I have three that I regularly look at and all three for different reasons.

Firstly, the BBC has also had a pretty nice website, Functional and easy to navigate.  They really stepped it up a notch when the redesigned the Formula one page to coincide with BBC taking the event from ITV.  Their World Cup page hasn’t quite matched the sleek design of the F1 section but the functionality and ease of use is second to none.

You can easily navigate between the main news section, a full overview of groups and fixtures and a day by day results section.  This makes it very easy to see the exact piece of information you are looking for.

Next up is the excellent oval site at Marca.com.  Marca is the leading Spanish sports daily newspaper and I doubt their website has had as many hits as it has over the last 4 weeks.   Surprisingly for a news site, this page has no news on it.  All it does is show information according to round, team, schedule and stadium.

The way it does it though is something special.  Using flash in a very very pretty way, you can see all this information with just a mouse hover over the correct section.  Hovering over the outer ring of each section fills the gap with a relevant round up or map of that particular topic.

So they are both very useful in their own way for looking up current and past events, but what about the future?  Worldcupchart.com has a very nice predictor that allows you to put in your own results to see how the World Cup folds out in your view.

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This is great for plotting out the route your team will take to the final.

Google had planned to add a full page background picture, one that changes daily, to highlight their latest ‘customisable’ options.  This also seemed another step for Google to look even more like Bing.  The Googlers backlash started from minute one with angry Twitter users opposing the change.  Google reacted a few hours later and the familiar plain white homepage was returned.

Marissa Mayer, Google Search Vice President said, “”We had planned to run an explanation of the showcase alongside it, in the form of a link on our home page,” Marissa continued “Due to a bug, the explanatory link did not appear for most users. As a result, many people thought we had permanently changed our home page.”

For those of you, which includes me that actually LIKED the change you don’t need to worry.  Look for the ‘Change background image’ link in the bottom left of the screen.  You will need to be signed in to see this; also, if you’re in iGoogle you will need to revert back to classic view.

There are 4 different options to choose from.

‘From my computer’ is pretty obvious with the ability to upload your own image as long as it is larger than the 800×600 pixel minimum.

‘My Picasa Web photos’ simply allows you to use the images you have uploaded to the Google Web Album, assuming they are big enough to use.

‘Public gallery’ is again fairly straight forward with a range of optimized images from Google.  They range from an Umbrella to your usually cityscape\Forest scenes.  The sort of thing you see on wall art in high street stores.  My favourite is the smiley post-it-note on a plain wall.  It’s fun and unobtrusive and can cheer you up.

The last section ‘editor’s picks’ is not too much different to the previous section but whoever the ‘editor’ is must really love colour.  They are pretty crazy.  There is a lovely rainbow over a forest and also a really quaint looking aerial English Countryside scene.  You can also choose from a few plain colour backgrounds.

Of course, you can always just use the search function until you find one that suits your style.

The changes arrived as promised. Dubbed “Google Jazz” by web experts, the new design closely resembles Microsoft’s newly re-branded ‘Bing’ search engine.  Last June Microsoft re-branded the ‘Live Search Service’ to ‘Bing’ and its tag-line ‘decision engine’.  A large advertising campaign has followed.  It contained a left hand nav and a more graphic interface.

This may have been the reason for the redesign from Google that includes everything including the logo.  The logo now features brighter blue, red, and green and is now showing in a standard font without the logo and shadowing.  The left hand side nav has been added that allows for differing search features and filters.  Each individual option then opens for a wider range of settings within.  This is sure to help the reader’s fine tune their searches.

This is now the third time in three years that Google has redesigned and this time it appears to have had the purpose of making the vast set of search filtering tools more available to the everyday googler.

Picnik was originally started back in 2005 and has been a great alternative for those not wanting to invest in Photoshop and with two million US visitors monthly wanting to edit their photos and with the easy integration into social networks via Facebook or MySpace it is no wonder that Google saw its potential.

In a statement on Picnik’s blog “Google processes petabytes of data every day, and with their worldwide infrastructure and world-class team, it is truly the best home we could have found. Under the Google roof we’ll reach more people than ever before, impacting more lives and making more photos more awesome.”

Google have stated that there have no immediate plans to change anything and that the service will continue to support existing partners although Yahoo’s Flickr might have different thoughts…

If you haven’t tried Picnik then I suggest you take some photos and upload them and see what you can create.

When designing a site you want all people that visit your site to see it the same which is why IE6 has been subject to a lot of hacks.  Google recently announced that they would join other browsers and no longer support IE6.  Googles shift coincides with a lot of problems concerning compatibility and outdated technology and was/is a concern for general security and stability.

