Gareth is the former web architect within the University of St Andrews web team and digital communications team. A graduate of St Andrews (BD Hons, 1993), Gareth joined the web team in 2006 and worked mainly on information architecture and front-end development (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript). He then spent most of his time doing DSDM agile project management and business analysis, was the warden at Agnes Blackadder Hall from 2016 to 2018 and then moved into full time agile and scrum master work.
At the start of the current academic session (2010-2011) the University introduced Moodle as its preferred learning management system (LMS), also called a ‘virtual learning environment’ (VLE) and began the move away…
A lot of my job involves looking at websites and making suggestions on how better to structure them. There is a bigger restructure project happening at the moment, though, which has an impact on the Web team. The…
Look what has happened on the whiteboard at Web team HQ! It started as an innocent enough looking wireframe showing a tabbed main content area and then … well, it turned into a monster. Ain’t that true of a number of…
Mozilla released Firefox 4.0 on Tuesday—it has already been downloaded 16,041,437 times; that’s about 92 downloads a second!— and there is a lot to commend it for: a clean look, that’s not too far away from both Google…
Since Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 was released Andy—you know! Andy!—wondered what it would be like to install every version of Microsoft’s Web browser starting at IE 1.0 under Windows 95 and working all the way up…
This time next month my colleague Chris and I will be sitting in the Surgeons’ Hall on Nicholson Street in Edinburgh at Andy Clarke’s Hardboiled Web Design workshop. I’ve just started reading his latest book, of the…
A couple of years ago I was asked to be involved in a project to redesign SAULCAT: the St Andrews University Library Catalogue, which uses the WebPAC Pro online catalogue service of Millennium from Innovative…
The idea for the Photo of the week feature on the University homepage came about in a brainstorming meeting we had back in 2006 with Mac McBurney who was working with the information architecture consultancy company…
Earlier this week we made a minor improvement to the University’s Error 404 Page not found page. On the right-hand side of the page, beneath the section entitled “Website help” we’ve now added a section called “Recent…
In Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson’s excellent book Rework: Change the way you work forever they offer this advice: “When something goes wrong, someone is going to tell the story. You’ll be better off if it’s…