A presentation given at Web Directions South, Sydney Australia, September 28 2006.
Thomas will provide an overview of information architecture for web designers and developers. He will cover the what and why, with a sprinkling of how. Knowing how to work with an information architect or how to build the skills into your role will be covered.
A presentation given at Web Directions South, Sydney Australia, September 28 2006.
The problem of bringing richer semantics to the world wide web has been challenging standards bodies and developers for several years. Approaches like “The Semantic Web” promise much, but require us to throw away the accumulated efforts, skills and tools of more than a decade. Over the last year or two, an evolutionary approach to richer semantics for today’s web, based on HTML, current developer practices, and tools, called Microformats, has been spreading like wildfire among tool developers, and web publishers large and small.
In this presentation John Allsopp looks at why microformats are necessary, what organisations like Yahoo! are doing with them, and how your organisation can benefit from them right now.
A presentation given at Web Directions South, Sydney Australia, September 29 2006.
The collection of social and information technologies informally known as Web2.0 have created a rich universe of applications – but a scattershot one. We plug lots of our information into websites everywhere – MySpace and Digg, Friendster and Yahoo!, and everywhere, Google, Google, Google. Yet it’s as if we’re spending all of our time building information silos; piles of data which are essentially unconnected. It’s getting dull. How many times do I need to list my friends, or my contact information, or my favorite bands?
We know why it’s happening: commercial interests are overruling the natural pooling and sharing of information that would actually bring some utility to this mountain of data we’re generating about ourselves. Yet the pressure to share is building up: the recent explosive emergence of mash-ups, which juxtapose two or three or more services in unique and valuable ways shows us that the hybrid always trumps the thoroughbred. And that’s just on internet services. Very few of us control the mountain of data we generate as we pass through this world – everyone wants it (for their own purposes), yet we – who are creating it – never have access to it.
It’s time to revisit the entire philosophy of interaction design on the Web, time to move the focus away from the site-as-resource, toward an idea of the site-as-personal-enabler. What we each bring to a website – or rather, what we should bring to a website – is a wealth of information about ourselves. This is the real resource of Web2.0, and the next place the Web is going. The exuberance around social networks shows us that people want to connect – it’s time for designers to build the tools which will truly enable that connection.
Virtual reality isn’t the television of the future, it is the telephone of the future Background We’re in a time and place where anything is possible; much like at the birth of the World Wide Web We are at least 98% identical to chimpanzees. We have now found the gene that gives us a bigger […]
Screen magnifiers make graphic text blurry, but alt attributes still render as proper text If we’re not writing scripts to suppress the right click menu, perhaps we should avoid suppressing the showing of alt text on images in IE Square brackets are often used to separate links to different document formats; when read through a […]
Public health warning – there will be code! Taking notes on a code-heavy presentation is a difficult challenge; I strongly recommend you grab Jeremy’s presentation slides to accompany these notes. AJAX is often treated as all or nothing technology, much like plugins – either you have it, or you don’t. Ideally you want to have […]
MP3 of presentation (to come) Transcript (to come) Presentation slides Session description LiveBlog post About Cameron Adams and Kevin Yank Presentation slides Session description Adding JavaScript to your portfolio used to mean more work. Thanks to the wide range of APIs springing up from the likes of Google (Mail, Maps, Ads, Calendar, Search, etc.), Yahoo! […]
Cheryl’s experience with Virgin Money I’m going to save the world by making my company go to web standards – Cheryl Lead Used numbers to sell the idea X more applicants if we make it accessible 400,000 legally blind web users in the UK. Tesco launched Tesco Access and made 13 million pounds more via […]
I’m not going to talk about CSS today, I’m hardly going to mention standards Art is design without compromise – Jeffrey Veen Limitations of what we do: Environmental – inflexibility of 2D screen; Materials – limitations of CSS et all; Medium – poor support in older browsers; Ourselves – unlearning what we have learned from […]
Vast chasm between what consumers understand the web to be and what is required of us to build the web. Mum doesn’t need to know XML, XHTML et all to get online, post photos, have a blog. This is fantastic and needs to remain. The chasm has gotten worse since the early days of the […]
where are we right now Checklist syndrome – Section 508, WCAG, IBM Web Accessibility. These lead to a mindset of compliance over anything else. Accessibility is not just a technical endeavour or a quality assurance process. In reality accessibility is about removing barriers; it is personal. Derek demonstrates a ‘typical’ search bar – mentions that […]
How can technology make people’s lives better? John has a 10 month old daughter; he doesn’t get out much. He wants to see a movie, but what good movies are out right now? Centralized solutions – Someone owns this data, we have to trust them not to be biased. Search – 38,000,000 results for the […]
Background started IT firm ‘Switch IT’ during the first web bubble 2003-2004 approached by more customers to send bulk email Always something missing from existing applications – the seed of idea is planted Took a few hours per day for 6 months to have a go at building their dream email campaign system Designed exclusively […]
“what is Ajax? That is what I’m going to try and answer today” Introduces AJAX and the birth of the term. Maybe it is just a buzzword; maybe that’s not a bad thing X in AJAX adds “the X factor” – if anyone’s looking to coin the next buzzword, stick with X. Clearly we need […]
Everyone’s talking about the internet, what’s working, not working for them. Different cultural implications of technology – very different whilst very ‘the same’ “two years ahead, ten steps ahead” – what will we have to work with in 2 years from now? Designing for lifestyle is where we really are – dive deeply into immersive […]
Web Directions South is the must-attend event of the year for anyone serious about web development
Phil Whitehouse General Manager, DT Sydney
