Created for obsessive-compulsive designers, Build is no ordinary web conference. From internationally renowned speakers to a jam-packed social calendar, Build is bringing the best of the web to Belfast’s Waterfront Studio on the 5th November.

Build presented some of the world’s most respected designers and speakers and it was an honor to meet them and be in their presence: Eric Meyer, Wilson Miner, Ryan Sims, Andy Budd, Mark Boulton and Tim Van Damme.

The conference was a huge success, I thoroughly enjoyed myself not just on the day but across the whole week with various other meetups and Andy deserves a huge pat on the back. Well done sir! I even managed to win a ‘goody bag’ thanks to this tweet – sorry Tim

I can’t even begin to list all the awesome people I chatted to over the week as there are too many to mention but it was good to meet you all and next time you’re up for a drink in Belfast just tweet me

If you’re in Belfast later in the month check out the Adobe CS4 training day Wednesday 25th November (free event).

Round ups

• Front: Build Conference recap
• Pabcas: Building a better web
• Web Designer Notebook: #buildconf
• TaylorMade: Belfast builds giants
• Kyle Boyd: Build Conference – Belfast 2009
• Sam Brown: Build Conference – My experience graph
• No More Art: City of Culture eh? Well 2009 will just have to do

Press

• Wired: Belfast looks to build a hi-tech future
• BBC: The next Twitter or Facebook?

Photos

Front

Keith Anderson

Paddy Donnelly

David Parsons

Maykel Loomans

Yaili

Videos

Tim Van Damme – Designers Designers Designers (from @vectorfunk)

These are just some of the post #buildconf links I have come across. Please feel free to share your blog posts and photos in the comments below.

Please also take a moment to review or recommend any cool places you visited over the days of Build on Lookaly (another project of mine). Cheers!

• John Hewitt Bar
• McHughs
• Duke of York
• Ramada Encore Hotel
• Malmaison Hotel

Stay tuned for Build 2010.

I’ll be joining the lineup of Andy Clarke, Drew McLellan, Web Standardistas and others.

The Belfast event is being held in W5 at The Odyssey starting at 8.45am.

Tickets are still available at £59 (bargain for a FOWD event).

I’ll be talking about ‘Rounding the edges of your website‘:

• Minor adjustments to ensure your user has an enjoyable experience
• How to optimise your site for optimal performance
• Essential checks before launching your website

Further links:

• Check out the schedule
• Check out the speaker list
• More Carsonified events

I’m very excited about the event and hope to see a lot of you there. Who’s going?

Here’s a brief roundup.

What is Refresh Belfast?

Refresh Belfast is a monthly event for designers and creatives to meet over an informative talk and a ‘refreshing’ pint.

It takes place every third Monday of the month in The Black Box, and like a lot of web related events happening in Belfast is organised by Andy Good.

More about Refresh Belfast.

Who are Front?

Front are one of Ireland’s leading web development agencies with clients including BBC, O2, Independent News & Media, Carte Blanche Greetings – and lots of exciting new work they’re not yet able to speak about!

Photo source

Paul McKeever, Front’s MD, and Jamie Neely, Front’s creative director, both spoke at the event.

Topics

Paul talked about the user experience, how people will use your site and being human online (and not talking like a robot).

Jamie discussed Front’s approach to design and how it’s not about jumping into Photoshop and starting to design a site. It’s about understanding the user and client needs, scoping out the project with wireframes and sketches and building the client’s online brand.

You can view the round-up, video clips and slides on Front’s website. It’s worth a read

I had a great morning and going by feedback from others the whole day was a great success with some fantastic speakers and over 350 attendees. Well done to Andy Good for putting it together, along with all those who helped out. There’s a good video montage of the day here.

The 7 Deadly Sins of Wordpress

I got the ball rolling at 9.30am with my Wordpress talk, looking at 7 ways to make your (Wordpress) blog more effective.

I thought that rather than put up my slides (which don’t really make sense out of context) I’d give an overview of the 7 points and the solutions.

1. Backup

Assume things will go wrong and the time will come when you’ll regret you didn’t backup (server problems, site gets hacked, client/other user deletes stuff, you muck it up yourself)

Solution

Backup daily automatically with WP-DB-Plugin. Your backup will be emailed to you daily and you don’t have to lift a finger.

2. Easy Comments

Make it as easy as possible for users to leave comments. Don’t put a barrier in their way in the form of captchas or having to signup to leave a comment. These are used to stop spam, but there are better user friendly ways.

Solution

To stop spam, install and activate Akismet (which will put spam in a spam folder) and verify comments before they’re published.

3. URLS

The default URL for posts e.g. http://www.leemunroe.com/?p=1194 doesn’t mean anything to users or search engines.

http://www.leemunroe.com/tips-more-twitter-followers/ means more to users (they now know what content is on that page) and search engines can allocate keywords to that page based on the url

Solution

Under Settings > Permalinks click ‘Custom structure’ and enter /%postname%/. This will change your URL so it includes the article title.

