Program detail | Web Directions South

September 25 and 26 will be 2 full days of in depth presentations across three tracks - design, development and management/strategy, as well as top notch opening and closing keynotes - from international and local experts with a broad range of real world expertise.

And then don’t forget our workshops on the 23rd and 24th as well.

Trying to convince someone you really need to go? Print our executive summary [PDF].

Keynotes

• Opening keynote: New media - new business
• Closing keynote: The human network - sharing, knowledge and power in the 21st century

Design

• Creating sexy stylesheets
• Elegant web typography
• Sensing context in mobile design
• Web app accessibility
• Designing our way through data
• Integrating accessibility into design
• Interaction design case studies
• From disordered to managed usability in an Agile environment

Development

• Ajax security
• Javascript libraries - Putting the cross in cross-browser compatible (2 hour session)
• Choosing the right web application framework (2 hour session)
• Web APIs, Oauth and OpenID: A developer’s guide
• Start Using Web Vector Graphics Today

Management/strategy

• The business of being social
• Semantic web for distributed social networks
• Custom V CMS – don’t take sides
• Starting and running a successful web development business
• Strategies for social media engagement

Opening keynote: New media - new business

Lynne D Johnson

Lynne will set the tone of the conference this year with insights into the future of media drawn from her wealth of experience in business, media and online communities as Senior Editor at Fast Company.

Closing keynote: The human network - sharing, knowledge and power in the 21st century

Mark Pesce

Mark’s closing keynote was an amazing, stimulating and inspiring end to Web Directions South in 2006 and 2007, leaving people talking about it long after the event. He’s certain to do it again in 2008: do not miss this session.

Creating sexy stylesheets

Jina Bolton

Being a CSS expert is about more than just memorizing selectors. It’s also about working to improve the maintainability and efficiency of your style sheets, planning for the future, and mastering your workflow. This session will look at pushing the limits of CSS to create stunning interfaces using clean, meaningful markup. We’ll also look at CSS 3 and at what the future of Web design could look like when CSS 3 finally becomes mainstream.

Elegant Web Typography

Jeff Croft

Even in our day of web videos and podcasts, text is still the king of content on the web. Great typographic sensitivity is one of the hallmarks of sites that exude a professional confidence. From type sizing and coloring to leading, kerning, and measures to proper usage of quotes, dashes, and bullets, to choosing appropriate typefaces, this session will demonstrate using CSS and other modern web technologies to display type on screen with elegance and impact.

Sensing context in mobile design

Gabriel White

Mainstream mobile devices are being loaded with sensors. These devices can be used to create experiences that are tailored, adaptive and responsive to the way people live and work. Location-awareness allows devices to respond to place, networked address books enable socially rich communication experiences, and motion and gestural sensors empower designers to respond to context of use. All these elements are creating a ’sensitive ecosystem’; mobile devices that adapt gracefully to context and use.

This presentation will explore some of the design and technology trends that are shaping design for mobile devices, show examples of devices and services that are starting to take advantage of these trends, then explain how designers need to rethink design problems to take advantage of this technological ground-shift.

Web app accessibility

Derek Featherstone

Developers, designers, and information architects work together to translate wireframes, prototypes, and mockups into functioning sites and applications. Examine the accessibility challenges presented by common design patterns. Learn practical solutions that translate an interface’s nuances and the intent of the design into meaningful code—to help ensure an accessible user experience for people with disabilities.

Designing our way through data

Jeffrey Veen

The hype around Web 2.0 continues to increase to the point of absurdity. We hear all about a rich web of data, but what can we learn from these trends to actually apply to our designs? You’ll take a tour through the past, present, and future of the web to answer these questions and more:

• What can we learn from the rich history of data visualization to
  
  inform our designs today?
• How can we do amazing work while battle the constant constraints we
  
  find ourselves up against?
• How do we really incorporate users into our practice of
  
  user experience?

Integrating accessibility into design

Ruth Ellison

When developing websites or web applications, we often follow the principles of web standards, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and other accessibility guidelines. But is this enough?

In this session, Ruth will look at how we can develop accessible web products by taking a holistic approach to web accessibility. She will look at different ways of incorporating accessibility into the design process to produce accessible and useful user experiences.

Interaction design case studies

Daniel Burka

User interface design is an iterative process — the design of Digg and Pownce have been a study in evolution and adaptation. This talk will inspect the why and how of these iterations by looking at specific case studies from the two projects as well as previous client work Daniel has tackled.

The case studies will examine specific user interface challenges that have arisen and will chop them up into their various bits. How do I identify a challenge? What is the best approach for getting started? How do I solve the problem conceptually and technically? How will I know if I solved the challenge successfully? Case studies have been selected that are especially pertinent outside of their specific contexts to help you in your everyday UI design.

The presentation will focus on design inspiration, decision-making processes, technical solutions, and learning from missteps as part of a designer’s iterative process.

From disordered to managed usability in an Agile environment

Teale Shapcott

Usability practice closely resembles the traditional software development approach in its formality and insistence on up-front analysis and design. Usability and design is an iterative process, but not agile. So how can design and usability be effectively embedded into an agile development environment? In this presentation, the tension between agile development and usability is examined and how Suncorp design and development teams overcame the challenges to bridge the gulf between these approaches.

Ajax security

Douglas Crockford

Security design is an important, but often neglected, component of system design. In this session, Douglas Crockford, creator of Javascript Object Notation, will outline the security issues that must be considered in the architecture of Ajax applications.

