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2006 September | Web Directions

Podcasts, slides and other presentation materials

Andy Clarke - Creating Inspired Design

• In: Resources
• By: Guy Leech
• September 30th, 2006

A presentation given at Web Directions South, Sydney Australia, September 29 2006.

Designers are more than mere pixel pushers. The role of the creative designer working on the web has changed and will continue to change faster than ever before. In this session, Andy Clarke will discuss how designers should now play the pivotal part in the creation of engaging user experiences, binding together the roles of information architects, content authors and technical developers. It’s time to put designers in the hot seat.

See the slides and hear the podcast »

• Tags
• copywriting
• design
• information architecture
• user experience
• wds06

Laurel Papworth - The business of online communities

• In: Resources
• By: Guy Leech
• September 30th, 2006

A presentation given at Web Directions South, Sydney Australia, September 29 2006.

It seems that everyone is talking about user generated content and online communities these days. But how will citizen journalism, user-generated content, the Blogosphere, tagging, ranking, and Wiki knowledge reshape branding and your business? How do you manage and scale this community and then hand control to your users (and how do you explain to the boss what you’ve just done?). Gain an understanding that dialogue is the new content and learn how to maximise the benefits (and minimise the pitfalls) of creating online communities in this presentation.

See the slides and hear the podcast »

• Tags
• folksonomy
• online communities
• social media
• social networks
• user generated content
• wds06
• wikis

Ben Barren - RSS will change everything

• In: Resources
• By: Guy Leech
• September 30th, 2006

A presentation given at Web Directions South, Sydney Australia, September 28 2006

RSS and syndication offer exciting new ways for organisations to manage information, communicate internally, and to reach out to their customers and stakeholders. Are you ready for this? A lot of product names are springing up in this space, but to make a great decision about what can happen in your organisation you need to understand the technology, its potential and challenges.

See the slides and hear the podcast »

• Tags
• rss
• wds06

Dave Greiner and Ben Richardson - The story of Campaign Monitor

• In: Resources
• By: Guy Leech
• September 30th, 2006

A presentation given at Web Directions South, Sydney Australia, September 28 2006.

Campaign Monitor is a great home grown web app success story. Dave and Ben will share their experiences of taking an idea they believed in, working like mad to implement it, and getting it to market. Along the way you’ll hear about how the idea was born, deciding what to build, pricing, building the product, getting the word out, handling support from Sydney, and all those things you’ll never know till you try.

See the slides and hear the podcast »

• Tags
• career
• project management
• strategy
• wds06
• web apps

Gian Sampson-Wild - Managing accessibility compliance for the Commonwealth Games

• In: Resources
• By: Guy Leech
• September 30th, 2006

A presentation given at Web Directions South, Sydney Australia, September 28 2006.

Melbourne recently hosted the 18th Commonwealth Games. Gian Sampson-Wild worked as the accessibility specialist for the Games for over two years, responsible for a variety of issues including the accessibility compliance of the web site and training of on-site and off-site developers such as Ticketmaster7 and Microsoft. Management at the Commonwealth Games were particularly cognisant of the precedent set by SOCOG and therefore made accessibility a priority. Gian will talk about the accessibility issues relevant to such a major event, such as creating accessible versions of venue maps and ensuring HTML fragments provided by third parties did not contravene accessibility requirements.

See the slides and hear the podcast »

• Tags
• accessibility
• project management
• wds06

Jeremy Keith - Hijax

• In: Resources
• By: Guy Leech
• September 30th, 2006

A presentation given at Web Directions South, Sydney Australia, September 29 2006.

Hijax is all about applying progressive enhancement to Ajax. In the Hijax model, JavaScript isn’t used for advanced intensive processing. Instead, the XMLHttpRequest object acts like a dumb waiter, passing information backwards and forwards between the client and the server. By hijacking the regular functionality and replacing it with an enhanced Ajax version, you can be assured that your website will work with or without Ajax.

See the slides and hear the podcast »

• Tags
• ajax
• javascript
• wds06

Derek Featherstone - Accessibility 2.0

• In: Resources
• By: Guy Leech
• September 30th, 2006

A presentation given at Web Directions South, Sydney Australia, September 28 2006.