4. Feed

Make sure your RSS feed link is easy to find. It should be clearly linked to in your sidebar and should be in the browsers address bar also (this is a common convention and there are also applications that will find your feed going by the link in your head).

By default Wordpress will include this link, as will most themes, but if you’re designing your own theme it can often be overlooked.

Solution

Put this code between your <head> tags:

<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=“Title” href=”link-to-feed” />

5. Actions

Once someone reads through your post it’s up to you to point them in the right direction of what their next actions should be. They could add a comment, read other articles on your site, help promote the post, follow you on Twitter etc.

Solution

Use the following plugins to suggest actions at the end of your post. These will help keep users on your site reading other articles or help to promote your post via social networking sites.

• Similar posts plugin
• Popular posts plugin
• Share this plugin or sociable plugin

6. SEO

For your posts to be found on Google they have to be well optimized. There are a few simple modifications you can make to help SEO.

Solution

Use the All In One SEO Pack and you can set titles, descriptions and keywords for your homepage, posts and pages.

7. Text

On the web, people don’t read they scan. You have roughly 3 seconds to grab the readers attention so your text should be easily read and scannable.

Solution

• Break blocks of text into smaller paragraphs
• Use meaningful sub headings
• Use lists where appropriate (bullet and numbered)
• Highlight (bold) keywords
• Make sure links stand out against other text
• Remove unnecessary waffle text

Photo thanks to Colin Parte

These are my 7 deadly sins of Wordpress. It should take you no longer than an hour to implement these solutions and they will make a big difference to the effectiveness of your blog.

There are lots of other ways you can improve the effectiveness of your blog so feel free to share any tips below.

Also if anyone has any links to #barcampbelfast roundups or photos, please share.

What is Lookaly?

Lookaly is an online business directory that lets you rate and review businesses. The objective is to allow you to find the best businesses and services in your area based on ‘the wisdom of crowds’ i.e. feedback from others.

What’s in it for businesses?

Businesses can add themselves for free. Yes, free! If you own a business or are associated with a business, by adding yours you will get a:

• Free directory listing
• Free web page
• Free link to your website

What makes Lookaly so special?

Apart from being beautifully crafted and really easy to use Lookaly is all about helping to promote the best businesses and services in your area. By allowing anyone to signup and review, you can make informed decisions about what restaurant serves good steak or what cinema has comfortable seats.

You can also follow and share reviews with family and friends. Lookaly has a social networking platform so you can setup your own profile and follow your friends, keeping you up-to-date with their latest reviews.

Background

Lookaly was developed by James Gallagher and myself (Lee Munroe). There are a lot of business directories out there but we found them really awkward or depressing to use. Trying to find a list of good recommendations for sandwich bars or coffee shops in Belfast, for example, didn’t seem to be possible. So we made it possible.

Most people now look up businesses online these days but because other directories charge upwards of £120/yr to get listed, there are tens of thousands of businesses missing out. So by offering a free listing service, we’re allowing every business from self employed tradesmen to global Hotel franchises to get listed and found online.

What now?

Check out Lookaly, signup and start reviewing.

For the month of February we’re putting an iPod up for grabs. For a chance to win the iPod, all you need to do is review a business and you’ll be entered into the draw.

We’re currently targeting Northern Ireland businesses but if you’re based in Ireland, England, Scotland, USA or anywhere else feel free to add your business and try it out. You still get your own webpage and link to your website.

Any feedback you want to provide please do.

Thanks

Thanks to everyone who helped test out the app; Paddy, Kyle, Chris, Nick, Andy, Marty, Barry, Andrew, Brian, Liam, Jonny, James Boyce and other family and friends who helped out.

Setup

Here is a brief explanation of the course taken from the Multidisciplinary Design website.

The programme seeks to establish an environment where creative, self-motivated practitioners from a diverse array of design backgrounds, with different methodologies, can experience a cross-fertilisation of ideas and approaches to the design process.

So basically share ideas and collaborate with people from other design fields, while moving forward in your own field.

The course is 45 weeks (3 semesters) long. September – June for first two semesters then September – January for the third semester.

The total cost of the course is somewhere around £3,200 (I can’t remember exactly).

The first 2 semesters contain 3 modules each while the third semester only has 1 module, which is your ‘Masters Project’. You can download the masters structure for more details.

Good

It has helped develop my character and expertise tremendously. Confidence, communication, presentation, collaboration, writing and entrepreneurial skills are a number of things the course has influenced and improved in me.

I feel the masters has also put me in a better position career wise. Out of the 100 or so that graduated from my under grad course, Interactive Multimedia Design, I am now one of few who have a masters so this may make a difference if I decided to go for employment.

The course also has a strong entrepreneurial aspect to it and encourages students to push their work and ideas forward as businesses. I have left with a good standing as a freelance web designer and I also have a new business venture with Lookaly that I will be starting to promote in the coming weeks.

