Sometime, about two months ago, I sent a link out to a couple of people whose opinions I value highly when it comes to design and interaction.

I had asked them for feedback on a nearly complete website. It was so nearly complete that it was perhaps just a click or two away from going live.

That website was my new company portfolio, on which I had been working heavily upon for perhaps four months, through the dark nights of autumn and winter. A huge amount of time had been invested to produce the site that would eventually replace the one I had built in 2006, a site which I had constructed six months before I even decided that web design was going to be my full time career.

I received two emails back. I deliberately had asked my confidants to be blunt and honest (the only worthwhile feedback) and within 12 hours, the entire site was consigned to the trash can.

This should have been traumatic. I had sweated detail after detail. I had included references so subtle that not even a super sleuth could have deciphered all the little tics and nods. The man hours lost, coffees quaffed and headaches endured all suddenly had been worthless. The fact was that the website on the end of that link was bad. Very, very bad.

That’s not to say the site I completed in January didn’t have considerable merits. The code was all HTML5, the CSS was packed full of ‘3’. There were embedded fonts when embedded fonts were still a mystery to most of us, and it was all sitting atop a frothy-light PHP framework that I’d handcoded from scratch. The underlying quality couldn’t have been higher.

About six or seven days ago I launched HiggsDesign.com. I didn’t really tell anyone; it sort of leaked out a few days after, and once a few people knew about it and had said nice things, it seemed the right time to acknowledge it. In fact the whole process of making it public was quite cathartic; like a weight lifting off my shoulders, after perhaps the longest, least pleasant web-design journey I have ever embarked upon.

To put this into context, I realised I needed a new portfolio a very long while ago. I started as a sole trader immediately after I graduated in 2006, then in 2008 the business became limited, and in 2009 I VAT registered the company. Still the website remained identical, and rarely updated.

Ever since I began trading, I’ve used my own name, my own domain and the old website that I knocked together at around the same time I wrote my dissertation.

But for a long time I had yearned for a better representation online. I wanted to drop the ‘Andy’ bit from my monikor for a long while, as I felt it limited what work the company could attract. Not that getting work through the door has been a problem - in fact probably my biggest issue over the past two years has been finding the time to work on personal projects for lack of time to myself. I’ve worked pretty hard, but it’s mainly through personal recommendations that I’ve earned my salt, rarely through freak visitations to my website.

I started the redesign around this time last year. A full 12 months ago now. I iterated quite a bit, but the same core elements remained. I struggled a lot to understand what I wanted, and spent much time debating very minute little details, putting off the big choices. When I think about it now, I was treading water furiously.

The thing is that I’ve since realised is that I was a terrible, terrible client. Of course, I’d read all those articles about making your own website being the hardest thing to do, but surely it wasn’t this difficult last time around?

I genuinely grew more and more frustrated with the project. I’d spend my weekends sat in my favourite coffee shop knocking back mochas and trying to hammer out something that would soothe this itch for resolve. It seemed like the project would never end.

I had quickly formed-up the most important pages in my mind, or at least the most interesting ones. The homepage, the folio and the contact page were all done, one by one they appeared in my browser window.

By the time I had weened myself off perfecting silly little details and moving onto the other serious pages like the about page, those other pages had stood stagnant for what seemed like months.

I struggled to get the tone right. Was this my portfolio, or the business’ portfolio? We, or I?

The battle continued.

In January I went away for a week to Austria with Tim and Stacey for some time snowboarding. The macbook came with me too, and I felt I finally had reached a stage where I was polishing the brass tacks. A good 10 months in the making, here was the final, glorious result. I was pretty much ready to launch, I thought.

When I received the first of the two replies to the emails I had sent, I wasn’t surprised. There seemed to be a lot of criticism. I took it pretty well I thought. Perhaps even a little too easily. I mean, I often challenge my clients when they request changes to the work I present to them (it improves the end result by a mile), and often defend my corner. With this, I didn’t feel like I could argue back. I agreed with everything that was said.

The observations were all true. The navigation was muddled. The copy was repetitive and inconsistent. The styling was over the top, and what was meant to be elegant had become kitsch. I’d really screwed up.

I felt nothing. By all accounts I should have had my heckles up, been annoyed, upset, angry, or at least felt something. But I realised by the time that I had read the second email, that this was a profound mistake with the project . It took a few hours to digest my emotionless stage and why I wasn’t surprised or angry, but I quickly realised that I had simply deluded myself that spending time on it meant that the end result would be good. By this stage, in my heart of hearts, I now knew that the whole thing needed to be reset.

I will say, I don’t believe this was in anyway ordinary. I had commissioned myself to work on a hyper-personal project that needed to resolve a number of incredibly complex business issues I had accrued over a four year period.