Using the current state of web accessibility as our launch point, Derek will explore some of the fundamental issues that are holding us back from an accessible web that truly makes a difference to people with disabilities.

See the slides and hear the podcast »

• Tags
• accessibility
• wds06

Kelly Goto - The Iterative App

• In: Resources
• By: Guy Leech
• September 30th, 2006

A presentation given at Web Directions South, Sydney Australia, September 29 2006.

Between the diverse demands of clients, bosses, engineers, and designers, Web application design has reached a new level of frenzy and discord. You know what we mean, and so does Kelly Goto, who has refined Web process and project management to an art form. In this session, she takes you through the application development process. Learn the behind-the-scenes techniques behind rapid prototyping, and see how to enhance your current process to include iterative usability testing cycles. You’ll also discover how to verify development requirements before you code by employing PDF prototypes and HTML click-throughs. With a collaborative mindset and the proper process in place, design and engineering teams can work together and launch the “iterative app” successfully.

See the slides and hear the podcast »

• Tags
• agile methodology
• project management
• wds06
• web apps

Thomas Vander Wal - IA for the “Come to Me Web”

• In: Resources
• By: Guy Leech
• September 30th, 2006

A presentation given at Web Directions South, Sydney Australia, September 29 2006.

In this specialised session Thomas gets us up to speed with his "Come to Me Web" framework for structuring information and web sites. This framework includes the "Model of Attraction", Personal InfoCloud, and Folksonomy. This ads the focus of designing and developing for information use across devices and context. With this framework we can consider mobile, broadband, web storage and personal off-line storage of information and its implications as we structure our information and sites.

See the slides and hear the podcast »

• Tags
• folksonomy
• information architecture
• wds06

Kelly Goto - Designing for Lifestyle

• In: Resources
• By: Guy Leech
• September 30th, 2006

A presentation given at Web Directions South, Sydney Australia, September 28 2006.

Interaction design is no longer limited to the web. The concept of user experience is being redefined as multiple delivery methods of social and business interaction merge into our lifestyles. As design migrates from the web to mobile devices we carry and interact with on a daily basis, our approach must also shift into cycles of design and research centered around the way people actually live. In this enlightening session, design ethnographer and web veteran Kelly Goto discusses the evolution of Web, handheld, and product interfaces and their cultural impact. Learn how companies are utilizing ethnographic-based research to conduct rapid, immersive studies of people and their lifestyles to inform the usefulness and viability of interfaces both online and offline.

See the slides and hear the podcast »

• Tags
• ethnography
• interaction design
• mobile
• user experience
• wds06

Cameron Adams and Kevin Yank - JavaScript APIs & Mashups

• In: Resources
• By: Guy Leech
• September 30th, 2006

A presentation given at Web Directions South, Sydney Australia, September 29 2006.

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! (Flickr, Maps, Search, etc.) and Microsoft (Virtual Earth), JavaScript can actually save you a lot of work these days. JavaScript veterans Cameron Adams (The Man In Blue) and Kevin Yank (SitePoint) will take a whirlwind (and somewhat irreverant) tour of the "free stuff" you get from JavaScript today, and the creative things people are doing with it.

See the slides and hear the podcast »

• Tags
• APIs
• javascript
• wds06

Derek Featherstone - Designing for Accessibility

• In: Resources
• By: Guy Leech
• September 30th, 2006

A presentation given at Web Directions South, Sydney Australia, September 29 2006.

A combination of practical "how-to" examples alongside several "how-not-to" cases from real accessibilty assessments and testing sessions.

See the slides and hear the podcast »

• Tags
• accessibility
• wds06

Jeremy Keith - Explaining Ajax

• In: Resources
• By: Guy Leech
• September 30th, 2006

A presentation given at Web Directions South, Sydney Australia, September 28 2006.

Apart from being the buzzword de jour, what is this Ajax stuff that everyone is talking about? Take a look at some implementations out there and start thinking about how Ajax can add value to your site.

