Welcome to the internet home of web designer, developer, pilot person and Cumbria dweller Dave Sparks.

Take time off

Since I started writing a post a week this year this is the first time I’m found myself without anything posted by Sunday. I had thought I’d write up something that’s already saved in a draft state, but I was late back from work and I’m at my mums and, here in the UK at least, it’s Mother’s Day.
So I’m doing what many people recommend all the time and what I certainly like to recommend to people, I’m having a break.

I’ve a busy week next week but I’ll make sure it isn’t a post-less one!

Getting started learning on the web

How do you get started with web design and development? It’s something I get asked a bit, often by people not necessarily looking at a career but looking to get to grips with the online world a bit better and start to do things for themselves.
There are two resources I point them at every time – Don’t fear the internet and Treehouse. So here’s a quick summary of what they are and why I recommend them.
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The web has made customer service so easy – stop messing it up

One of the great things about the web is the ease of communication, the ease of access it allows people to resources. Not just piles of data on Wikipedia but access to people and companies.
It has made customer service incredibly easy to do and yet so many organisations still do it badly. Some will complain that they are limited by budgetary constraints but customer service on the web is not just easy, it’s cheap.
I regularly take to twitter with my customer service issues and questions and its great when you get some dialogue and a question answered. It makes a huge difference to your perception of a brand and how much does it cost to set up a twitter account? Nothing. Ok admittedly you have to get someone to manage it but the setup cost is nothing.

But good customer service doesn’t start and end with twitter, so here are my major online customer service gripes and I’ll start with twitter.

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A quick CSS based “Back to top” link

You see these in plenty of places, especially with popular single page sites. A page where the menu is at the top in the header and as you scroll down a small “Back to top” link appears that whizzes you back to the top of the page and therefore back to the menu. Here’s a quick way I do it just using a bit of CSS, it might not work in every circumstance but it’s easy to do and can be modified quite easily. Continue reading

Revisiting HTML5 placeholder fixes

I had a detailed look at my analytics for the first time in a while and I noticed I pick up quite a bit of traffic from StackOverflow.com which was quite interesting. Digging further I had a look and found most of it is to the quick JQuery based HTML5 placeholder fix I posted a while ago.
As pointed out by some Stack Overflow commenters there are elements of the coding that are less than ideal so I thought I’d address them and see what can be done.
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