Notes
How websites are built, why they go wrong, and what to do instead.
Reflections on thirty years in tech: as a writer, a designer, a developer and a user.
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Why an alligator
I chose the name for its sound. The animal turned out to have more to say.
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When we stopped writing on our own sites
How blogging made the early web personal, and what we gave up for the platforms
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Where engineering met documentation
The Society for Technical Communication taught a trade without a school. In 2025 it closed.
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The best interface is an invisible one
Invisible Interfaces was my company for five years. The name was the brief: an interface works best when nobody notices it.
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Nobody calls themselves a user
Where the word “user” came from, what it does to how we design, and where it still belongs
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Mascots in webdesign
When a drawn character helps a website, and what everybody learned from the paperclip
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Information architecture: when librarians came to the web
Around the turn of the century, people trained to organise libraries turned to the web and started to make it findable.
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The promise of XML
The mark-up language XML promised that anything written once could be published anywhere. It kept that promise for people who had an anywhere. For a website that only ever published to itself, it was mostly a second language to look after.
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Microsoft Word did not win on the writing
How a profession lost its tools, and what the court record actually says
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Zoom out: here is service design
Service design asks you to look at everything around the screen: the letter before it, the counter beside it, the helpdesk after it. It is a good way of looking and a poor way of building.
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Stay where you are
Stay on the page. Do the task where the task is. Every extra screen, every link to elsewhere, is a moment where someone stops doing what they came to do.
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An FAQ is a list of problems you did not fix
Every question on a page of frequently asked questions is a problem somewhere else on the site. The page explains it. It rarely fixes it.
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Controlled language: one word, one meaning
Aviation built a version of English with nine hundred words, and three of its habits belong on every website
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What happened to DITA, the standard named after Darwin?
A standard named after the one feature its own advocates tell you to avoid
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What happened to the Semantic Web
The Semantic Web was going to let machines understand pages. What arrived instead was structured data for search engines
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An icon is not a drawing
Why the icon you drew yourself will not be understood
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Top Tasks: what people came to do
Most visitors come for one of five things to your website. How to find out which five?
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The three digits nobody reads
The status codes every page carries, where the numbers came from, and the ten worth knowing
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The quiet is the design
Why a calm page is harder to make than a loud one
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Every plugin is code you did not write
What a plugin really is, and why this site has none
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The email address people write to
Why one email address, why hello@, and why not a contact form
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The interruption you cannot turn off
Pop-ups were beaten once. They came back as part of the page
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The page nobody designs
What to put on a 404 page, whether a joke belongs there, and when to redirect instead
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The page only one program can read
What a page builder does with your content, and what it costs to get it back
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The promise in every link
How to write a link, and why a web address should outlive the page
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The keys, and who holds them
Passwords, two-factor, and the question nobody asks: whose name is the account in
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PDF: the format that will not bend
When a PDF is the right answer, and the four times it is not
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Nothing to accept
Why this website has no cookie banner, and what it would cost to need one
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Text formatting is a budget
Bold, italic, quotation marks and the underline — what each one is for
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A search engine made of paper
Paul Otlet built one in 1895, out of index cards
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Kicking out the paragraph
Why text on a screen works better in blocks than in prose
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Inside-out design
Services built from the organisation’s logic instead of the visitor’s