Today, like many others, I still play ‘fantasy’ but this time in an online virtual world called World of Warcraft (playing a Mage) whereby I do quests and battle demons.

Unfortunately, the demons within the game are rather difficult to defeat, even with the aid of nine other players. So some players of Warcraft have taken it upon themselves to write tactical guides on how to complete the task.

One of the better Warcraft guides’ websites out there is Icy Veins.com. I’ve been a Twitter follower of theirs for a while now, so when I checked my email I was pleasantly surprised to find I’ve been sent one from the webmasters of Icy Veins requesting web design help.

I immediately said ‘Yes’.

I thought it would be a nice challenge for myself and also my way of paying back the webmasters for their hard work and efforts on the guides.

There were two main concerns the webmasters wanted me to concentrate on:

1. Content navigation
2. Guide navigation

The webmasters also asked for any other web design advice regarding the usability and experience of the site.

Over the course of two weekends (this was a part time project), I analysed the Icy Veins website with the two key concerns in mind and I wrote a report identifying the issues that I thought needed addressing as well as making recommendations that needed correcting.

1. Initially, the main content navigation was arranged in an illogical order, which could have frustrated users looking for specific content. Also the layout of the drop-down mega-menus were cluttered and not spaced in a grid like arrangement which can give the appearance of looking messy, it was also hard to read.

2. The webmasters felt their users were not using the guides as effectively as they could be. They had already been proactive to the problem by creating a guide menu navigation box and they wanted my advice on what would be the best way to display this. I recommended two things: one, place the box on the left hand side rather than the right due to the F-Model and advert association; the menu would be more visible to the users.

The other recommendation was to display the menu in a + and – accordion arrangement (clicking the + symbol would expand a sub-heading, clicking – would collapse the sub-heading). This would save space because total height of the content menu can get quite big.

The other web design advice I gave was mainly cosmetic.

The feedback from the webmasters and the Icy Vein users has been overwhelmingly positive, which is a pleasure to hear. Users of the website are finding the information they need more easily, the user experience has increased and the Likes, Followers and +1’s have also increased, much to the delight of the webmasters.

It’s been a great little project to work on and I wish the webmasters continuing success.

Below, you will find a gallery of mock-ups that I sent to the webmasters of Icy Veins to help illustrate what I was referring to in my reports. Full descriptions are in each photo.

© Copyright 2012 Michael Oglesby / Icy Veins.com

Now here is your chance!

In partnership with Sainsbury’s (Queen Street, Norwich), SnappySnaps® and London Camera Exchange, we are sponsoring a Photography Competition in aid of Norwich City community Sports Foundation’s Sporting Light Appeal charity.

Do you think your image has what it takes to win? If so, why don’t you submit your photo?

The top prize is a studio session with SnappySnaps plus an A1 canvas print with many runner up prizes. Entry is £2 per photograph for adults, £1 per photograph for under 17’s and you can enter as many photos as you like. Entry forms can be picked up from:

1. Sainsbury’s, 1 Brazen Gate, Norwich, NR1 3RX
2. SnappySnaps, 3 St Stephen Street, Norwich, NR1 3QL
3. London Camera Exchange, 12 Timber Hill, Norwich, NR1 3LB

Best of luck

My involvement in the project was to design the promotional poster.

Well, you’ll would be half right. Norfolk Constabulary have made a short film to promote their new state-of-the-art arrest custody centres, called Police Investigation Centres or PIC for short (pronounced ‘pic’) and I star in the film as ‘Ben Gardiner’, the main perpetrator.

The film is a journey of the arrest and custody process through the eyes of Ben Gardiner. Ben has been formally arrested for burglary and he is transported to a PIC to be charged and processed. There, he will have his biometrics taken (photo, DNA and fingerprints) and interviewed before being formerly charged and placed in a police cell. The short film was produced in-house by the Norfolk Constabulary’s digital media team.

Press coverage

Eastern Daily Press

Police Oracle

©2011 Norfolk Constabulary. Used with permission. www.norfolk.police.uk/custody

But so what?

The secret to selling a tablet isn’t with the hardware; it’s with the software applications or ‘Apps’ which are available for the device. If the tablet doesn’t have an extensive library of Apps available, so a user can install and enhance their user experience, the tablet won’t sell and it will eventually fail. You don’t want to spend a small fortune on a tablet only to find there are a handful of Apps for it right?

It is simple as that.

Some people might be happy with just the standard applications that the tablet comes with, but, if I was going to spend a couple hundred pounds or more on a new tablet, I know I would want to use it to its full potential, wouldn’t you?

So, if you are considering buying a tablet in the near future, don’t concern yourself too much with the devices’ hardware, find out what applications are available for the tablet and more importantly, how you access them.

