Dad raised three beds today;
A damned site more than me.
He showed me how to use a saw,
35 years after my first lesson.
I’d forgotten the best way
and hard work sets him free.
Posted in Scrapper's Poetry, Verse
Born in ’44,
Pushing on seventy but still fitter than me,
I watched him today, watched his way
Of showing he could still hack it,
Harder and better than I ever could.
Fuck it I thought,
He wants to do all the work?
And it was hard graft,
Swinging those scaffold boards about,
Hammering those nails in,
Digging the earth out,
I swear he enjoys sawing.
Fuck this I thought,
He wants to do all the work?
I didn’t enjoy even watching.
Praying his heart wouldn’t attack,
The way he approached the work.
The work I needed done.
The sky beat down, the blistering son.
Fucking hell, I thought,
He wants me to watch or work?
Yet he’s nearly finished the job,
The task I didn’t do before he came,
Dripping in sweat and hand seized up,
In half a day, he’s done it all.
Grateful, I feel fucking small.
Fuck it, I couldn’t have stopped him,
Even if I had tried.
Posted in Scrapper's Poetry, Verse
Different Page, Same Menu
If your site only has a few pages, navigation is easy: you just need a few links from page to page. When you’ve got more than a few pages, it is polite to include a menu navigation system. This system should appear on every page and have all the same links on every page. Design the menu for human beings to follow, not you or your nerdy mates. With everything you do, ask yourself the question – what would someone, who had never visited a site of this type, want to know about. Old-timers can follow any old menu system but it should be easy to follow for newbies.
Same Old Menu
It is crucial to get this right at the start of your design process so that newbies quickly become adept at navigating around your site. If you keep changing the menu system, your site’s visitors will give up and look elsewhere for the information they want. If you are lucky, they will send you an email asking for the information which they couldn’t find. More likely they will bugger off and find somewhere more interesting and approachable. If you must change the menu system, keep the menu headers the same. This means before you design your site, you need to sit down and have a really long hard think about what its structure is going to be. Design may begin at your workstation but it does not begin online! If you must design with a live site, put it behind a password so that only you can see it until it is ready for public booing.
Include Really Important Information On Every Page
I used to run Brighton & Hove Chess Club’s website and found that 90% of all the enquiries I got asked for the club’s address, so in the end I just put the address on every page of the website. Obviously I couldn’t put all the information on every page and had to be very selective about what appeared on every page. I chose to include the menu for navigating the site and the club’s address.
Silence is Golden
Menu systems that make noises quickly become annoying, no matter how cool they might seem to you at first. Make your menu silent!
Use CSS not Javascript or Flash
Silver surfers have a habit of disabling features which their browser warns them “may” have a security risk. Consequently, many visitors to your site will have disabled Javascript or Flash. You still want them to see your content so do not use Javascript or Flash for navigation – use CSS instead. Once they feel that they can trust your site, they might turn these fancy features on when they visit your site and, who knows, they might even realise that they could leave them on all the time and just stop visiting those dodgy sites which their relatives wouldn’t approve of. Pornography has been around for a very long time but it wasn’t so freely accessible when when these oldsters became adults. They know they’re being naughty and are frightened about the consequences. Be nice to them!
Posted in Brighton & Hove Chess Club, Chess, Web Design