Web Directions South 2008, Sydney Convention Centre, September 26 2.40pm.
Hear how Drupal, Semantic MediaWiki and other bleeding edge tech were enlisted along with pixie dust, FOAF, RDF, OWL, SPARQL, Linked Data (basically all the Semantic Web stuff) to build a distributed social network. The focus will be not on evangelism (I don’t really care about that) but how disparate open source platforms can talk and work together. This stuff actually works and makes development more fluid. These technologies make local development easier, but when it is time to broaden your scope, classic search is still king. How can you leverage this? Newcomers such as Yahoo Searchmonkey can play an important role in the creation of a truly distributed information system.
Web Directions South 2008, Sydney Convention Centre, September 26 11.45am.
You’re invited to join a narrated exploration into the exotic regions of HTML5 and surrounding territories. Your journey will begin with a preparatory briefing about what to expect from HTML5 – what’s different, what’s new, what to look forward to, what to watch out for. During the cruise, we’ll make some short excursions into surrounding territories adjoining HTML5, and you’ll learn a bit about their history and relationship to HTML5.
Web Directions South 2008, Sydney Convention Centre, September 25 11.45am.
The release of Apple’s iPhone brings new opportunities for web sites and web apps on handheld devices, though not without its share of challenges and best practices.
Tim and Pete will look at the best examples out in the wild and share their experience creating iphone.news.com.au – one of Australia’s largest news sites, news.com.au, tailored to the iPhone.
A presentation given at at Web Directions Government, Old Parliament House, Canberra, May 19 2008.
Those initial stages of converting your company to web standards are much like trying to score that first kiss with the princess. You seduce them with the business benefits of web-standards development, and the rest of the arguments we have all read, written, and preached to anyone who will listen. But getting corporate web standards in place is just a sign that the real relationship is about to begin. The honeymoon is over, and now it’s time to figure out what has gone wrong and why the prince and princess now seem to be constantly bickering—when they were meant to live happily ever after.
Scott draws on his experiences leading the development of eight large media web sites for News Digital Media to examine the ideals of web standards and how they translate within a large organisation. Learn how to make web standards work for you, when rules must be broken and how to deliver a final product that meets deadlines and still keeps project teams happy.
A presentation given at at Web Directions User Experience, Melbourne Town Hall, May 16 2008.
So you’ve designed a fantastic website for your client, tested in all the major browsers and everything looks great. Now they want to send an email newsletter to all their customers, using the new design.
No problem right? Just need to test in Outlook 07, and 06. Yahoo and Hotmail too, of course. Oh, and Gmail, Lotus Notes, AOL…Of course, the design may not work that well for an email anyway, and isn’t there some kind of anti-spam laws?
Like it or not, HTML email is here to stay and the responsibility for doing it right belongs to web designers. Learn how to plan, design and build an email newsletter that will provide a great user experience to the recipients, and great value to your clients.
A presentation given at Web Directions North, Vancouver Canada, January 30 2008.
Dubbed “the King of Web Standards” by Business Week, Jeffrey Zeldman co-founded the group and movement that brought standards to our browsers. Through A List Apart Magazine, his books, and endless advocacy, he brought wisdom to our industry and benefits awareness to the people who approve our budgets. Ten years into the web standards movement, how are we doing? What agreements have we reached? What battles no longer need to be fought? What hurdles still prevent us from reaching standards and accessibility utopia?
A presentation given at Web Directions North, Vancouver Canada, January 30 2008.
When we follow the principles of web standards, we write valid HTML and CSS, unobtrusive JavaScript and follow WCAG and other accessibility guidelines. This simple act goes a long way to creating an accessible web site, application or service. At the same time, many sites that don’t utilize all that is good and wholesome about web standards perform surprisingly well when they are used by people with disabilities.
How can we get the best of both worlds to create standards-based solutions that are highly usable for real people (including those with disabilities) in the real world?
In this session, we’ll dissect several examples from real sites and apps to learn about accessibility problems that arise from design and development decisions and what we can do to create a more accessible user experience for all people, regardless of their ability.
Ben Buchanan got in touch a few weeks back, excited to let me know that after a long struggle over at News Digital Media, they’d got the Aus IT home page to validate. Other people over at NDM have written in the past about the long march between gathering together a team of enthusiastic and […]
A presentation given at at Web Directions North, Vancouver, February 7, 2007.
When people talk about incorporating accessibility into the design process, they usually refer to selecting colours that correspond to somebody else’s ‘accessible’ contrast ratio or using a large enough font size. Trivial, really.
But the design process — observation, ideation, evaluation, refinement, and presentation — gives us many opportunities to build accessibility in from the very start. We’ll look at some real-world examples of Web-based services (like a transit-system route planner) and classic accessibility problems (like masses of old PDFs) and use those examples to build in accessibility from the ground up.
A presentation given at at Web Directions North, Vancouver, February 7, 2007.
Microformats are much more than just a promising technology or passing fad — hear these three experts cover the whys and the hows of designing and developing with microformats.
Hear microformats founder and custodian Tantek Çelik paint on the broad canvas, talking about motivations, use cases, examples, and benefits. John Allsopp, author of the forthcoming friends of Ed microformats book will cover a number of practical examples of quickly and cleanly adding microformats to existing code. Renowned designer and developer Dan Cederholm will look at how microformats provide excellent scaffolding for styling with CSS.
