Boags World

It is hard to talk about blogs in terms of something I can’t live without, but certainly,  Boags World makes life as a blogger and webmaster a lot more bearable.

Many moons ago, Paul Boag started a web design company called Headscape. It seems to have done rather well out of universities and public bodies. Unlike many people with his corporate web design experience, Paul has developed a blog aimed at “ordinary people” who build or maintain websites.

He is a usability and accessibility freak, and shouts (metaphorically) very loudly in the ears of web designers who stick to table based design and won’t use the rich web 2.0, domscript and other geeky features coming into vogue. That may sound a bit “out there” for ordinary people, but he applies himself well to explaining in words of one syllable exactly what makes for an accessible, usable and upgradable website.

Say you want to build, commission or even just tweak a website, Paul Boag won’t go into gory code details, but talks in bigger brushstrokes about the principles of layout, where search boxes should be, the rules for accessibility and usability, and so on. So, if you pay attention, you will learn the overall picture of web design, and then you can move forward with at least half a clue about what you should be trying to achieve.

Not only is he knowledgeable and a straight forward talker on paper (his podcasts get a bit wordy at times!) but he is also quite avant garde, verging on controversial. If you want to know how to market a site, Boags World will explain about proven practices, ie his proven practices, usually listed 1 to 10 in no particular order. By way of an example of his forward-thinking, he is a great believer in the future of social websites, and he does not advocate SEO as the main thrust of a campaign to bring your blog to the forefront of public consciousness. Ooooh!! He seems to have the traffic to back up his tactics.

Ultimately he has developed the blog into a podcast and forum, and I suppose the bottom line motivation is to raise the profile of his company. That is just one role of a blog, and fortunately, Paul flies the flag for good corporate practice and offers more than he takes. Almost no subject is taboo and he will relate what seems to be everything he knows about a topic, and if he doesn’t know, he will usually find out. Excellent blogging practice with a sense of humor which makes me return to the blog time and again to see what is going on in Boags World.

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