I started work as ARU ’s web manager on the last day of May. Since then I’ve gone through the usual round of introductions and getting to know the structure of a large organisation. It’s be...
I’m not sure how long The Guardian has been asking permission before displaying embedded Instagram posts, but I only noticed this today: Most websites would just display the embedded Instagra...
http://www.leonpaternoster.com/posts/guardian-requests-permission-for-instagram/
I’ve been writing an article about advertising online over the last couple of weekends. It’s a subject I’ve been interested in for years, and I can offer some perspective as we place lots o...
http://www.leonpaternoster.com/posts/focusing-articles-through-scaffolding/
I agree with this post from Mark Root-Wiley which argues that dropdown navigation menus are best activiated when a user clicks the link (or, correctly speaking, button) rather than hovers over i...
http://www.leonpaternoster.com/posts/hover-versus-click-versus-flat-navigation-menus/
My former colleague Alice was bemoaning the lack of a way of dropping various components into a page using her current CMS. She’s right, I think; you’d expect any modern CMS to allow editors...
How we think about the function of libraries in relation to other organisations that provide the same set of things can be complex. Especially when we consider the list of competitors, some of wh...
http://www.leonpaternoster.com/posts/libraries-as-alternative/
As you may or may not have noticed, I haven’t posted anything to this site in a while. That’s because leonpaternoster.com is really just a professional portfolio now. I was lucky enough t...
http://www.leonpaternoster.com/posts/au-revoir-auf-weidersehn/
DF has been going in hard on Apple Mail not blocking tracking pixels over the last week or so. The relationship between the providers of what we consume content with (browser and email client/se...
http://www.leonpaternoster.com/posts/marketing-without-tracking/
What price traditional visual branding? — Or rather, what value does carefully crafted branding have to users in a fluid, interactive medium where they want to do something? Where they feel in ...
I’ve been managing the Suffolk Libraries website for seven years, during which it’s been through three incarnations. The first two were built on standard PHP/MySQL database CMSs – WordPres...
How do we make web content that can last and be maintained for at least 10 years? asks Jeff Huang. Another back-to-basics post bemoaning the death of the web . Maybe I sound skeptical? I don’...
http://www.leonpaternoster.com/posts/building-a-web-that-lasts/
I’ve unhidden my skip link (as you may be able to see in the top right hand corner of the page). Why? Well, if you hide a link and neglect to reveal it on focus, keyboard navigators experience...
http://www.leonpaternoster.com/posts/hiding-things-on-web-pages/
We don’t read enough about the results of kiosk testing , maybe because people don’t kiosk test enough. But Thomas wrote an excellent post on some last minute tests on the MoMu website , shar...
http://www.leonpaternoster.com/posts/kiosk-testing-different-users-different-results/
Hidde de Vries posted some excellent thoughts on not bothering with complex CSS fallbacks for older browsers (in this case when using CSS grid): > I don’t think we owe it to any use...
http://www.leonpaternoster.com/posts/griddy-layouts-why-bother/
Many news and big blog sites have introduced onerous and confusing popovers since the introduction of GDPR in May. Unfortunately, this will no doubt result in GDPR banner blindness , where users...
Jekyll Tachyons is a starter theme for Jekyll that makes it easy to: get started on a Jekyll project using the Tachyons CSS framework remove unwanted Tachyons modules from your project, thereby ...
Original Sidney Paget illustration from The Man with the Twisted Lip I made a website from the 1892 Sherlock Holmes collection The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes . 12 stories, some of which you ...
http://www.leonpaternoster.com/posts/adventures-of-sherlock-holmes/
Heydon makes a good point about how we all, at some point during our day (or lives), need designers to make web pages accessible because we’re finding something difficult. We are all physicall...
Skinny Guardian was inspired by sites like CNN Lite and Thin NPR – news served with next to no styling. While this may sound (and look) unexciting I find a simple list of headlines an excell...
Although we’d like to develop products and services iteratively, the truth is organisations think in terms of strict deadlines, mainly because projects have finite budgets that have to be spent...