Having completed our journey with Air France, it’s good to be ‘home’. It’s 2 years since we last visited and I must say, I’m seeing a new side to the city this time round already. Before, it was always ‘family holidays’ where we were pulled one family dinner to the next, or – during 2003-04 – it was for work, which meant I saw even less of the city and more of a desk due to the working hours. Or maybe it’s just that this is my first official holiday from my full-time IA career. I must say, I did need a break, and you can’t get any further away from it all than sitting in a rural village in Hong Kong surrounded by mountains.

Just on the taxi back to our village – the taxi ride was a comparative luxury compared to the flight – the scenery was a refreshing change to the UK. With mountains, bridges, harbour-side dwellings, inner-city suburbs, marvelous urban engineering and architecture, Hong Kong really is a photographer’s dream. I sometimes wonder why I left. Something to do with ‘getting a proper job’, and getting a better work-life balance. The things I do miss though is the food, the sunshine (ok in small doses), the ability to use it as a base to explore other parts of Asia, the quirky almost-Japan-like culture, and the different types of activities you can do here: from nice beaches, shopping, trendy bars, original restaurants, a cosmopolitan community, island-hopping, hiking, and so on. If only I could read / write Chinese, maybe I’d be able to build a career for myself here. Oh well.

On a bad note, they’ve managed to build yet another house directly infront of my bedroom so what view I did have (admittedly it was a view of the carpark) is now someone’s window. That’s the rate they build things here!

Courtesy of an email forwarded to me from my father-in-law! All pictures here are made from food. Amazing work.

In the last few days I’ve began using Flickr and Blogger more intensively and found them very impressive platforms. They’ve either improved leaps and bounds since my usage of them slowed, or I didn’t pay enough attention to them before. Althoug the Flickr platform involves alot more learning in terms of navigation, features and functionality the learning is spurred on by great interactions (dragging and dropping images into sets and creating collections), quick image uploads, as well as really inspiring images from the Flickr community. Blogger, on the other hand, is providing the usual robust platform but with really great template customisation facilities – both native to blogger and via various experts. Being able to make a blog template look as far away from a ‘template’ is brilliant. Another great point is the speed and reliability of their post-by-email functionality which means I can blog via my phone (i.e. now). Really looking forward to exploring both sites more.

For work I was looking into placing items below the fold for a few sites. I was favouring the fat footer approach, and the more research I did the more it seemed the best approach. Ha! But wait. Isn’t everything you put below the fold destined for eternal user neglect and a lifetime of digital ‘what-ifs’? Well. I’ve always found this concept that users don’t scroll a bit mystifying. Even analysing my own web behaviour I find scrolling second nature, particularly with the proliferation of mice with scroll wheels (over 90% I think I read somewhere according to Logitech). With the rising popularity of long web pages like blogs, twitter pages, online newspapers, users are getting used to looking for content down the page. The way your site looks visually can also help entice users further down the page. If users scroll down one or two screens and just see solid blocks of text they will probably decide it’s too much ‘work’ to do and leave. However, good use of section titles, type face, labelling, graphics and colours would engage users sufficiently to keep them scrolling down. Of course, as long as users think they can find what they’re looking for they’ll keep looking.