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Two Kats and a Cow whose website was designed, developed and hosted by Hobo, won first prize in the category of Best Local Arts Website in the Brighton Web Awards 2007.

Credit for this award goes to the fantastic efforts of the artists at Two Kats and a Cow who manage the content and direction of their site entirely by themselves using Hobo's Plone-based content management system.

Brighton Craft Fair, an exhibition of works from 100 of the UK's best designer-makers, opens to the public on Friday 23rd November 2007. Hobo sponsor the Craft Fair and its sister event the Brighton Art Fair by developing and hosting the websites.

If last year's event was anything to go by this year's fair will be well worth a visit and if you can't afford to buy any craft works (some of which are on sale for over £1000) then why not just settle for a browse and nice drink at the bar?

Two Kats and a Cow, an artist-led studio and gallery located in the arches on Brighton seafront has been shortlisted in the category of Best Local Arts Site for the Brighton Web Awards 2007. The site, whose entire content is managed and edited by the artists at Two Kats and a Cow, is developed and hosted by Hobo.

Fingers crossed!

Danny spoke at a ProfitNet event yesterday, advising on what site owners can do to improve their websites' usability.

The session was structured as a 'clinic' - where other ProfitNet members would submit their site for criticism.

The audience (all members of the 'CI2' ProfitNet group) were eager to participate in conversation and surprisingly willing to see their websites criticised before their peers.

Update: Danny has been asked to run further website usability clinics for other ProfitNet chapters.

Following last year's sponsorship, we're proud to announce that Hobo is again sponsoring both the Brighton Art Fair and Brighton Craft Fair this year. We went along to both events last year and really enjoyed seeing the wide variety of high quality Arts and Crafts on display.

The application deadline for the Craft Fair has now closed but, if you're interested in exhibiting at this year's Art Fair, applications will be accepted by the event's organisers until 30th March 2007. We've put together an online application form to make applying simple.

Following the Plone 2006 conference in Seattle last October, videos of some of the sessions can now be viewed or downloaded from the Plone site. Most of these will appeal to people with a technical bent but for anyone more interested in what Plone is and why they might use it, see Andrew Hatton's talk Why Plone? Confessions of an NGO in which he explains why Oxfam decided to use Plone.

If you know anything about us you'll know that we're strong advocates of accessibility and standards-based websites. This doesn't make us over-zealous when it comes to accessibility issues. We always consider both the merits and demerits of specific accessibility guidelines and principles before applying them to any website.

There are still far too many websites being developed that make it difficult or impossible for people with disabilities to access the content. As awareness of accessibility issues increases and more web designers and developers learn how to interpret and apply accessibility guidelines, the number of inaccessible websites will fall.

The task of raising awareness is a difficult one. The task of learning how to interpret and apply the guidelines involves doing some hard work to learn new techniques and practices and then having the discipline to adhere to those techniques without cutting corners or making exceptions without consideration. But the business case for accessibile websites shows that the work is worth the effort.

With that in mind, perhaps this petition to the UK Prime Minister to ensure that any website launched by the Government complies with accessibility standards (WCAG AA at least) will help to raise awareness and move us all towards making more of an effort.

Note: Unfortunately you've got to be a British citizen or resident to sign the petition.

Plone, the content management system that that our customers rely on, is 5 years old today

Plone has grown from a two-man project to encompass over 100 contributors to the core application and over 500 developers for the third-party add-ons. Over 400 add-ons are available.

Plone has become a global phenomenon, is published in more than 35 languages, and with more than 200 companies doing Plone development around the world.

We'd just like to say congratulations and thank you to everybody who's been involved in creating this brilliant application.

Via: Plone News

This Wednesday, at the Sussex Geek Dinner, Tristan Roddis, (head web developer at Cogapp) will be delivering a presentation on the Plone content management system. If you want to know why you, like us, should use Plone for web development then come along.

[Update - Oct 5, 2006]: here's a picture of Tristan explaining Plone.

Following our sponsorship of the Brighton Art and Craft Fairs, Hobo and Brighton Art Fair have now been jointly awarded an investment fund to provide further web based services to local artists. Plans for development include adding a blog to the Art Fair website to provide artists with regular information about news and events in their vicinity.

The investment comes from the Arts and Business South East Double Your Money scheme and will help us to develop our growing relationship with the art community in Brighton & Hove.

