Blog

  • Wrapping text around irregular images

    January 04 2010 | Jake Liddell

    Quick JS fix for a painfully dull task - wrapping text around an image that is irregular in shape.

  • Online Marketing Links

    January 04 2010 | Jake Liddell

    A few links to various types of online marketing tools.

  • Microsoft provides guidance on Azure pricing

    October 26 2009 | Jake Liddell

    Microsoft has announced prices for Azure, it’s cloud hosting offering.

    Users will be charged $0.12 per hour for computation, and $0.15 per GB for storage.  There will also be charges for SQL Azure and .NET services.

  • RNIB provide advice on making Flash banners accessible

    January 28 2009 | Jake Liddell

    The Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB) have provided guidance on how to make flash banners (the typical animated adverts that you see all over the web) accessible to those using screen readers.

  • Microsoft announce delay for IE 8

    December 06 2008 | Jake Liddell

    Delays to IE8 mean more dev time for new CSS layouts

  • Towards a new time-money ratio

    November 18 2008 | Jake Liddell

    Shaking up the traditional consultancy model brings added value to clients and helps consultancies to secure incomes. Jake Liddell, director of Four Hats Ltd, presents three innovative new approaches.

  • Scrolling along

    September 03 2007 | Jake Liddell

    One of the most common requests from clients early on in the design process is to avoid scrolling on pages.  This is a pretty outdated requirement, yet the myth perpetuates.

  • Speed still a critical driver

    June 12 2007 | Jake Liddell

    A survey by hosting company 1&1 Internet has found that 52% of respondents experience ‘web rage’ as a result of slow websites.

  • Free Accessibility Training

    May 14 2007 | Jake Liddell

    The Open University have put a number of short modular courses online, with free access for everyone.

  • New article published on The-ChiefExecutive.com

    April 12 2007 | Jake Liddell

    A new article has been published on The Chief Executive website, highlighting the pitfalls of the consultancy model, and suggesting some differing approaches to solving them.

  • The customer seems to be rarely right

    March 28 2007 | Jake Liddell

    I was working in the City the other day, and had need of one of those small-to-large USB cables, the type that allow you to attach your mobile and charge it from a PC, or transfer data between the two.  I always carry one around, but must have left it somewhere.  It was frustrating, because I knew I had loads of them at home (what with two adults going through two phones a year, and numerous other pocket-pc and games devices each coming bundled with one).  But this was holding me up, so I went out to buy one.  Easy, simple, cheap, I thought to myself.

  • Think about the customer!

    March 14 2007 | Jake Liddell

    I was recently on a business trip to Basel, in Switzerland.  All work, no play of course, but I did get a moment to sit in the sun, enjoy a cold beer and browse the local paper.  There were a number of adverts for German lessons, two of which caught my eye.

  • The median isn’t the message

    February 05 2007 | Jake Liddell

    Browsing around the website of Edward Tufte, ("The Leonardo da Vinci of data”, according to the New York Times) I came across a fascinating essay by another ground-breaking chap, Stephen J Gould.

  • Microsoft “improves” html support for e-mails

    January 30 2007 | Jake Liddell

    Microsoft have announced the somewhat surprising news that they’re taking out the Internet Explorer based rendering that Outlook 2003 used for displaying html in e-mails, and replacing it with the Word2007 html rendering engine.  We were all hoping that they’d actually be updating it with the IE version 7 rendering, which is much improved.  What they’ve done instead has been described as “breaking HTML rendering in Outlook 2007”.

  • I can see clearly now

    January 26 2007 | Jake Liddell

    I’ve just switched PCs, and was wondering what was funny with all the fonts.  For some reason, websites just weren’t looking as good as usual.  Our own website font looked fine at large sizes, but the smaller body text looked sort of scratchy, and the contrast between the text and the links was poor.  Not good.  What was wrong?

  • Multiple IEs on one machine - easy life!

    January 16 2007 | Jake Liddell

    OK, so I’m sure you’re all going to respond “Like, that’s so last week!”, but maybe this will help someone.  It certainly would have helped me, had I not just discovered it for myself only 10 minutes ago!

  • Disaster Recovery: A Triumph of Hope Over Experience

    December 13 2006 | Jake Liddell

    According to a report published by the Institute of Directors (IoD) and Dell, small and medium businesses, or SMEs, as they’re known, are chancing to luck when it comes to the business of continuity and disaster recovery.

  • Blink!

    October 10 2006 | Jake Liddell

    Welcome to our webs… Oops, too late!  If you haven’t made a good impression in 50 milliseconds, your bird has already flown somewhere else.  So researchers in Carleton University of Ottowa have concluded.