One of our project managers is taking six months off to have a baby and we are looking for someone to help cover her workload while she is away. It’s a six month contract, beginning in December 2009.
You’ll be joining our project management team, who are all PRINCE2 qualified (but don’t worry if you aren’t) and working in a creative digital media studio environment (building large websites), working for a very diverse range of interesting and demanding clients.
We are looking for a very, very organised person with great written and verbal communication skills. You must love writing to-do lists and making sure everything gets ticked off on time. You’ll be in daily contact with our clients and working closely with our consultants, designers and developers, making sure projects run smoothly, get finished on time and within budget.
You’ll be able to follow tried and tested procedures, but also be able think on your feet. If you have a technical background, or at least an understanding of how websites work, that will be an advantage. If you have any previous project management experience, that’ll be good too, although definitely not necessary.
The role is office based, in Swansea’s SA1 waterfront location, within easy reach by road, train and bus.
Drop an email to jobs@s8080.com. Address it Chris and Matt.
We look forward to hearing from you.
Please, please, please – we don’t want to hear from any recruitment agencies, thank you.
At S8080, we ensure that all of the websites we create are built to meet accessibility standards, as it’s very important to us that they’re accessible to everybody.
Whilst following guidelines is all well and good, it’s always extremely useful to see how real people with disabilities experience the web. The video below does just that – it shows a guy named Bruce describing how he uses the internet with the help of a refreshable Braille display. Most people have seen/heard a screen reader in use, but likely not a Braille display.
This week, Google announced an early version of a plugin for Internet Explorer, which allows it to use modern web technologies such as HTML5, CSS3, SVG, Canvas, and more.
More and more web applications (including many from Google, such as Google Docs, Gmail, and MobileMe from Apple), either require these technologies, or make extensive use of JavaScript. As such, fast JavaScript support has recently become something of a game of cat and mouse between the top browser vendors, constantly leapfrogging one another to be ‘the fastest’. Internet Explorer, whilst receiving a big upgrade with version 8, is still some way behind Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Google Chrome when it comes to these features.
Google are soon to be launching their much-touted Google Wave service: a combination between e-mail, instant messaging, wikis, and social networking. Wave’s interface is very JavaScript-heavy, and requires features of HTML5. At present, this means that Internet Explorer users will be unable to use Wave. And even if Microsoft implemented the necessary features in the next version of IE, there are still around 40% of internet users on versions 6 and 7 of IE with no clear intention to upgrade any time soon (or, for many corporate users, they’re not even allowed to upgrade). It’s a big problem for Google if their ‘next generation of email’ isn’t able to be used by 60% of internet users.
Enter Google Chrome Frame.
Chrome Frame is a plugin for Internet Explorer versions 6, 7, and 8 – much like Flash or a PDF reader – which seamlessly allows Internet Explorer to use Google Chrome’s web technology support and fast JavaScript engine. Web developers simply need to add an HTML tag to their webpages, which will tell Internet Explorer to switch to using Chrome’s rendering engine for that site.
This is a fantastic solution to the issues outlined above for a number of reasons:
For starters, the installation is a breeze – no more difficult than installing Flash, which most users have probably done without even noticing it.
Other than the installation, there’s nothing for the end-user to do. Most websites will continue using Internet Explorer the same way they always have. If a site needs to use Chrome Frame, it all happens magically in the background, and is completely transparent to the user.
There’s no need for IE users to have to install or learn an entire new browser. Again, they just keep using IE just as they did before.
Finally, because the use of Chrome Frame is completely opt-in on a site-by-site basis, it doesn’t change everything and ‘break the internet’. Viewing sites that require new technologies is as simple as installing a plugin for your browser.
Initial tests by Computerworld have shown IE8 using Chrome Frame to be nearly 10 times faster than usual when processing JavaScript.
It has been a crazy few weeks for us. Good crazy though.
We won two major (and fascinating) contracts at the end of August and we are off to London later this week for a kick-off meeting for another big win for a brand new client.
I can’t talk too much about it just yet, but it’s one of those career defining projects that our team will talk about for years to come.
We are incredibly pleased and proud to have won it and look forward to showing you later this year
Nice to be having some decent weather at last too.
When writing online we always recommend ‘the active voice’ – it is more direct, less wordy, easier to understand. Active voice helps people to grab information quickly and naturally leads to a more conversational tone of voice.
What is the difference between active and passive voice?
This is the way I’ve always explained it:
Active voice is when the subject is doing something or causing the action
“John kicked the ball” – the sentence describes who does what to whom, John is kicking the ball..
The passive voice is the other way around – something is being done to the subject, the subject is the recipient of the action
“The ball was kicked by John” – the subject (the ball) is being kicked by John
More examples of the active voice:
Active: Craig slammed down his iPhone
Passive: The iPhone was slammed down by Craig
Active voice minutes: “We discussed user journeys. Jane presented the analytics report, further user testing will be undertaken next quarter
Passive voice minutes: “User journeys were discussed by those in attendance. The analytics report was presented by Jane, it was agreed that further user testing is to be undertaken next quarter“
Writing in the active voice uses less word, makes copy more concise which ticks another online writing basic – remove excess words and use smaller everyday words where possible.
Here’s a nice little article on the Wireframes site about using mind maps to think about functional requirements of the web site and user goals / tasks before diving into the detail and sketching wire frames.
By using functional mind maps first (whether they are sketched or done using tools such as Mindmeister) it allows us to explore ideas and start mapping associated activities of the users.