See the slides and hear the podcast »

• Tags
• ajax
• coding
• javascript
• wds06

Cheryl Lead and Ben Buchanan - Moving your organisation to web standards

• In: Resources
• By: Guy Leech
• September 30th, 2006

A presentation given at Web Directions South, Sydney Australia, September 29 2006.

This was one of our most loved sessions last year, so much so that we decided to do it again this year, with some new faces, some new experiences. With speakers from both government/education as well as the private sector, get advice from those who’ve already been there on dealing with recalcitrant management, teams members and agencies, building by stealth and making incremental change.

See the slides and hear the podcast »

• Tags
• agile methodology
• government
• project management
• strategy
• wds06
• web standards

Donna Maurer - IA: a “how to”

• In: Resources
• By: Guy Leech
• September 30th, 2006

A presentation given at Web Directions South, Sydney Australia, September 29 2006.

There are 2 aspects to making IA work in a project - an understanding of the key principles of information architecture and a knowledge of activities to put them into practice. This presentation will examine the “how to’s” of information architecture. We’ll look at how to take a content inventory, analyse content, conduct card sorting, analyse user research, choose the right structure, create an information architecture and test it. These activities drive an informed design process so you can be confident in your decisions and communicate them to other people.

See the slides and hear the podcast »

• Tags
• information architecture
• wds06

Thomas Vander Wal - IA for Web Developers

• In: Resources
• By: Guy Leech
• September 30th, 2006

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.

See the slides and hear the podcast »

• Tags
• information architecture
• wds06

John Allsopp - Microformats

• In: Resources
• By: Guy Leech
• September 30th, 2006

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.

See the slides and hear the podcast »

• Tags
• coding
• microformats
• wds06
• web standards

Mark Pesce - Youbiquity

• In: Resources
• By: Guy Leech
• September 30th, 2006

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.

See the slides and hear the podcast »

• Tags
• interaction design
• online communities
• social media
• social networks
• wds06

Mark Pesce – You-biquity

• In: notes
• By: Andrew
• September 29th, 2006

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 ...

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Derek Featherstone - Designing for Accessibility

• In: notes
• By: Andrew
• September 29th, 2006

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 ...

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Jeremy Keith - Progressive Enhancement with Hijax

• In: notes
• By: Andrew
• September 29th, 2006

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 ...

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Kevin Yank and Cameron Adams - Web APIs and Mashups, work you don’t have to do

• In: notes
• By: Andrew
• September 29th, 2006

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 ...

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Cheryl Lead and Ben Buchanan - Moving your Organization to Web Standards

• In: notes
• By: Andrew
• September 29th, 2006

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 ...

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Andy Clarke - Inspired design

• In: notes
• By: Andrew
• September 29th, 2006

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 ...

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Molly Holzschlag - The New Professionalism

• In: notes
• By: Andrew
• September 29th, 2006

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 ...

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Derek Featherstone – Accessibility 2.0, Where do we go from here?

• In: notes
• By: Andrew
• September 28th, 2006

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 ...

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Microformats - John Allsopp

• In: notes
• By: Andrew
• September 28th, 2006

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 ...

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Dave Greiner and Ben Richardson - What We Learnt Building Campaign Monitor

• In: notes
• By: Andrew
• September 28th, 2006

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 ...

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Jeremy Keith - Exploring AJAX

• In: notes
• By: Andrew
• September 28th, 2006

“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. ...

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Keynote: Kelly Goto - Designing for Lifestyle

• In: notes
• By: Andrew
• September 28th, 2006

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 ...

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Notes from the Front Line

• In: Uncategorized, events
• By: Andrew
• September 28th, 2006

The following posts will be in raw note form for now so as to allow me to keep up with the presentations while getting as much online as possible. When I get some more this evening I will come back and expand upon the points. Caution: falling character debris... [tags] wdo6, raw ...

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Introducing Web Directions North - Feb 6-10 2007 Vancouver

• In: Uncategorized
• By: john
• September 26th, 2006

Dave Shea, Derek Featherstone, Maxine Sherrin and John Allsopp are proud to annouce Web Directions North 2007. Workshops, a two day conference featuring an amazing lineup of speakers, and two days of skiing and boarding (or just relaxing) at Blackcomb/Whistler. All the details are available right now at the ...

