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Last Thursday I had the pleasure of attending the latest Brighton Girl Geek Dinner. Denise Wilton presented on "Designing a web application with character" and whilst it was more fluffy and designy than I am, I still learnt and gained from the experience.

A lot of the talk was about defining the character of your application, and sticking to it. So, are you designing a social site where exclamation marks and less formal language is acceptable - if there is an error message is an "oops" page acceptable - or are you designing a banking site in which case a fuller explanation indicating which part of your transaction did or didn't happen rather than leaving you wondering what just happened. This got me thinking, every time I've worked on a web site, I, as the developer, have always written the error messages. Generally this is the only copy I ever write for a website, and yet in some instances it is the most important. Something for me to work on in the future.

As usual, the food at the Eagle was great, and there was a really good bunch of people there including some new faces. Richard won a copy of Jeremy's Dom Scripting as well.