The design of the browser did not anticipate the needs of multiparty applications. The browser’s security model frustrates useful activities and allows some very dangerous activities. This talk will look at the small set of options before us that will determine the future of the Web.

During this session, attendees will:

• Learn why effective security is an inherent feature of good design;
• Experience a real-time demo of a Ajax client/server system based on sound security principles
• See how to apply secure design to rich web applications.

Javascript libraries - Putting the cross in cross-browser compatible

Craig Sharkie

No longer are search engines the main contenders when you’re shopping for JavaScript solutions. For sophisticated, cross-browser effects which degrade gracefully and don’t impede accessibility, libraries are the new heavy weights. But which library do you want in your corner?

The crop of polished, opensource libraries bring a vast array of visual effects and functionality to leverage in your projects and we’ll introduce you to the power houses. We’ll run jQuery, the YUI, and Prototype up against pure Javascript in a tag team event that will challenge even the hardiest code warriors.

In this special 2 hour session local and international developers will run libraries through their paces giving you real world insights in to how a library can help you knockout the toughest scripting challenge.

Choosing the right web application framework

Lucas Chan

The new era of web applications has introduced to us a number of frameworks designed to aid in rapid development. But, no matter what your preferred language, finding a suitable framework is not usually an easy task. Making the wrong choice can prove to be both costly and time consuming.

In this intensive 2 hour session you’ll hear from several developers who’ll discuss which frameworks they chose, why they love them; why they hate them, and gain valuable insights to help you choose the right tools for your job. We will focus primarily on Rails (Ruby), Cake (PHP), Struts/Spring (Java) and Django (Python).

Expect to hear discussion ranging from framework features & tools, development speed, source management, bug tracking, collaboration, interoperability, performance, scalability and deployment, as well as recommendations on how to hit the ground running.

Web APIs, Oauth and OpenID: A developer’s guide

Myles Eftos

Online web applications are big business, with many people relying on the cloud for data storage and workflow. These days, an API is an essential part of any online system, but this presents authentication and authorisation issues for the humble web developer. Learn how to create Web APIs, how OpenID and Oauth works and what you need to do to implement them.

Start Using Web Vector Graphics Today

Dmitry Baranovskiy

With the growth of interactivity in web applications we are pushing Javascript to its limits, not to mention the limits of HTML and CSS. And so we spend our days resorting to Flash, waiting for that distant time when browser support for CSS3 will come to our rescue and allow us to create the UIs we dream of. But this is not the way it has to be: there is a little known secret weapon right here in most modern browsers. Yes, even in IE6.

Dmitry Baranovskiy is here to tell you about Canvas, SVG and VML. Come along and be amazed by standards based UI wizardry you can start implementing in projects right here, right now.

Where’s the money? The business of being social

Laurel Papworth

It’s not true that there are no proven monetisation models for online communities; in fact, there are distinct revenue streams that have been successful over many years. This session looks at the soft returns on investment for engaging with user generated content, communication and collaboration with the consumer and then moves into how social networks earn money for their investors and developers.

The aim of this session is to limit the slapping of banner ads on every niche community online - you might be surprised to learn that the least profitable revenue model is… Advertising! Come, spend an hour on the Dark Side, and find out which social networks are making money, how much and by what means and learn about the business models in this growth industry.

Semantic web for distributed social networks

David Peterson

Hear how Drupal and MediaWiki, were enlisted along with pixie dust, FOAF, RDF, OWL, SPARQL and Linked Data; basically all the Semantic Web stuff. 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 and short timelines possible.

We took a look at basically every acronym and buzzword you could shake a stick at; tough decisions were made and only the best were kept. Take a critical look at the success of a network that will propel climate change research into the next generation of the Web.

Custom V CMS – don’t take sides

Diana Mounter

When I was introduced into the role of managing web projects, I naively believed a Content Management System would solve all my problems. Growing my little empire of content authors I had little idea of what was to come- before I knew it I had created a monster.

I went searching for a white knight to slay this monster and was tempted by the delights of custom builds, agile development, and ruby on rails. And off I went following the trail of breadcrumbs into the forest eating them as I went, but then oh, how do I get back to my old friend CMS? Hmmm.

This session will help you know how to make the choice between the sweet delights of custom builds and the faithful workhorse CMS. How to get them to play nice, grow gracefully, and present together as a seamless front-end user experience.

Starting and running a successful web development business

Kay Smoljak

Working for yourself is a dream that many web designers and developers have. You can pick and choose your clients, work in your pajamas, and sleep in until 10am every day if you want to. But there’s a more serious side to starting a business, and lots of factors to consider if you decide to head out on your own. Kay will share the story of Clever Starfish’s journey from a seed of an idea to a thriving small business, with lots of handy hints for both things to do, and things not to do, along the way.

Strategies for social media engagement

Grant Young

With so many social networks blooming, all with different participants and methods of interaction, it can be hard to determine where to invest your energy, time and $$.

The session will provide ideas and a “background briefing” to help you answer the question:

• why is social media important to my organisation?
• what is the ROI for social media?
• how can I evaluate which approaches are right for me/my organisation?
• what sort of activities can/should I undertake in these spaces?

This is not a technical session and although we will briefly touch on some popular sites, the focus will be on how you and your organisation can effectively and authentically engage participants in the social media world.

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