My mistake most likely had been working in pure isolation. Bar the odd look-in, I was the only person who had ever seen the site, and perhaps those who had seen it hadn’t had the heart to criticise earlier when they saw I had been working so vigourously at it.

The thing is, I have built up fantastic methods for working with my clients over the years. It allows me to get inside their business or organisation and produce website that they are truly pleased with. I work with them closely and we plan, iterate and resolve. But here, I had used none of these tools. I don’t think I planned anything really.

The whole thing had formed like some organic mutant. The core had been fired months ago, but some of the most important elements had been relegated to final-minute half-assed compromises in order to get the thing complete before I lost the remainder of my sanity.

So after thinking about my lack of emotional attachment (and taking that as a warning sign that something was totally awry) I consigned it all to the trash and started over.

That was two months ago. I quickly started over, and this time I took input from day one. My coffee people have still been doing a roaring trade, but for the past eight weeks or so my vigour has been tempered by planning the whole thing out before I moved to code.

Some things have changed since then - of course they have - but that initial plan, plus the assistance of some trusted council, really focussed the objectives of the project and I progressed quickly and efficiently.

Of course things could always do with improvement. Before I launched the new site, I felt the thing lacked the beauty and complexity of the original version, but I don’t have to dwell long to think of every mistake and wrong turn that made up that last attempt. This is so much better.

Perhaps the most salient of all lessons learned from this experience was that I shall never attempt my own projects again without taking feedback and criticism from the start. Where in my professional relationships with clients I actively consult anyone and everyone, I managed to isolate myself here in some trance-like way, and it proves that that method had nothing but a detrimental effect on the project.

I am not dispondant about the time i spent working on the dead site, nor do I regret building it. Of any project I have worked on in the past four years, it is the single greatest leap forward in my knowledge of the use of the technologies we work with. The underlying framework of that site became the underlying framework of the new site. The HTML5 and structure have become foundation stones for a whole construct of new techniques that I have become expert in. It has had a truly profound impact on all my work over the past two months.

Today marks the 6th year since I posted the first message on this blog. Since then my career has progressed a long way, and oddly enough, this project has taken up a large part of that time. But I’m so pleased with the result, and the affirmation I have had has only strengthened my resolve to continue building websites and improving my techniques.

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F1Calendar.com is a little something Si and myself have been working on recently.

Very much in the tradition of Si’s previous ‘KickOff’ productions (Six Nations Kickoff, Euro Kickoff and World Cup Kickoff), F1 Calendar is a quick way to check Formula One race times and dates for the entire season, or retrieve of the same details in a file that can be loaded into your copy of iCal or Outlook (or other desktop calendaring software).

You can download a standard .ics file, or subscribe to the updating ‘webcal’ version which will update throughout the season to reflect any changes that occur to the planned event dates over the coming months.

F1 Calendar supports every world time zone, and remembers the last one you viewed so you can always return to view the most relevant schedule, instantly.

We’ve also allowed a level of customisation for the downloadable content; we imagine not everyone wants all the practice and qualifying sessions recorded in their calendars, so before you download you are asked to pick which ones (if any) you want to include. We’ve got dates and times for all Grands Prix, qualifying sessions and practice sessions.

The design and architecture has been kept straightforward - there is only one page to speak of, but there are quick urls for all time zones if you need to send them as links. Also we’ve decided that IE6 will get a reduced visual experience (and a reduced visual experience only), and this is the first site either Si or myself have been involved in which we opted to use a Bring Down IE6 inspired philosophy - really on the basis that people who understand how to download calendar files and subscriptions will also understand how to download a browser and how it would benefit them.

If you like it, please Tweet it, pass it on or bookmark it - we’re on twitter at @f1cal.

Building it was pretty enjoyable.

Formula One Race Times & Dates

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I’ve made it a habit in recent times to steer clear of mentioning actual clients in actual blog posts, but as so much time and effort has gone into the complete re-skin and slew of new features, it’s only fair to give this one a bit of a nudge.

RateMyPlacement is one of my big ongoing and often more intensive projects, and today/just now, we proudly launch version two. Hence why I’m still sitting on the edge of a cup of very black Spanish coffee, six hours after I drank it, and it’s just gone midnight.

For those familiar with the concept, this paragraph is needless, but for everyone else, RateMyPlacement is a place for students looking for, and who have returned from, internships and placements. It allows users to rank and share their experiences with future ‘placementeers’ and is a resource peddled across universities and placement offices around the country.

There are a few bolts to be tightened and edges to be deburred, but on the whole it’s there.

