.Net Magazine | July 25, 2006
Last year I bemoaned the sorry state of UK web design magazines. Most of the magazines I came across were hobbyist titles, full of Flash portfolios, “how to” tutorials in Dreamweaver, and articles about setting up a shopping site in under 10 minutes. None of these titles seems to focus on professional designers, and they all seemed stuck in an Internet of five years out of.
I used to subscribe to a magazine called Create Online during the dotcom years, and from what I remember it was pretty good. They would have interviews with top designers, check out agency portfolios, and take a look inside company offices. This was obviously a lot more impressive when agencies had sushi bars and golf courses in their buildings, but it was still a good way to see what was going on in the industry. Along with this they would run the usual feature articles, and I even remember one about web standards that included an interview with Jeffrey Zeldman.
Unfortunately the magazine stopped being published, and I got sent a copy of something called .Net as a replacement. Sadly .net was aimed more at web users than developers and was full of articles about ISPs, Spam and ways to make money off the web. There were some tutorials, but they were all very basic and obviously aimed at the amateur enthusiast rather than the web professional.
I quickly cancelled my subscription and didn’t look at .Net magazine again for a long while. Over the coming years, .Net magazine slowly cut back on the Internet news and started concentrating more of web development. It was still pretty low level stuff, with lots of “how to” articles in Dreamweaver, but there was definite improvement. There was even the odd standards based article from the likes of Rachel Andrew.
Towards the middle of 2005, .Net magazine seemed to get a renewed vigour and a small re-lunch in Oct 2005 saw a subtle change of focus from a hobbyist magazine to a more professional audience. This was typified by more in-depth articles such as Jeremy Keith’s DOM scripting tutorial, a topic that probably wouldn’t have received coverage a few months earlier. Subsequent editions saw articles on web development trends, Ajax, British design and PAS 78.
Last month the magazine went through it’s biggest overhaul yet. The magazine saw a compleate redesign, giving it a modern and unified look. However it was the new content that really impressed me. The August Issue of .net saw interviews with Mike Davidson and Jon Hicks, articles by Jesse James Garrett and Stuart Langridge, and tutorials from John Oxton, Gareth Knight and myself. On top of that there was a good article on website redesigns, a look at “the real web2.0”, a great editorial by Andy Rutledge and a sweet tutorial about mod_rewrite by Rik Lomas.
As part of the re-launch I was asked to become part of the magazines advisory panel along with Molly Holzschlag, Andy Clarke and Patrick Lauke. The idea behind the panel is to provide the publishers with industry feedback, so I’d love to hear your thoughts on the redesign, and the type of content you’d like to see in future issues.
As part of the advisory panel, we get to see the next issue a couple of days before it reaches the shops. I’ve had a quick flick through issue 153 and it looks pretty good. I hope I’m not giving the game away when I say it includes an interview with Joshua Schachter, an article on business blogging, an editorial on speculative design contests, a tutorial by John Oxton on liquid layouts and another tutorial by Rik Lomas on Google Maps.
The re-launch issue was a great read, and I hope the future issues will be of the same high quality. If you are like me and dismissed .Net magazine in the past, I’d definitely give it another look.
Posted at July 25, 2006 9:34 PM
Paul Robertson said on July 25, 2006 9:27 PM
How about dropping the “free” disc and investing the money in a few more pages