I was lucky enough to be sent on a course and get a day away from the office yesterday. It was a day workshop on how to perform an expert review on your website to see how good or bad it is, and more importantly how it can be improved.

I met some very nice people from Blackwell, Canon, Michelin and Hydro who were also doing the workshop. They all had much more impressive job titles than me.

Forrester's methodology involved putting yourself in the position of a user with a set of goals and asking yourself 25 questions. These questions covered the content, the navigation, the presentation and trust.

The method seemed quite sound and a good way of looking at your site to make sure you covered all aspects. The only problem is that the 25 questions are copyrighted, so you'll need to pay Forrester to get them and they're quite expensive.

I'd much prefer an open standard on this, so I might have a look to see if there is. Or if anyone knows of any good ones?

The weather in Leeds lately has been very random. Sunny one minute, torrential rain and thunder the next.

To help others know what weather I'm experiencing, I've made a handy ASP.NET control that displays the weather in Leeds. It shows a picture of me experiencing that weather and can also tell you the weather in several other places I've been to.

It can also change how the whole site looks based on the weather, but it doesn't do this at the moment. You can see this control on the right hand side of my blog's homepage.

Went to geekUp Leeds last night. Had a lot of fun and met some interesting people, although I've forgotten all their names.

There were a lot more people than I expected. Who would have known there were so many geeks in Leeds. Guess we normally hide away.

I wasn't able so stay long, so I didn't get to chat to most people. Hopefully I'll get a better chance at the next one. 

In my drive to sort out my development processes there are a few things I want to do. Top of my list is proper automated testing and creating automatic documentation.

Doing these steps every time I compile my site (or application) will add a lot more steps, so I thought it would be better to learn how to automate the build process first.

I'd heard that NAnt was the tool I should be using, but I found it a little bit overwhelming.

NAnt is a program that follows a list of instructions in an XML file called a build file. These instructions are used to do a series of tasks like the following:

• Compile a site's ASP.NET code behind files
• Compile some unit tests
• Copy some files
• Run the unit tests
• Run a program to create documents

It took me a while to get my head round it, but I finally got a simple build file working. I found Jean-Paul Boodhoo's NAnt starter series very helpful.

Next I'm going to get the testing working and then automate it using NAnt.