The two biggest app stores on the market today are: Apple’s App Store for the iOS devices and Google’s Android Market for Android base tablet devices. If possible, you should check out each App store to see if it offers the right kind of Apps for you and at a price you are willing to pay.

The Apple iTunes Store can be access via the iTunes software. The Google Android Market can be accessed via a web browser.

I wouldn’t considering any other tablet that isn’t running either one of these operating systems; otherwise, you could end up with a very expensive paperweight.

The Harbour Centre is a venture between Norfolk Constabulary and NHS Great Yarmouth. To bring awareness to the Centre, I was task to design and construct the website, but due to the dark nature of the subject, the brief was to keep the aesthetics simple and pleasing.

It only took 3 weeks from start to finish to complete the project and the website is W3C compliant, meets accessibility, as well as working in all major browsers including Internet Explorer 6.

digg.com

The list is:

Apple iMac / MacOS X
Apple iPhone
Apple iTunes / iPod
WordPress
Facebook
Twitter
Amazon Prime
World of Warcraft
Online Banking
Adobe PhotoShop
Adobe Dreamweaver
XTorrent

…and a good old fashion notepad and pen.

Upon reflection, that’s a lot of products or is it? I am also shocked on the amount of Apple products listed; maybe it’s a testament on how good their products really are.

On the flip side, I thought that it would be fun to list the products I ‘can’ live without:

Apple iPad
Internet Explorer, especially version 6!
Microsoft Windows
AppleTV
3D Films/TV
Blackberry Phones

Why don’t you make your own list and see how many we have in common, or scare yourself on how many products you can’t live without.

Interactive Media Award

The Interactive Media Awards “…recognise the highest standards of excellence in website design and development and honour individuals and organizations for their outstanding achievement.” as quoted from their website and it is a worldwide recognised award.

I can’t take all the credit as the Norfolk Constabulary website was a team effort. For those involved on the project, I can honestly say that we’ve put a lot of hard work and love into the website and winning an award like the IMA just makes all that effort worthwhile.

This would be my second IM Award that I have been a part of; my first one was for the Office of Government Commerce website that was constructed in 2007.

My colleagues and I accepting our nomination certificate

Background
When I was asked to co-attend this year’s IoIC Awards 2010 (Institute of Internal Communications) by my client Norfolk Constabulary, I was overjoyed. The IoIC Awards, which was known as the CiB Awards, is a yearly event whereby awards are given for recognition for outstanding work for internal communications.

WordPress is one of the most popular Content Management Systems (CMS) on the Internet today, but doing Research and Development (R&D) work on the platform can be problematic at best. The reason being is any R&D that you do on a Live WordPress platform has a potential risk of bringing your website down. So, what do you do if you want to create a new theme or test a new plugin to see if it meets your needs?

Well, you can install WordPress locally on your Apple Mac so that you can play around with the platform to your heart’s content. Luckily, there is a solution available where you don’t need to install and configure the Apache, PHP and MySQL packages on your Mac.

Process

1. To begin with, you need to download the WordPress CMS and an application called MAMP. MAMP or ‘Macintosh, Apache, MySQL and PHP’ is an all-in-one application solution where it turns your Apple Mac into a local ‘web server’. Like what the name says, it provides the three most popular open source software applications for your Mac. No installation or configuration of Apache, MySQL and PHP is needed.

2. Once the MAMP application has downloaded, open the .dmg file and drag the MAMP folder to your application folder. For convenience, you should also place the MAMP icon in your Dock (it’s inside the MAMP folder). Double-click the MAMP application to start the web services. When all the green lights in the Status window appear, your Mac is now a local web server. A web browser should also automatically launch displaying the ‘Start page’ for MAMP. This is where you control the MySQL and PHP functions, we come to those later.

3. Locate a folder called ‘htdocs’ inside the MAMP folder. This is where you place files that you want to excute on your local web server. Unzip the WordPress ZIP file that you downloaded earlier and move or copy the files from within the WordPress folder to the ‘htdocs’ folder.

4. OK, your local web server is now up and running, the WordPress files are installed, all you need to do now is create a MySQL database for WordPress and you are done. This is the hardest part to accomplish, but follow these instructions and you will be fine. You need to go to the MAMP ‘Start Page’ web page; launch the MAMP application and click the ‘Open start page’ button (if you already don’t have it open from Step 2). Click the ‘phpMyAdmin’ navigation button which enters you to the MySQL administration screen. Find the ‘Create new database’ field and enter a name for the WordPress database. In this tutorial, I’ve called it ‘wordpressdb’.

Click the ‘Create’ button. You should get a confirmation message saying that the database has been created. Don’t worry about creating tables for the database, the WordPress set up procedure will do that for you.

