Dave Potts

The Work

arehaus came out of the Guardian newspaper, where five of the partners previously worked. We had quite a free reign there and developed cutting edge sites early on, including Eurosoccer96 and ShiftControl - a site that was redesigned every week. Our publishing background and skills are what makes arehaus unique.

So far we've been publishing-focussed, although we're starting to move into broadcasting. Our clients include Time Out (the dominant London listings magazine), CGU (insurance), the Design Council, Net Imperative and the Photographers' Gallery. We also do our own projects. We're currently working on a book about the future of retail, and we regularly come up with Web ideas to sell to clients or attract sponsorship.

My role has changed through management to overseeing projects from concept stage and analysing content management systems and new technologies. My specialities are information architecture, site navigation, and the user experience.

Career Route

I was interested in computers and worked on a CD-ROM project for a Dutch magazine. I felt electronic publishing had a lot of potential but there were too many problems with CD-ROMs. When I was introduced to a chat room by a New Yorker I thought - that's it. Back in London I worked for the Guardian and started their New Media department by learning html 1.0! It's been frenetic ever since.

Software gems

Being Mac-based, it has to be BBEdit. I rave about BBEdit. It's so coder-friendly. It can open files that other programs can't, it's got great conversion tools and plug-ins that other people have written, like BBTidy, which helps your code conform to standards.

Our skills and the ease of running and fixing Macs meant they were our first choice when we started out. Also some of our publishing clients use Macs. But we'd be happy to move away from them now and we're investigating other systems at the moment. We use PCs for testing.

Smaller software gems include Drop Attribute and Drop Rename, good for batch switching file types and renaming files. Web Devil is great for downloading sites you're about to work on if you don't have the code.

The Internet vs.TV

The TV is going to impact a lot, though perhaps not very well to begin with. There's likely to be confusion before things get better. The TV will attract the more corporate end of Web development - banking, home shopping. Information and research I imagine will stay on the home computer, but I see a crazy period when both try to do the same things.

Video on demand on home computers is going to be an extension of what the Internet already is. TV will naturally attract bigger budgets, but it won't have the same two-way capabilities, so it won't attract the enthusiasts. It comes down what kind of person you are. If you're a very passive user of the Internet, you'll prefer the TV-based approach. If you're much more active and hands-on, you'll use your computer.

TV screen resolution is a big problem when you are used to designing pages for computer screens. The best thing I've seen is a TV that can switch resolution to suit a computer or TV - in Japan, of course.

Wireless

WAP is before its time, an example of how business is trying to get the Internet to work to its advantage before things have been thought through. But otherwise wireless is going to be a big growth area, both on handhelds and elsewhere.

UK cultural issues

Culturally I don't think there's much difference in the way UK users approach the Internet compared to the US. The biggest problem to date has been call charges and the crippling attitude of UK telecommunications towards giving people decent access speeds. It's amazing that the UK has come as far as it has and there's such a large industry based on pitiful home access.

I believe there's a big misconception that people don't like scrolling. It's especially strong in the UK. A lot of American sites have long front pages and simple navigation. In the UK and Europe, people are a lot more hung up on making everything fit into a laptop screen. The US has a more practical approach to Web site design and services. Sometimes the European approach can be overly designed.

Pet Hates

Flash introductions and inappropriate Flash. Unexpected sound - especially in the office. Cascading Style Sheets are a problem for Mac users since if they're misused you can't increase the font size and a lot of sites become unreadable. The marginalisation of Mac users in general is annoying.

And of course the difference between Netscape and Internet Explorer is the bane of everyone's life.

Open Source

I'm very interested in the Open Source movement, things like PHP, Zope (content management), and Blogger (publishing). It's a big deal in software development, how much to keep, how much to give away, how to get money from giving things away and how to make them secure. Not that I'm sure of the answers.

Advice for New Developers

The biggest issue is to seriously assess whether you want to become a programmer. You can get quite far in Web development without the disciplines of a programmer, but at the end of the day it's the logical extension of becoming a developer. I think you need to make up your mind early on, so you know you'll be moving on to managing a team, or the user experience, or design. Too many people try to do everything. It's important to specialise.