It is up to you what you want to do and what research you want to pursue. I started the course wanting to research usability and web applications, which I think I adequately fulfilled. Working with people from other design fields was also interesting. You don’t realise how much jargon you use on a daily basis until you have to interact with non-geeks daily. A different perspective on your work is always good and opens doors to new ideas and inspiration.

The lecturers involved are extremely helpful and are always available to chat. We were able to watch as Chris Murphy and Nicklas Persson developed and authored their book ‘HTML and CSS Web Standards Solutions‘, which was published at the end of 2008 by Friends of Ed. This shows the high standard of mentoring available. A number of workshops were also arranged for us, which included the guys from Front sharing their project management and process expertise in a 2 day course.

And it was great fun. I had great craic with the rest of my peers, we got to go camping, we got to work on interesting side projects, we visited different events and we had good fun in the studio.

Bad

There isn’t much I can criticize about the course, but I’ll flag up a couple of things that annoyed me from time to time.

There are a lot of ‘sessions‘ in the Art College (where the course is situated). Stuff that should take 2 hours takes a day. Sometimes it’s down to not being organised, sometimes it’s because you’re expected to do more yourself and sometimes it just has to be done. But it always happens.

One thing that we constantly heard was that there was no budget (i.e. no money available). The course did run workshops and supply funding for a few things but if you want to go to any events or fund any projects you’ll have to sort out funding yourself. And it seems to be generally expected that you’ll spend a good bit of money on print work (or other) for the end of year shows.

And I felt there was one module that could be improved. There were a few classes that I didn’t get anything out of and there was a general consensus that they could be improved. Although I think this module has been reviewed and altered since I took it and on the flip side the other modules were extremely useful and interesting.

One last thing to be aware of is that post grad life is nothing like under grad life. You have a lot more work to do and a lot more responsibilities. Apart from maybe the first couple of weeks, the mid week partying becomes few and far between

Conclusion

All in all I would recommend Multidisciplinary Design at the University of Ulster to anyone looking to further their education and career in the creative industry.

A few tips and things to ask yourself.

• What do you want to get out of a masters? Ask yourself why you want to do a masters.
• Research other courses. Multidisciplinary Design seems like the natural transition from IMD (same University, similar lecturers) but there are other courses out there and it makes sense to see what there is, both in Northern Ireland and across the water.
• Where do you see yourself in 2 years after you do a masters. Do you need to do Multidisciplinary Design to get there?
• Think about what it is you want to research and accomplish. Is Multidisciplinary Design the course to accomplish this? Does the University have all the assets you need?

Thanks to all the lecturers and students who made the course interesting and enjoyable, notably Debbie Fraser, Chris Murphy and Nicklas Persson. And good luck to Paddy, Kyle, Jenna, Katherine, Jane and all my classmates for the future. It was a pleasure being involved in the course.

Further Advice

Let me know if you’d like any further advice or information.

Course details can be found here.

So if you’re from Northern Ireland or have ever visited Northern Ireland I’d really appreciate 60 seconds of your time. There’s nothing complicated involved, honest.

Click here to complete the form.

I’ll post the results soon

Thanks

#Edit – View the results here

I’m sure there are more useful resources that I’ve missed so if you think you can recommend anything else, leave me a comment and I’ll update accordingly.

Web/Techy blogs and meetups

Belfast Open Coffee Club

BOCC is an informal tech meeting that happens once or twice per month. Chat about web apps and iPhones over coffee and cake.

Digital Circle

Digital Circle is an association of digital media businesses that help to develop, connect and promote the industry.

NI Creatives

Great resource to keep you informed about what’s happening in NI.

MobileMonday Belfast

MobileMonday brings together industry professionals interested in mobile.

Northern Ireland Mac User Group

NiMUG provides support to Apple users and have monthly meetings.

Digital Media Island

Digital Media Island is an enterprise network that develops and administers enterprise resources for companies in the digital media industry in Ireland.

Crea8ivity

Northern Ireland’s creative digital hub.

Web Designire

Showcase of creative web designs coming from Ireland and Northern Ireland.

NI Tech Blog

The latest tech news from Northern Ireland.

Events to keep an eye on

BarCamp

An open techy/web event where anyone is welcome to present.

CreativeCamp

A similar event to BarCamp but with a broader creative reach i.e. you don’t have to be ‘tech savvy’.

Build

Coming to Belfast later this year, Build is an exciting new web conference.

FOWA Dublin

The Future of Web Apps is coming to Dublin in March 2009. Keep track of Carsonifed for future events.

Business meetups

NISP Connect

Northern Ireland Science Park have a variety of events and competitions, including monthly frameworks classes that are free to attend (and often include bacon buddies).

Creative Entrepreneurs Club

CECNI brings creative entrepreneurs together at various networking events.

Free Wi-Fi hotspots in Belfast

Free Wi-Fi spots include;

• Sinnamon, Stranmillis
• Charlies, Bradbury Place
• The Limelight, Ormeau Avenue
• Ground, Fountain Avenue
• Roast, Royal Avenue
• Roast, Lisburn Road
• Bookfinders, University Road

What else is happening?

Feel free to leave a comment below with more suggestions.