Tag Archive: Next


We’ve all dreamed of spending our working days reclinining back in a deck chair eating cheese sandwiches on an overcast summers day. But then we remember the mortgage/kids/wifes $500 a day drug habit and our fantasies turn to dust. It doesn’t have to be this way. Here at www.mindtap.co.uk we show in 5 easy steps how you can quit that lousy Graphic Design job and spend the rest of your life living in easy street.


Step 1: Think yourself in a better place and low and behold it will happen

This is your first step towards financial freedom. Imagine if you will yourself sat upon a huge pile of money, flinging it in the air with gay abandon and why not? Congratulations you’ve just made the first step towards making this a reality. Forget the graphic designer career you had mapped out. Let’s join the idle rich instead.


Step 2: Tell the boss what you think of him and burn those bridges!

Now its time to get some payback. Remember the time your design studio manager had you stay late and manually key in that 1oo page farming brochure text by hand and then laughed at you in your face? Right, we’ll show him who’s boss. A good way to be forcibly removed from the office and earn some extra kudos from your fellow graphic design employees is to take a dump and leave it festering away in a drawer in the bosses desk.Just wait for his reaction when he smells that sick stunt. You’re history.


Step 3: When you hit rock bottom the only way is up, up and away

No job = No money right? Wrong you putz. How do you think the tramps and beggars fill there days outside sainsburys? That’s right – drinking and robbing. It isn’t absolutely necessary to pick up a drink and drug habit at this stage but it isn’t going to harm your chances of success. Now would also be a good opportunity to get rid of the other half if you happen to have one. A spot of domestic violence after hitting the bottle is usually enough encouragement. Hey Presto, one more tiresome burdon off your back!


Step 4: Remember keep your vision and your dreams will come true

At every stage in this degenerate journey, never lose sight of that image we visuallised in step one of yourself sitting astride a huge pile of banknotes. They can take away your dignity but not your dreams. After several years of eeking out a living as a street bum its time to get this show on the road. Think hard about your previous day to day life, was there someone in your remote family or circle of friends who had a large stash of cash readily disposable? It’s time to pay them a visit with cap in hand.


Step 5: Invest wisely and you can say hello to a life of wanton abandon

Now after securing your large sum of cash from your chosen aquaintence, its prudent not to blow it all in one go on 200ft gold statues of yourself or buying an amusement park complete with zoo. No, you don’t want to be going back to the nine to five graphic design day job do you? There are a thousand ways to invest your cash so that it will sit pretty and continue giving you a steady stream or revenue for a long time. Property for example is ‘as safe as houses’ or maybe put it all in a high interest savings account. It’s taken a long time to reach your goal and hopefully the pain, ill health and loneliness have been worth it.

New innovations in the mobile phone industry, such as 3G technologies and new handsets such as the iPhone, have led to an increase in so-called WAP website design. Small, low resolution screens, clunky interfaces, inadequate navigation and slow connection speeds are a thing of the past with this next generation of mobiles, and a shift in the way many companies look at the use of mobile web. But the question remains: How will this affect the future of web design?

The mirroring of traditional design values with those for WAP are clear in more areas than one. For instance, many of the optimisation tactics deployed in desktop sites also apply here. The submission of a mobile sitemap to search engines, well-positioned key content, outbound linking, adding your URL to directories and business listings, as well as keyword-rich page titles and metadata are essential for indexing purposes. Designers must ensure that their site’s navigation is easy to crawl through and efficiently coded.

Layout is as much an essential component of design with mobile Internet as it is with traditional mediums – clear, crisp and concise. The use of Flash for instance should be avoided, as long loading times are considered an absolute no-no in mobile designs. Creative flourishes like this need should be eliminated as user experience is key.

Wap designs must conform to the W3C’s mobile standards, which could mean anything from the creation of WAP-friendly CSS style sheets to the correct rendering of tables and images. These guidelines are fundamental in not only ensuring that web sites crossover successfully to the WAP platform, but also in search engine optimisation, as the search engines develop their algorithms around these standards, and getting indexed will hinge upon complying with W3C.

Using a WML, XHTML or CHTML mark-up language is the best way of ensuring that your mobile device can ‘read’ your site. The correct use of these codes is essential to guarantee that the spiders can index your web pages and go some way to securing healthy search rankings.

So what about the next gen of phones then, such as the iPhone? What is apparent is that the high resolution screens of these models enable a more visual experience for the user, meaning more symmetry between WAP and desktop Internet. These handsets are able to display what is in essence the full, ‘normal’ Internet. Some popular websites, such as Facebook, are even modified when loaded through these handsets to present a slightly-watered down, but essentially the same experience.

According to recent research by the end of the year in excess of one billion people will carry handsets that are capable of providing exceptional, next generation browsing. Now is the time for web design Solihull to implement WAP-accessibility and functionality in their sites to take advantage of this booming industry.