With game-style achievements, of course!

I’ve previously touched on the fact that I have the attention span of a mentally subnormal goldfish, and lately I’ve once again found myself overwhelmed with ideas for personal projects that I will probably only get done once someone in charge makes 10 extra hours in each day official. Last week, I heard the best and most obvious suggestion for sorting myself out that I have probably ever heard.

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For me and My Man (I’ve been banned from calling him The Boy), 2009 was the year of lettings websites. We must have looked at hundreds of properties on sites ranging from irritating to completely unusable, and never managed to find a single site that did it all. Local or national companies, it made no difference. They all sucked!

The internet is the perfect medium for house-hunting. You can see more information than in a newspaper ad and view endless images (provided the agent has actually taken some). It should be an enjoyable experience, but it’s not.

Both being webby types, of course, there was much discussion over “this form is quite nice, shame about the results” as well as “this place is a bit more expensive, but look the walls are painted green!”. This inevitably led to the conclusion that if we ever got the opportunity, we would build the best property lettings/sales website in the entire world.

“They can’t be that bad” I hear you cry, “She’s exaggerating!”. You think so? Read on for some examples that may very well give you nightmares.
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When I built my first ever website, I didn’t design it. I knew what I wanted the main colours to be, and through trial and error with CSS eventually came up with something I quite liked. It was hideous, of course, but I wasn’t to know.

A lot of your design ability will come through practise and research, knowing what is “in” and knowing what will always look good. However, if you’re just starting out and don’t quite have a hold on the nuances, here are a few things to consider.
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My latest client project was to use Wordpress, and needed a forum to match. I’ve used phpBB and Wordpress together previously but it did leave something to be desired, so I set off in search of something a bit more integrated.

Soon I stumbled upon bbPress, the forum by Automattic (the Wordpress guys) and the same one used for the WP support forums. This was definitely going to be easy. Keep Reading