One interesting day follows another - tomorrow I’m in Cheltenham teaching GCSE kids how to design a good logo.

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Like Indiana Jones, yet potentially more action-packed, Multipack’s Geek In The Park 2008 makes a welcome return this year, and will be pitching camp in Royal Leamington Spa on Saturday 9th August.

The format will be the same as last time; an afternoon picnic in the wonderful Jepheson Park (friends and families welcome) will be followed later in the evening by a discussion based event, with some top-notch speakers. We’re not disclosing the line up yet, but rest assured, you won’t be disappointed.

And of course, there is one other reason why GITP is always worth a look in; once again it’s free of charge.

For those wondering how to get to Leamington Spa, it’s easily accessible from the motorway and regular, direct trains run from London Marylebone and Birmingham.

For more details and to sign up for a reminder, visit the Geek In The Park 2008 website, put together so masterfully by Trev and Lloydy.

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I’ve been playing with this on and off for a few days, but have managed to finally get my photo collection back onto this site. Instead of hosting it (which was the headache), I’ve tapped into Flickr’s API which handily allows you to get your photos out (I used this PHP wrapper in the end - I was going to use Trev’s but it wasn’t quite baked yet…).

Using a little bit of wizardry I’ve also linked in Upcoming and Google Maps. Unfortunately, until the API supports collections you can’t browse in the exact way I’d like, but you can view by photoset, most recent, tag and individually. I’ve also dragged in comments and EXIF data for those who are interested.

It’ll probably see some tweaks in the coming months, but for the moment it’ll do. You can see it it here.

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I’m really pleased to write about some exciting changes for the Midlands based web group, The Multipack.

The ‘Pack have been going strong for over two years now, and being a collection of web developers it seemed only right that after all that time we might be able to muster up an update to the logo, website, forum and set out a new direction for 2008.

Kudos to Paul Lloyd & Gareth Brown for the artwork and Trevor Morris & Ross Riley for the hardstuff. The new site is really refreshing and looks fantastic.

There have been some other changes too. Our key venue is now the Victorian splendour of The Old Joint Stock on the edge of Birmingham’s St. Philip’s Square, right between (and no more than one minute walk from) Snow Hill and (3 minute walk from) New Street stations.

There will be some more opportunities to meet with us further out in the West Midlands, as we are hoping to start venturing outwards once more.

Meetings are (as they have always been) open and free to anyone who wants to informally discuss, learn or network with other local developers, designers, experts and non-experts. We meet on the second Saturday of every month at 2.00pm over a few beers and a even occasionally a late lunch.

For more details about Multipack events (including our next meeting on Saturday 9th February), check out our new website and forum, or feel free to ask questions of any of the regulars such as myself - we’re always looking forward to meet and join up with others who want to learn, share and engage with other web professionals.

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The run up to Christmas, Christmas itself and the aftermath have been a great big sticky pudding mix of socials, late night working sprees and over indulgence, and not really in that order.

You may also have noticed that things have changed here a bit.

The first thing to note is the reason that I haven’t posted for ages, probably the longest I’ve left it while still in the country, is that this website is no longer at it’s old slash-blog location. Although all the links still work, I’m now floating ‘Just Beyond The Bridge’ over on it’s own domain making it well and truly standalone.

AndyHiggs.co.uk may get it’s own blog back eventually as a different type of beast, but for all the usual stuff you now come here. Feed-reader users fear not, due to the wonder’s of feedburner you won’t notice a thing, except you now get all those photos too…

In more technical detail, what I’ve done is shifted everything that was on my old TextPattern installation over to ExpressionEngine. Well, you can never jump on a bandwagon too quickly I think, but of course it’s much better to arrive fashionably late.

I’m not entirely convinced by everything yet, although it does appear pretty flexible and have some nice facets; this is an exploration of the package as much as anything else, so bear with me while I bang around with the code, iron out the glitches and clean up the somewhat shabby code in places. There are some encoding issues I’ve discovered (where ‘Bent?’ read ‘Bentō’ for example) and maybe a few articles that don’t quite map as before. If you spot anything glaring, comments will be gratefully accepted below.

Rather surprisingly the Internet Explorer 6 hacks file was the smallest I’ve ever made for a site this size, but admittedly they don’t get all the opacity fun that you do on the full fat version. There is some jQuery image resize shizzle going on too for those of you viewing this on a GameBoy sized screen… it should look good down to quite small (give it a go if you like).

Design-wise, it’s no classic, but I wanted to get my photography back in here and hence at the moment (December 2007) you can see a panoramic view from the Tibetan plateau (taken on my last big excursion).

As I say, work in progress, but feel free to chip in, after all, you’re the ones that have to look at it.

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