Alex Hardy

I’d expect better than this from the BBC.

The W3C is “the web’s regulatory body”, is it?

Thank you, website designer Leonie Watson, for your insightful remarks.

[CSS is] … quite a new technology, it’s only been around a couple of years.

Oh really?

I’ve finished the work I was doing for Stephen on Uncover Egypt, so my extra-curricular development efforts are full-time on my project now.

First task: I want a slick little enquiry form with client-side validation using jQuery (no nasty validation pop-ups for me, nosir) and some nice server-side validation in PHP to catch the little tricksters that sidestep the first line of defence.

Marvellous.

This PR business is going to be more complicated than I imagined. I’m going to have to think long and hard about core values, points of differentiation and which specific part of the site’s intended audience is going to be most important.

I think those things are there, but I need to clarify them for myself before I can articulate them to anybody else.

I’m going to do the unthinkable, and recommend a PC It’s a price range thing though - £400 just doesn’t buy a MacBook…

Anyway. Acer. We have a couple of them at work, so when Stephanie said she wanted a laptop I thought of them first. We have some VAIOs too, but honestly I find them nice looking but twitchy.

Funnily, she actually got a better model than the one that we ordered - it has a 15.4 inch 1280×800 screen. Very nice The spec on the site said 1024×768.

So what distinguishes them for me:

• They don’t offend me to look at. I know plenty of people don’t care how well their posessions are designed aesthetically (or sometimes functionally too it would appear), but I do. They look fine.
• They set themselves up pretty nicely - you don’t have to bugger around with drivers because the ones that came on it are generic and rubbish.
• They’re not stuffed to the gills with a load of bullshit (Sony, I’m looking at you) that you’ll just want to uninstall anyway. They’re not entirely innocent - there’s a so-called ‘Acer: Empowering Technology’ panel that likes to mither you from time to time. I’ll figure out how to disable that.
• They come with MS Works and Norton Antivirus, which is a good enough place to start.
• Slightly unusually, they’ve partitioned the hard drive into C and D. Keeps things a bit tidier.

Yessir, they get my chufty badge of approval

PfWD is now known as Refresh.

(Refresh? ReFresh? reFresh? refresh? … I’ll make up my mind later)

The address will be get-refreshed.co.uk - when there’s something there I’ll make it known.

I look forward to coming up with a logo with my good friend Ste - things will feel much more real then.

… you have to read Getting Real.

Refresh

That might be more adaptable… Refresh your prospects, options, views ect…

More of a verb than a feeling, a call to action. Hmm.

I quite like this one. I wrote a quick pitch to explain it.

Relief

At Relief we know that as a business, finding people you can trust can be a long and expensive process. We also know that as professionals, delivering today’s work is easier than securing tomorrow’s. That’s why we’re here, to take the stress out of it all and offer everyone some relief. Relief works.

www.relief-works.com

and some of the brainstorm notes that rationalise them:

Espresso (fresh, filtered, blended, strong, skills) - espresso-works.co.uk is available. I’m slightly troubled by the existence of a jobespresso.com, but they don’t seem to be playing on quite the same field…

FeedMe (the information you want, coming to you, RSS feeds) - feedme-prospects.co.uk is available.

Fresh (newest information) fresh-jobs.net is available. I think this is the weakest.

Starfish (quality, differentiated, apart from the crowd, finding, fishing) starfish-jobs.co.uk is available.

Rather abstract I know, but I don’t want something techie. I want something human and approachable. Unlike most services, I want to position the users as the content, not the ads.

There will be more ideas, no doubt.

I’m open to feedback, even if it takes the form of unrestrained scorn

… about looking up domains.

Even though I’ve been buzzing with ideas this past few days and I’ve had unanimously positive responses to those ideas, doing a quick Google or a WHOIS search always seems to come up with some bastard who’s on the same turf (or close to it), using a name I want.

There is some relief though - just about everyone I see has a pitfully bad looking site that I wouldn’t be seen dead using. There’s a selling point in there, if I can arrive at a sexy enough identity…

As I sit here, rocking back and forth and mumbling, I remind myself that true unprecedented originality doesn’t exist. Quality of execution is everything. All these people have are names that I wanted, and they thought of them first, so they’re entitled to them.

I need to come up with a name, I need to get an identity (if only a logo) designed, and I need to do this quickly. Before I lose faith in the whole thing.