Jamie Stephen Represents is a London-based photographic and production agency, representing a diverse range photographers, directors, and directors of photography.

The company had already embarked on developing their website with another supplier, but for one reason or another the website hadn’t been completed. I was contacted to perform what essentially was a salvage operation to get the site into shape and online asap. I tweaked the visual design, tightening up elements such as typography, layout and colour pallet. I also drastically simplified the front-end code structure and ensured it was more accessible and easily updatable in the future.

The site has recently gone live and I am in discussions with regards to the next phase of development.

URL: http://www.jamiestephen.com/

I have recently been in discussions with Together London about collaborating with them on forthcoming web projects. The idea behind the company is to put together a team of highly-skilled individuals who work together in a flexible and more efficient way. By being more agile, cutting out a lot of the inefficiencies that occur in larger agencies we can deliver higher quality projects, more quickly and cheaply.

URL: http://www.togetherlondon.com/

Today the web has gone beyond the browser and now content is syndicated through XML-based technologies, re-purposed for desktop and mobile applications and AJAX and web service-driven functionalities are commonplace.

With the emergence of the social web (or for want of a better phrase, Web 2.0), individuals are able, more than ever to connect with each other to form communities sharing common interests, regardless of location, class or race. The control over the dissemination of information has been put in the hands of the people and now anyone can publish anything (text, photos, video) and reach a global audience within seconds.

As the complexity of web applications increases, writing well-structured code is more important than ever. This is as much an art as it is a science. Since the beginning (for me at least, back in 1999) I have followed the standards-based approach to front end web development through the layered production of XHTML, CSS and JavaScript. This is bound up in the framework of accessibility and scalability to ensure your website or application is accessible and extensible now, and in the future.

Along with these front end technologies I use PHP and MySQL to power the back end to create dynamically-driven websites and applications.

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If you would like you know more about web development then please get in contact.

Over the past few months Amazon have been tweaking their existing site to improve the design and user experience. They have done a good job, but I couldn’t help but notice that they have only gone half the way to using Web standards in their redesign efforts. Here’s a little (non-exhaustive) summary of what they are missing:

• The HTML isn’t really that semantic, if you remove the style sheet the content doesn’t really flow that well - a(ccessibility barrier to non-graphical browsers)
• No DOCTYPE to inform browsers of what version of HTML they are using
• A huge amount of page specific CSS and JavaScript, could this have been moved into an external file to be reused elsewhere?
• They are STILL using tables for content and page layout - very inflexible, non-semantic and harder to update, increases code to content ratio (lowers SEO - although Amazon are all over SEO)
• Page design doesn’t scale well when you increase the font size
• No use of access keys or tab indexes so a user can’t tab logically through the navigation
• No use of skip to content or skip navigation links

Amazon still provides a great online shopping experience, but you have thought that if they had gone to the trouble of redesigning their site they would have taken a few lessons out of Yahoo’s book and gone down the full Web standards route.

So after a few week’s of blood, sweat and tears I have finally got the 8th incarnation of my website: www.hungrybrowser.co.uk live. This time around it wasn’t so much a case of going for a new look and feel but more an exercise in content consolidation. Before I redeveloped this site I had a site for photos, one for work and one for blogging. I’ve managed to now get everything in one place, choosing WordPress as my publishing platform (although I had to do a lot of hacking the templates to get them to where I wanted).

As a side point I thought it might be interesting to have a look at some of the old versions of HB, so I’ve dusted down the source code and taken a few screen shots of the site as it has evolved over the past 7 years from 2001 to the present day.