5. Go to your web browser and type ‘http://localhost:8888/‘ into the address bar.

6. You should get an error saying that the WordPress configuration file hasn’t been set up and you need to create one. Luckily, there is a sample given within the WordPress download. Go to the ‘htdocs’ folder within the MAMP folder and find the ‘wp-config-sample.php’ file. Right-click on the file and select ‘Open With’ and then select the Text Edit application. The PHP file should open in Text Edit. You can use any other text editor of your choosing if you wish.

7. Within the PHP file, you need to enter some details that enables WordPress to find and access the database that you’ve just created in Step 4. The database name, as given in this tutorial, is ‘wordpressdb’, and the user name and password by default for MAMP is ‘root’ (yes, they are same for both). So, within the PHP file:

• replace ‘putyourdbnamehere’ with ‘wordpressdb’,
• replace ‘usernamehere’ with ‘root’
• replace ‘yourpasswordhere’ with ‘root’

Once you have done that, select Save As… and save as ‘wp-content.php’ making sure that the file is being saved in the ‘htdocs’ folder. You should have some similar as the screenshot below:

8. Go back to your web browser and go to ‘http://localhost:8888/‘. As you can see, WordPress has been installed and is up and running. All you need to do now is go through the normal final set up procedure and that’s it, WordPress is installed locally on your Mac.

Notes

• MAMP does not start up automatically when you log in; you need to start the services each time. You can place the MAMP application in your Login items if you wish.

* Special thanks goes to James for discovering MAMP for me, and this tutorial is dedicated to Heidi P.

Although MacOS X is an extremely secure operating system from hackers when you are using the Internet, the physical computer itself is not that secure. Files can be easily transferred off your Mac if someone has direct access to your machine and also if they have with them another Mac computer and a Firewire cable.

So, how do you secure your files? How can you secure your files so that only you can access to them? Fear not. MacOS X gives you the tools or tool in this tutorial, to do this “right out the box” as Steve Jobs often says. In this tutorial, I will show you how to create a secure directory, so that you can place your important files and other related documents securely away.

You can instead, if you wish, encrypt your entire home directory using FileVault; this function is located in the Security System Preference. Personally, I see some disadvantages with using FileVault, the biggest being that you are unable to store your encrypted files on a memory key for added security, more on that later.

Process

1. The tool that we are going to use, to create a secure directory, is called Disk Utility. It is located in the Applications > Utilities folder. We don’t actually create a secure directory as per say, but more a ‘virtual’ directory. In fact we create an encrypted disk image volume where we can save the files and documents we want to secure away. It’s the same principle as File Vault, but you have more control.

2. Launch the Disk Utility application if you haven’t done so already. We use this application to create a new disk volume image. Click on ‘New Image’ in the toolbar.

3. You will be presented with the usual ‘Save As’ dialog box, but with a few added options. Save the image something like “Important Files” and select where you would like to save the image.

4. There are various options to choose from. The first one, Volume Name, is what you would like the volume to be called when you mount the disk image, name this whatever you like. Volume Size is the size of the image that you would like to create. For added security, you can save the image on a memory stick later and keep in a safe place. Select a size that suits your needs. If you run out of room in the image, you will have to create a larger image at a later date. Volume Format you should leave as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) unless there is a specific reason why you should choose another.

5. The next option is Encryption. As stated in the application, you can choose 256-Bit encryption if you wish, but it will be slower. Pick the one that suits you best.

6. The last two options, Partitions should read ‘Single partition – Apple Partition Map’ and Image Format should read ‘read/write disk image’. This makes you able to read and write files to the image file. You should have a dialog box similar to the one below in the image:

7. When you are happy with your settings, click Create. Because we choose to encrypt the image, Disk Utility will ask you for a password. Insert a password that is going to be strong as displayed by the password strength indicator.

DO NOT FORGET YOUR PASSWORD!!! If you forget your password, tuff. There is no way of retrieving the data; it’s gone, it’s lost, it’s gone the way of the bit, bye bye, you’re SOL (shit out of luck). So choose a password carefully, but not stupidly, like your middle name etc.

Also, make sure that the check box for the ‘Remember password in my keychain’ is UNCHECKED (why this feature is here I’ll never know). We don’t want the password being stored on your computer.

8. Once you clicked ‘OK’, the disk image will be saved to your computer to the location that you specified earlier and the virtual disk will mount on your Desktop ready for use. Then it’s just a simple process of copying the files that you want to secure away on to the virtual disk. Once you have copied the files over, you can delete the originals off your hard disk.

9. When you have finished, drag the virtual disk to the trash to ‘eject’ the disk, therefore unmounting the image.

10. When you want to use the virtual disk again, just double-click the image. It will ask you for the password for the image. Once successful, the virtual disk will then mount on your Desktop as before.

11. For added security, you could save the disk image on to a memory stick. Then you can store the memory stick somewhere that is not near your computer and only insert the memory stick when you want to access your files.