We all know what a word like table refers to? We all visualise a chair if you say the word. What do you visualise when you are told the word myfocus123? It’s about as meaningful as calling a CSS element Derek - actually that could be more meaningful. When it comes to naming your CSS it is a key to give meaningful names.

We’ve all heard the phrase “Honesty is the best policy”, but how much awareness do you take to this when designing? More and more, I find myself coming back to the points of silent design and websites that ‘just work’ being a key to most online successful projects. The basic policy of honesty is being true to yourself of course and not doing anything your morals say is wrong. You can take this a step further and focus on your design ’self’ and being honest to that. I’m not really talking about when referring to honesty of design and function, the areas such as ripping another’s work. I think it’s safe to say the mass consensus is this isn’t honest or good designer practice. Really, the ‘honesty’ I am referring to here links more into the brief, the design subject and the market.

I know I was a bit amiss last week but I’m slowly getting over the hospital treatment and getting back in the game. I still have to find out what the infection did in the long term (and the small matter of getting rid of it as I still have it apparently) but things are slowly getting back to normal. Anyway, back to webspiration….

Last week I wrote ‘putting users in the driving seat’ and focused on ways you can give users control over your site. I was rightfully picked up on a few points by Natalie Jost responded to my post with ‘Users gain freedom in a designer keeping control’. Whilst, we differ slightly on our opinions and agree on some, there is a bit of clarification needed on my prior post so this is about taking that idea and elaborating.

A while ago the ultimate in making your users feel in control of the site was a welcome message on sign in. It’s spiralled from those days to sites where the complete look, format and even what it does is controlled by the user. You can conceivably have as many different user pages as there are users, you could have elements users can choose if they display them or not - the possibiliites are nearly endless. Thinking of your users less like dumb test cases and more like real people with real wants and giving them the ability and respect to make their own decisions, has been proven time and time again to benefit sites.

Before I do the webspiration for this week I’d like to announce I’ve started a more personal blog in the form of a tumblr, it’s going to be integrated into this blog more at some point but for now you can visit through clicking karmatosed. I am going to be reworking some of the categories over here and this seems a really good way to take what was being done in espresso but keep this blog for main posts. I love the format of tumblr and will be writing more about it in the next few weeks.