This session will really get you up to speed with this exciting, quickly spreading technology.
A presentation given at at Web Directions North, Vancouver, February 7, 2007.
Traditionally, CSS has been the domain of designers while JavaScript was for programmers, but these technologies can and should work together to improve your visitors’ experiences. After all, you can do amazing things with CSS, but when you start to use CSS in concert with DOM Scripting, there’s almost no limit to what you can achieve.
MOD-ern web designer Andy Clarke and DOM/Ajax developer Aaron Gustafson will take your CSS skills and supercharge them with JavaScript magic, exploring how you can make CSS and JavaScript work together to make beautiful (and functional) results.
A presentation given at at Web Directions North, Vancouver, February 7, 2007.
Hear microformats founder and custodian Tantek Çelik paint on the broad canvas, talking about motivations, use cases, examples, and benefits.
Cameron Moll says the web is a volatile medium that changes endlessly, but one thing remains constant: a demand for designers who are disciplined in graphic design theory, human computing principles, and communication techniques. Oh, and CSS, accessibility, and (soon) mobile devices, too. How does one stay abreast?
Hear one of the web’s most disciplined designers share his advice for mastering fundamental user interface principles, good vs. great design, communication-centric approaches, and mobile web development, all with the hope of producing meaningful interfaces that deliver a rewarding user experience.
A presentation given at at Web Directions North, Vancouver, February 7, 2007.
Web standards investigators: Get your crime scene gear on and help Molly dig up the dirt on crimes committed against web standards. Molly will demonstrate code samples from her own felonious work dating back to 1993, as well as the work of other infamous standardistas before they got rehabilitated and let standards into their hearts. Help unearth the felonies and reveal the clues that lead to a life of crime-free, guilt-free code.
A presentation given at Web Directions South, Sydney Australia, September 27 2007.
There can be a feeling in the web development community that “SEO is evil” – Scott Gledhill cuts through the hype to focus on how developing accessible, standards compliant websites is the first step in creating search engine friendly websites – and also talks about what is being done in the industry to make websites more findable, sometimes at the cost of making them less usable.
A presentation given at Web Directions South, Sydney Australia, September 28 2007.
Web Usability is far more complex than User Testing and Interaction Design alone. And while interface design is an important consideration, there’s more to a usable site than what’s on the surface. We all know the importance of accessibility and web standards, so let’s take that knowledge one step further and into the realm of usability. In this session Lisa Herrod will redefine the common definition of usability by introducing a greater focus on accessibility and web standards. By taking a more holistic approach you will soon see why usability is more than skin deep.
Hear how Drupal, Semantic MediaWiki and other bleeding edge tech were enlisted along with pixie dust, FOAF, RDF, OWL, SPARQL, Linked Data (basically all the Semantic Web stuff) to build a distributed social network. The focus will be not on evangelism (I don’t really care about that) but how disparate open source platforms can talk and work together. This stuff actually works and makes development more fluid. These technologies make local development easier, but when it is time to broaden your scope, classic search is still king. How can you leverage this? Newcomers such as Yahoo Searchmonkey can play an important role in the creation of a truly distributed information system.
You’re invited to join a narrated exploration into the exotic regions of HTML5 and surrounding territories. Your journey will begin with a preparatory briefing about what to expect from HTML5 – what’s different, what’s new, what to look forward to, what to watch out for. During the cruise, we’ll make some short excursions into surrounding territories adjoining HTML5, and you’ll learn a bit about their history and relationship to HTML5.
The release of Apple’s iPhone brings new opportunities for web sites and web apps on handheld devices, though not without its share of challenges and best practices.
Those initial stages of converting your company to web standards are much like trying to score that first kiss with the princess. You seduce them with the business benefits of web-standards development, and the rest of the arguments we have all read, written, and preached to anyone who will listen. But getting corporate web standards in place is just a sign that the real relationship is about to begin. The honeymoon is over, and now it’s time to figure out what has gone wrong and why the prince and princess now seem to be constantly bickering—when they were meant to live happily ever after.
So you’ve designed a fantastic website for your client, tested in all the major browsers and everything looks great. Now they want to send an email newsletter to all their customers, using the new design.
Dubbed “the King of Web Standards” by Business Week, Jeffrey Zeldman co-founded the group and movement that brought standards to our browsers. Through A List Apart Magazine, his books, and endless advocacy, he brought wisdom to our industry and benefits awareness to the people who approve our budgets. Ten years into the web standards movement, how are we doing? What agreements have we reached? What battles no longer need to be fought? What hurdles still prevent us from reaching standards and accessibility utopia?
When we follow the principles of web standards, we write valid HTML and CSS, unobtrusive JavaScript and follow WCAG and other accessibility guidelines. This simple act goes a long way to creating an accessible web site, application or service. At the same time, many sites that don’t utilize all that is good and wholesome about web standards perform surprisingly well when they are used by people with disabilities.
Web Usability is far more complex than User Testing and Interaction Design alone. And while interface design is an important consideration, there’s more to a usable site than what’s on the surface. We all know the importance of accessibility and web standards, so let’s take that knowledge one step further and into the realm of usability. In this session Lisa Herrod will redefine the common definition of usability by introducing a greater focus on accessibility and web standards. By taking a more holistic approach you will soon see why usability is more than skin deep.