Despite being very useful in principle, access keys are problematic:

• They are very likely to conflict with existing browser functionality, especially with regards to assistive technologies
• They are not standard (despite government guidelines), so users don't really know what keys are available and have to take the time to find out (which most users won't do)

For these reasons, we have decided not to use access keys when we develop websites and we believe that other developers should follow suit.

Access keys should not be dismissed altogether. There will be many cases where access keys should be used. However, access keys should only be used if there is a strong case for using them rather than being used by default.

For further information and articles on this subject, see Using Accesskeys - Is it worth it? and Accesskey problems remain in XHTML 2.

Having an editable website means that it's not just down to the developer or design team to make sure that the site is accessible. If it wasn't before, it's definitely now your responsibility to make your content accessible.

Making the content easy for your audience to understand is your most obvious task but you should also remember to provide alternative text for non-text elements like images so that people who can't see things like images still know what they add to the page.

You might already know about the 'alt' attribute that can be used to provide alternative text for an image. Using the content management system that comes with our websites, inserting images into your pages and providing those images with an alt attribute is easy. But we know from experience that the alt attribute isn't always (or often) used correctly, causing pages to be less accessible than they should or could be.

In fact, the alt attribute isn't the only way to provide alternative text for images and other non-text elements in a page. It's perfectly acceptable, in certain circumstances, to provide alternative text in the main content of the page and leave the alt attribute blank.

Getting alternative text right shouldn't slow down your productivity so read this short article on the Appropriate use of alternative text and you'll soon know how to do it properly and quickly.

As part of our sponsorship we've migrated the existing Art Fair website into our own content management system and created a new site for the Brighton Craft Fair exhibitors. The sites are being hosted indefinitely on our own web servers. The team at Brighton Art Fair can now update the website themselves and add new exhibitors to an online database.

Details about the events can be found on the Brighton Art Fair website and the Brighton Craft Fair website.

If you're not sure what sort of website you need for your business or whether or not you need a website at all, try Business Link's 'Get the right website for your business' tool.

As Business Link themselves admit, the tool is no substitute for professional advice, but your answers to a few simple questions about your business might at least start you thinking about what you need if you're really not sure.

We did this for a few reasons:

• To avoid sending mixed messages when advising clients that their search engine ranking by regularly adding new content
• To reduce time spent monitoring sites (making sure they stay within their quota)
• To simplify billing - charging extra for some clients but not others complicates an otherwise simple hosting arrangement

Of course you should still only add content that's of genuine interest to your visitors but now you can do it without worrying that you're going to have to pay for the privilege.

Hobo's latest website to go live belongs to Sarah Beese-Leroux, qualified yoga teacher and owner of Sussex-based Yoga Mums - yogamums.co.uk.

With the growth of her yoga business, Sarah identified the need for a website to publicise and promote her services to a wider target audience.

Her new website and content management system from Hobo means that she can now update the details of her yoga classes whenever and from wherever she needs to.

We've just helped the nice folks at the Two Kats and a Cow gallery (on Brighton sea-front) to launch their new website - twokatsandacow.com.

Every page in the site was created by the three artists themselves - Katty McMurray, John Marshall and Kathryn Matthews. Hobo simply provided a set of editing tools and let them get on with it.

Read a press release about the launch of the Two Kats and a Cow website

A conference about the way new technologies are being used to improve user's experiences on the Internet was attended by Hobo team members Ben Lobo and Danny Hope last week.

The d.Construct conference, which was organised by clear:left and took place at Fabrica in Brighton, was centred around Web 2.0, a term being used to describe how new technologies can deliver better web-based applications and services.

Speakers at the event covered a range of topics and emerging ideas about how the web will continue to develop. Some interesting examples of the new breed of web-based applications include:

• meebo.com - A browser-based Instant Messaging client
  
• flickr.com - A photo sharing service
• maps.google.com - Google's location and direction finding service
  
• geobloggers.com - Google maps and Flickr combined into a new service
  

By attending conferences like this, Hobo aim to stay at the forefront of Internet technologies and to pass on the benefits that this brings to their customers.

At Hobo we're always trying to improve our products.  One of the ways that we do this is by examining how real users interact with our content management system (CMS) to see where they're having difficulties.

To gain the best possible understanding of our users, we like to observe them using our system in their own surroundings and under normal conditions rather than in the less natural environment of our own testing area.

That's why we're now offering a £50 reduction on the first year of your hosting costs (typically £240) to clients who agree to allow a usability specialist to visit them in their place of work and observe them as they use our CMS.

Membership of the UKWDA is one way that we have of showing our clients that we know what we're doing when it comes to website design and development. There's more about this in our accreditation section.