Alan Coleman

About this site

I've been involved in Web Development for several years now. Nothing has changed since day one, I’m still as fascinated with the place now as I was back in 2000.

History

I registered alancoleman.com in the late nineties simply because I thought it would be useful at some time in the future to have my own domain name. At that point my understanding of the web extended little further than basic surfing using Hotbot on the old beige coloured Macs. I remember thinking that it was a canny business move, which is laughable.

Nothing happened with my domain name for a year or so until I started learning about coding and web technologies at college in 2000. Within days of our first HTML lesson I’d managed to build a home page and successfully upload it to a web server. It didn’t matter that it was a ridiculously big Flash file or that there was no content, more important was the sense of empowerment and potential in what seemed like a personal media channel. I remember thinking that, for the next few years at least, the web would be a big thing in my life.

Design

My earlier attempts at designing for the web suffered all the usual mistakes that have since been heavily documented. It was all there, over reliance on images and chunky flash animations undermined with general bad code practices. The thing is, I was having a great time making embossed buttons in Photoshop, did I really care what Jakob Neilson thought? After a while I found myself creating more content, which in turn made demands on ease of upload for myself and navigation for the user. This lead to a shift in design ideas towards simply presented and accessible text based layouts. These changes have also been influenced by the adoption of standards based design.

My latest design for the front page comes from a recent interest in trees, I wanted the theme to be a little more organic, or just less contrived than my previous ideas. The CSS layout should make for an easy swap to a different theme at a later date.

Technology

I moved very quickly from clunky framesets and <font> tags towards a more standards based approach to coding. This has made for lighter and more semantic markup that formats more consistently across various platforms and browsers. The use of CSS has had the desired effect of separating content from presentation, again making the markup cleaner and more efficient.

I started using XHTML at the beginning of 2005 as a nod towards forward compatibility. On the whole it validates okay, although I've had some issues with characters drawn from databases, I hope to sort this out in 2006.

In an attempt to make the site more dynamic, both in terms of content management and user experience, I started coding as much as possible using PHP and MySQL. This move has proved to be a mile stone in terms of developing personal skills as well as pages that are consistent and easily editable. On a day to day basis it has allowed the focus to shift towards content, and away from the tedium of HTML and FTP.