The most relevant incompatibility issue of concern now is the start of HTML5.  HTML5 is going to be big for web designers and open a lot of functionality that designers want to get their hands on to build new innovative design.
So with these concerns why are people still using such an outdated browser, there are two main reasons:-

1. Standard browser for XP, which is widely used.
2. Some people don’t update

IE6 was originally released on 27th August 2001 and in 2003 IE held 95% of the market, but in 2004 Mozilla Firefox was released being a better browser for the end user and IE lost a lot of users.

Since then we have seen the release of Chrome, Google’s browser, which has encouraged Firefox, IE and smaller browsers step up to the faster running speeds, nicer overall search and general ease of use.

Do you think this will mean the end of IE, when Google’s goes ahead with its plan cease support?

These new structural elements include:

• <header>
  The header element contains introductory information to a section or page. This can involve anything from our normal documents headers (branding information) to an entire table of contents.
• <nav>
  The nav element is reserved for a section of a document that contains links to other pages or links to sections of the same page. Not all link groups need to be contained within the <nav> element, just primary navigation.
• <section>
  The section element represents a generic document or application section. It acts much the same way a <div> does by separating off a portion of the document.
• <article>
  The article element represents a portion of a page which can stand alone such as: a blog post, a forum entry, user submitted comments or any independent item of content.
• <aside>
  Aside, represents content related to the main area of the document. This is usually expressed in sidebars that contain elements like related posts, tag clouds, etc. They can also be used for pull quotes.
• <footer>
  The footer element is for marking up the footer of, not only the current page, but each section contained in the page. So, it’s very likely that you’ll be using the <footer> element multiple times within one page.

These new elements show that it is simply a case of replacing our current div elements with named tags. Sounds easy and its true.

The other positive from these new structural elements is the inclusion of being allowed to duplicate the tags. For instance, the <footer> element can be used to finish the content structure and also to finish the main page wrap tag if you have one.

HTML 5 is going to be an exciting change within the design/development industry and the days are counting down to when we can utilise it to its full potential.

Since the introduction of Apple’s first iPhone, and companies like Google with their Android platform it has become possible to forget about the “mobile version” (formats like WAP) and just design for HTML instead. Is this really the case though? What else do we need to consider?

The likes of google, ebay, facebook, etc. have mobile-specific sites which are designed and developed with the small screen in mind with more rapid loading time, and a more compact interface.  However mobile devices can support all the usual elements of  a standard HTML site, headers, p tags, lists and images but when we move into the realms of Flash and Java then the problems begin.

With this in mind how can a site that has Flash, Java still be accessible? The answer might have just been revealed – the new iPhone 3.0 OS firmware works on all current hardware and supports HTML5 – as  will the next Palm Pre update and Android firmware.

The new version of HTML (HTML 5) allows for new ways to tween page elements potentially making Flash redundant for the more basic functions. Little additions like this just help to improve user experience and don’t require a massive amount of work.

There is a good reason why Apple pushes these new features of the HTML  standard – and a good reason why all the other big browser  manufacturers are getting on board with HTML5. The reason is that we can do it all in HTML+CSS now – we just don’t *need* Flash anymore -  and all the issues which follow. We can deliver rich content  using nothing more than the browser itself.

Developing for these pocket-internet devices is becoming less of a  chore these days and eventually  it may even be the case that we design  a site once and it will work on anything, PC and mobile devices alike.

So what design trends are emerging?

Large Font Face
One of the first things I have noticed is everything is bigger. We are starting to see larger typography. This is emerging from personal portfolios, agencies and product websites. To put in perspective how big font has become I have seen many sites where font size exceeds 36px/em. Big font started to emerge late in 2008 and I predict it will continue for 2009.

Embedding Font Face
With the emergence of CSS3 and the possibility that IE8 may be reconfigured to support CSS3 elements, embedding font face into the style sheet has become popular. It is allowing designers to use some beautiful fonts that accompany their website and with the use of PNG transparency it is changing the way fonts are being used in web development.

PNG Transparency
Although Internet Explorer 6 does not support transparent imagery among many other things, by using the CSS filter element (which we can show you if you wish) allows for a consistent use of the PNG. As a result, transparent images are becoming more popular within designs today and are often used as a way of highlighting or promoting headers, advertising messages or important content within the site. Many sites use PNG transparency to achieve an ‘editorial look’ and often sit the PNG over a background image to emphasise the copy placed above the PNG.

Rich User Interfaces
Online stores, ecommerce web designs and product sites that adopt a WEB2.0 design are now developing stronger and richer colour palettes.  With new monitors and greater resolutions resulting in greater colour depth, designers are taking advantage and producing richer interfaces where appropriate. A great way to provide depth and an overall stronger appearance to your design is to simply flatten your PSD and apply a level and brightness/contrast . If you do this you will see a dramatic change to your work, the blacks will be blacker and the whites will be whiter. If you do this, please make sure to keep a backup of your design!