Things have changed a bit around here. I’ve revisited Havoc Inspired and made what feels like hundreds of little changes mainly to improve the usability of the site.

You’ll notice that my homepage boasts a completely different layout. When I first designed Havoc Inspired v3.0 I wasn’t producing “Please start from the beginning…” and as a result had not accounted for it in my layout. Therefore the episodes were previously clumped together with the rest of my posts, this was one of the main reasons for the realignment of the design. My Blog and Please start from the beginning… are now separated into their own sections so you can see at a glance the current and previous two episode of the series.

I wanted new area to be able to display relatively temporary pieces of information about what I’m up to, for example that I’m one of the judge for the Webvanta Design Contest in Janurary 2010 were the first prize is a Macbook Pro. So I’ve built a billboard type gallery that transitions every 10 seconds (a time period I‘m hoping is long enough to not be distracting to visitors).

I was also previously listing the boagworld show I’ve been vocally involved with, however this was starting to become a very long list (as Paul keeps taking holidays) so now I’m only showing the most recent.

I’ve made tweaks to my typography, copy and calls to action as well as going over my markup with a fine tooth come and cleaning things up a bit.

I’m a lot happier with the layout, but hey I’m a designer, that won’t last long. :-P

I hope you guys like it too, I’d love to hear your feedback!

Plenty of people have custom “404 Page Not Found” pages. A quick search on google reveals plenty of galleries of such examples and Barry Wardrop appears to have been the first to spot mine.

Very nice site Ryan, glad to see it now with the kerning is sorted, absolutely love your 404 page error!! I nearly pooped myself thinking oooh what have i done!

that was great ;)

Have a look for yourself here: 404 link

So what are the benefits of having a custom 404 page:

• Your site doesn’t feel broken when a visitor hits your 404
• Server generated 404 pages tell visitors nothing, which means they are more likely to give up and move on
• You have control of your own 404 page, which means you can encourage visitors to keep looking for what they are after, for example by providing them with search facilities
• You have the opportunity to make light of what is basically a failure to provide
• It shows your visitors that you care about the details

It’s so easy to add your own 404 page to your site. If you’re using Apache web server and .htaccess files are supported you can simply add:

ErrorDocument 404 /notfound.html

And style notfound.html to your liking.

If you’re using a CMS/Publishing Platform such as Wordpress (which is the case for this site) you can add a 404.php file in your theme folder.

So there’s no excuse not to really.

What great 404 pages have you come across?

I was growing really tired of Havoc Inspired v2. I suppose it had served me well for a while, appearing in .net magazine readers sites section and on design meltdown, but it had become a real bind to update and I feel the focus of the site was all wrong.

Havoc Inspried v2

I wanted a more professional looking site for my freelance work, with some fun aspects hidden away for those interested in exploring.

I’ve removed the necessity to have a thumbnail image for every blog I write, this was a real pain!

I also seem to be doing a lot more interviews and show for boagworld and I wanted a more prominat place to shout about it.

I’ve moved from Movable Type to Wordpress, and so far I’m really happy with it. Being able to manage my blog from my iPhone is a nice touch.

There are a few niggles that my pixel perfect eyes keep spotted, but for now welcome to Havoc Inspired v3.

I’d love to hear what you think. :-)

Update: Thanks for the feedback guys. I’ve made a few updates to the site based on your suggestions. The foremost being the kerning issue. :-S

I have been brought on board as Head of Web Development to help establish a new web services agency based in Leeds, which, after much deliberation, we have lovingly named Infinite Path.

I have hastily put together a holding page for our site with a brief description of what we do and ways to contact us. You can expect to see the full blown site arriving very soon, once we have wrapped up a couple of existing client projects. The full site may be of a similar theme to the holding page but knowing me it probably won’t be, my mood changes with the wind, especially when it comes to design.

One thing that won’t be changing is our logo, well not much anyway. We’ve got two versions:

Logo for website, business cards etc.

Logo for invoices, letterheads etc.

Depending on where the logo is being used.

This is the first logo I have designed where I’ve drawn my own font, and I have to say I’m quite proud of it.

So that is a brief update of what I’ve been up to as of late. All in all I’m very excited. I’m working with a great team of people who are as enthusiastic about what they are doing as I am. So expect big things from us in the future!

I’m not going to repeat Andy post here so read it yourself on his site. The question I asked however was this:

Okay, well IE8 is also missing a few of the other more popular CSS3 selectors that are available in other browsers, like border-radius and things like that. Is this a setback for CSS3?

And he answered:

The interesting thing, though, and this is the wider issue, is that there’s no strategic plan, either from the browser makers or, most importantly, from the CSS working group, where they plan in a timetable implementation of these new features. Now we’re not talking about the big design of CSS, and when are we going to get new layout features and things like that, but simple things like for example CSS columns? Webkit implements CSS columns, Mozilla implements CSS columns, but they do it independently, they do it when they want to on their own timetable, and what I’d really like to see is for these browser makers to get together and say “You know what in September, we’re going to introduce these columns across the board, and in October, or in our next release, we’re going to implement this across the board.”

This really got me thinking…

It wouldn’t just be nice if browser manufacturers collaborated more, it’s vital!

The web is evolving at an unprecedented rate, and users expectations of the web are evolving too. Unfortunately we as developers are hindered by the restrictions of the browsers that these users utilize and I’m not just talking about Microsoft.

The simple fact of the matter is, unless all browsers introduce, for example, the same CSS style at relatively the same time, we as developers can not implement them.

In some cases we can employ progressive enhancement, like with the border-radius style available in Firefox & Safari, but background layers? No way. Not until all browser support the style consistently will us as developers begin to implement it to any great effect.

The CSS3 specification has been in working draft since May 2001. Only now with the release of IE8 have Microsoft got the rendering of CSS2 (recommendation May 1998) working properly (fingers crossed). It’s about time browser manufacturers got the fingers out and started working together to improve the web for all.

As a developer I find this industry an exciting one to work in, there’s always something new to play with and improve, but imagine were we would be today if say five years ago, browser manufacturers had all got together, said to each other “OK, lets make all our browsers render in the same way and support the same things” and started focusing on their individual browser interfaces and browser features, which to the average user is all the market upon anyway.

We designers/developers would be much further along at build the beautiful web that Andy advocates.

thehodge.co.uk Redesign

So I drew two cartoons of Dom, one for the top of the page (Guitar Hero’s Dom) and one for the bottom (Slumped Dom). The grundy style to the blog evolved naturally after that.

Guitar Hero’s Dom & Slumped Dom

Linkage: thehodge.co.uk

Let me know what you think of the final result?