your site routinely disappears off the net at 2am! Also the uptime guarantees tend to come into effect only if the server itself is down and not if any external problem is effecting connectivity.

I tend not to take a lot of notice of uptime guarantees when selecting a host, I would far rather choose based on reports I hear from other users as to how good in practice the host’s uptime and support when there are problems is.

Hosting resellers

Be aware that many companies offering hosting services are in fact resellers for larger companies. It is possible for anyone to take a server with a large hosting company and begin to resell space on it, without very much knowledge or experience of hosting at all. If you site goes offline and you contact your host, you may find that they actually can’t do anything about it, as they just have to contact the larger company’s support and raise a ticket there. In this situation you just end up with a middleman between you and the people who can do something about your problem.

Virtual server hosting

For many years shared hosting – hosting your site on a server where you have an account for a single site – was the only cost effective way of hosting all but the largest websites. A site on a shared host may share a server with hundreds of other sites. You will typically have a certain amount of space allocated to you and will be unable to make any changes to the server configuration or install any additional software.

The alternative to shared hosting was to take out a dedicated server. This would mean having an entire physical computer at your disposal running your website. This would be far more flexible as you could make changes to the configuration of the server and the software hosted on it but is expensive and most sites do not need the amount of space and resources that an entire server would give them.

In the last few years a new type of hosting has begun to emerge. The Virtual Private Server gives you what appears to be an entire server to yourself, however you are in fact sharing one physical server with a number of other virtual servers. The benefit over regular shared hosting is that you have your own version of the operating system and software running on your virtual server and so can make changes to the configuration and host multiple sites on the one server. In addition, a virtual server set-up should guarantee you a certain amount of system resources, in comparison to shared hosting where you compete for resources with other users of the same server. A virtual private server also offers better security than shared hosting due to the separation of the individual virtual machines.

Most companies who offer this type of hosting offer it with control panel software installed to make managing your server easy even if you don’t have systems administration knowledge. This software will help you to set up new sites on your server and will usually allow you to schedule updates of the server software or configure what services are available to individual sites.

Virtual Private Servers are a great option for designers and developers as you can set up demonstration versions of sites for clients before they go live, perhaps hosting them on a subdomain. If you have a policy of not handing over files until the client has paid you then this means the client can view the work as a complete website and approve it before it is moved onto their server.

Hosting recommendations

I’ll wrap up by recommending a couple of companies that we have found to be excellent hosts.

We tend to advise clients to take out a virtual private server package for all but the smallest sites. The advantages are certainly worth the small additional cost over good quality shared hosting. We recommend Memset, we have been using servers with them for many years now and their service and pricing is excellent. If you are looking for shared hosting we have found NSDesign to be reliable, and several of our Perch customers have been happy with hosting with NSDesign.

Share your dodgy hosting pain, or your recommendations for excellent hosting in the comments.

Despite the recession 2009 was a good year at edgeofmyseat.com. We launched our mini Content Management System, Perch, at the end of May and the success of this little product, designed to fulfill a need we had, has been quite amazing. In addition to Perch we have had our best year yet for development work, with several sites launched on our main CMS framework, a web application currently under development and are working with some great clients.

On the writing front my CSS Anthology third edition was published. Having a third edition of a book of mine on the shelves makes me feel almost as old as the fact that my daughter will turn 13 this year. Technical book release cycles are pretty short, but even so a third edition seems quite something. Right at the end of the year I published an article on 24ways. I am more choosy about my writing projects these days, writing books and magazine articles is incredibly time-consuming, and while I do enjoy it, the projects have to really excite me these days to make me want to consider giving up the time I know they will take.

So to 2010. In terms of the business I think Perch will be a big feature of life at edgeofmyseat.com this year, as we continue to work with the ideas our customers have brought to improve the product. The feedback from customers has been great and our challenge now is to add features to the product without taking away from our initial goal of it being incredibly simple to install and get started with. On the services side of the business I hope that we can continue to build relationships with design agencies and individual designers who want to do web stuff well, and really want to work in partnership with us to produce the best possible end result for each job.

2010 should see me writing a lot more here as I have foolhardily signed up to project52 – committing to add new content to this site at least once a week in 2010. We’ll see how that goes, however with taking on fewer writing projects of late I feel I have to some extent got out of the habit of writing. Something like project52 might just be the push I need to start publishing things here regularly again. The business articles I posted last year were well received so I may write up some more of the things I have learned in almost 9 years of running edgeofmyseat.com. I have also been working on another book project, this time something that I will probably self-publish as an ebook. Watch this space for more news about that as I hope to be able to start talking about it in the coming months.

I’m hoping to get out of the office a bit more this year, lining up a couple of speaking engagements, and also attending more events. As something of an introvert I do tend to use the excuse of being too busy with work or with driving my daughter around to avoid going to social events or conferences however I always do, “enjoy it when I get there”. I just need to remember that fact when I am coming up with an excellent reason why I can’t go into London for something interesting that is happening!

In my personal life I am fortunate to work with my husband and to be able to arrange my work hours and location to spend time with my daughter. I should never forget how lucky I am to be in that position. At times I feel like my daughter’s social secretary but she has some lovely friends and it is a joy to see them all growing up and becoming a really friendly and confident bunch of young people. In addition to spending time with her I hope to do more photography in 2010, experimenting more with Macro photography and my new interest of Digiscoping. Perhaps I’ll write up some of my photography experiments as part of project52.