Over the last few months I've been making a web site for my wedding. Emily (my fiancée) and I didn't want your run-of-the-mill wedding website, hosted by someone on an unrecognisable domain (for example, ewedding.com or gettingmarried.co.uk sub-domains). I wanted something that I had control over, that I could make as the perfect website for us, not a nice template that thousands of others have. We wanted something personal.
Over the last few days I attended the Future of Web Design conference in central London. It was a great two days meeting some of my peers and heroes of web design. Here's my notes from Day 2, featuring Ethan Marcotte, [Femi Adesina](<a href=), Josh Clark, Bruce Lawson, Martin Beeby (from #LWSIE the day before), Elliot Jay Stocks, Sarah B Nelson and once again, Josh Clark!
It's Mobile World Congress 2011 this week, and amongst the throngs of Honeycomb tablets, Nokia and Microsoft square dancing on the showroom floor, there are a few announcements that may not be hugely exciting to the general public, but that the tech community should be giggling with glee about.
There are loads of good reasons to look at and study users visiting your site: entrance points, pages visited, time spent reading, adverts clicked etc. Google Analytics (GA) provides a great free service for this and can't really be faulted considering how much traffic it is receiving.
As a developer and iPhone fan, nothing pleases me more to say that Android has caught up with the iPhone. Android hardware has been great for a while, the Motorola Droid and Nexus One being the first in a wave of great devices, but the software hadn't been right. Android took its sweet time to develop but finally has all the great features iPhone users have enjoyed since the iPhone 3G and more (wi-fi hotspots for example).
Over half of the UK population has a mobile phone, and there are 40 million active mobile devices. Of that number, there are about 8 million touch screen devices, with around half of that number being accounted for by the Apple iPhone. More than half of the new handsets being manufactured today have touch screen functionality, though no other single device has had the success of the iPhone.
I've signed up for O2 broadband (again) this week, and I've been quite impressed with their service for setting things up. For every step you get an e-mail, then a text, which is great and keeps me up to date with how everything is going.
