Hi I am DigiKev, this is the silly name I call myself for my little online presence. My real name is Kevin Rapley, I prefer Kev and some call me Kevlar for reasons unknown. I get called some other names too but these aren’t appropriate here. So here comes the guff:
DigiKev is a digital media, website design and build outfit. Digital media is interactive and thrives on conversations. I engineer this ability and allow people to converse in a digital space. This type of capability of starting online conversations and social networking has been coined the term Web 2.0.
For the rest of us it is just a common sense approach to using the technology for business, social and networking purposes.
Latest work
I was asked by Fierce! and the Royal Shakespeare Company to produce a mini-site for the unique collaboration where they will be recording a series of everyday public service announcements for broadcast across a wide range of public spaces in Birmingham and Stratford upon-Avon: including shopping centres, train and bus stations, sports stadia and schools. The announcements will be recorded and broadcast by RSC Associate artists whose distinct voices are easily recognisable and who include Sir Ian Mckellen, Patrick Stewart and Dame Judi Dench.
Visit You be the bard!
I worked with Bristol illustrator Sarah Newman to create a portfolio website which coincided with her masters final exhibition. Sarah knew exactly the look that the website needed to take on and producing her own design with cardboard and paper created a web page in the real world while I prepared it ready for digital media. The project involved combining Sarah’s illustrative style with accessible web design and Flash movies.
Visit Sarah Newman’s illustration portfolio
5 May 2008
Xobni, pronounced zob-knee is the spelling of inbox backwards. Groundbreaking! It is also the name of new software currently in Beta and rated by Microsoft and Bill Gates. Xobni plugs into the Microsoft Outlook sidebar to bring a much more social way for relating to our contacts. Using a powerful analytics package it is able to show you who your top contacts are, send to receive ratios and map out the time of day you usually receive emails from a particular contact. The part that excites me most is the way in which it tracks conversations.
[Read more on Working smarter: Using Xobni to make Outlook social
3 May 2008
It shocks me to see web programming examples breaking the rules of accessibility and common practices in published books. I don’t feel it sets the greatest of examples to anyone trying to get a foot in the industry when supposed authorities on subjects cannot even get it correct in their own publications. Take Microsoft Press for instance. Programming Microsoft ASP.NET 3.5, published 2008. This is written by Dino Esposito, an authority on ASP.NET and AJAX.
[Read more on Why aren't experts like Microsoft being expert?]
3 May 2008
From experience, clients who commission DigiKev to build a small website solution, perhaps even just a mini site with a handful of pages, at some point in the future may require additional pages or sections to be added. Larger websites with a multitude of information and complex structures will more than likely require expansion or remodelling of the configuration to accommodate a new campaign style or to work more efficiently for search engine optimisation after studying the analytics.
[Read more on Working smarter: Building expandable, modular websites part I]
2 May 2008
From my experience, web designers fall into three distinct camps. The first is the graphic designer turned web designer. They have the fundamentals of page layout, an eye for detail and a strong grasp of design consistency and typographical techniques. The graphical web designer will more than likely be able to build a website in HTML, will have an intermediate knowledge of Flash animation and will get around this format using the timeline and visual tweening. Some will have a clear grasp of using style sheets and producing HTML markup which is both semantic and standards compliant. This is the camp I grew up in.
[Read more on Working smarter: Learning a programming language]