The channel 5 program 'The gadget show' had their live show in the Birmingham NEC a few weeks back. It was an interesting collection of all the series gadgets so far, plus some retailers such as GameStation and Ebuyer.

I was surprised by the diversity of gadgetry on show, although in several instances there wasn't an option to purchase some of them on site, which was a shame. It was reasonably techie but not overly so, so still enjoyable for all the family, and they had regular 'Tech-talks' from hosted speakers on various subjects.

Pics here

So generally a pretty entertaining event, with less of a commercial slant than I expected. It will certainly be interesting to see how this develops, as it was the first event they have done. It was nice to actually see some of these gadgets in real life though, rather than just through a TV.

Most people are familiar with the suckerfish style drop down menus, but as a quick recap they are lightweight CSS driven dropdown menus.

I won't go into massive depth here, but suffice it to say that there have been many improvements to the way they work, and the most streamlined version I've come across is here:

http://www.htmldog.com/articles/suckerfish/dropdowns/

It's a good article on how to get them working on your site, and how they interact with different browser versions.

What is quite interesting though is that there is an issue with them in IE7. If you use the 'sticky' version of them (where the menu stays visible even after mouse out) then IE7 has a CSS flaw in the handling of it.

As the link under here explains, there is a fix for earlier IE versions that creates a pseudo class to get them to work as they should, but IE7 handily circumvents this to break.

http://css-class.com/articles/explorer/sticky/

This entry details how to fix the IE7 bug and end out with a totally cross browser CSS friendly version.

In the UK this weekend it was a bank holiday, and my partner's birthday, so we set off to a local(ish) amusement park, called Alton Towers.

There is a rather handy map that you are given when you buy your tickets, and you are ushered through the front gates to be surrounded by souvenir shops and restaurants. After walking through a few areas of trinket sellers and the usual teddy merchants I began to notice how everyone was being 'funnelled' into handy areas of commerce. It is very subtly done, but to get to any of the themed areas of the park you have to pass several eating establishments, and child friendly games, where you can win stuffed animals that will never fit in your car.

Combine that with the idea that any ride you go on is surrounded by similarly themed merchandising opportunities, and once you have managed to damage all your internal organs from being shaken around 360 degrees, the exit to each ride is through a shop. You actually have to exit the queue to leave the ride by going through a shop.

This has to be one of the best most direct examples of meticulously plotting of the customer journey that I have ever seen. In most wire framing and spec analysis meeting it is always a consideration how an end-user is going to travel through your site. Usually you give them easy access to a variety of options so that they find using your applications hassle free, and painless. Rarely ever do you so carefully craft a path through your application as I witnessed in Alton Towers.

It was certainly an interesting comparison between the real-world customer journey, and the online equivalent. I know I'll certainly be taking a lesson or two from their example next time I am wire framing up a site layout.