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Wanted! Technical Editor (Web Design & Development)

• In: Uncategorized
• By: john
• September 25th, 2006

Sitepoint, Melbourne based publishing company, and platinum sponsors of Web Directions South, are looking for a web design and development expert technical editor to join their team. Read on if you are interested. Technical Editor for Sitepoint Want to work with the team behind one of the most popular web sites in ...

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It’s coming - Monday

• In: cool, events
• By: john
• September 22nd, 2006

Make Connections at Web Directions

• In: cool
• By: john
• September 21st, 2006

For a good while now, Cam "the man in blue" Adams, and Tim "toolman" Lucas have been toiling away on a a killer webapp to compliment web directions, "web connections". To prove the adage "great minds think alike" only a couple of weeks ago d.Construct's, Backnetwork ...

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Web Directions T shirts and T shirt slogan competition

• In: Uncategorized
• By: john
• September 18th, 2006

We announced our "Web Direction's design your own web 2.0 t shirt slogan and wear it to the conference" competition a few days ago. Sadly, because a trailing slash is sometimes important (well, the absence of it is), the link in that post was broken. So one more time, here ...

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Port80 event in Sydney on the eve of Web Directions

• In: events
• By: john
• September 17th, 2006

The indefatigable Miles Burke, of Bam Creative, and one of the founders of the Web industry association Port80, along with a whole tribe of sandgropers (that's folks from Western Australia for our non Australian audience) are once more heading east for Web Directions. Each year more of them ...

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Got the developer skills? Then you can “name your price”

• In: Uncategorized
• By: john
• September 15th, 2006

Yesterday I was having a chat with someone from a large Australian site who do all kinds of interesting work. They'd have to be close to one of the largest Australian sites in terms of traffic, and do lots of innovative stuff. We were talking about how easy, or ...

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WE05 podcasts - back online

• In: podcasts
• By: john
• September 9th, 2006

Last year the conference we were associated with, WE05, was almost fully podcast within hours of the close of play - one of the first, if not the first fully podcast conference we know of. Sadly earlier this year, the podcasts went AWOL, but as a means of ...

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First ever Web Directions Tee Shirts

• In: cool
• By: john
• September 5th, 2006

The last couple of years, the number one request has been for conference tee shirts. So we are excited to announce the Web Directions Tee Shirts, featuring our new logo, designed by guru and web superstar, Dave "CSS Zen Garden" Shea, available online now....

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Job Post: gnoos.com.au looking for a developer

• In: jobs
• By: john
• September 4th, 2006

Ben Barren of gnoos.com.au, recently launched aussie blog search engine, are looking for a developer. If you are keen, drop him a line. In fact, lots of people ask us for recommendations of freelance or potential in-house developers, and from what I can tell, demand far outstrips supply. So, if you are ...

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Announcing the Sitepoint closing party for Web Directions

• In: Uncategorized
• By: john
• September 4th, 2006

Last year, our impromptu closing night drinks at the Pumphouse Hotel Darling Harbour [1] was a great success. Tired but elated after three days of workshops and the conference, having packed up and left the venue, I walked down to the pub expecting to see a few people having ...

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The Australian Office of the W3C

• In: Uncategorized
• By: john
• September 4th, 2006

I think to those coming to or interested in Web Directions, the W3C, or World Wide Web Consortium, founded by Sir Timothy Berners-Lee, will be very well known. We've had great presentations by Dean Jackson from the W3C the last two years, and this year he's the coding judge ...

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Welcome Crumpler as a supporter

• In: Uncategorized
• By: john
• September 4th, 2006

If you've got a lot of portable digital gear, laptops, cameras, ipods, game machines, tamagotchis, then you soon realize you need really good bags for keeping it in one piece while lugging it to and from the office, on places, in cars, where ever. A couple of years back, when I ...

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Emily Boyd and Stephen Cox: debrief

• In: Uncategorized
• By: maxine
• September 1st, 2006

Thanks so much to all who came along last night, but most of all thank you to Emily Boyd and Stephen Cox who went to a lot of trouble to prepare their presentations. More on those in a second. It really was great to see so many new faces last ...

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