Guy Leech | Web Directions

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Jeremy Keith — Explaining Ajax

• In: Resources
• By: Guy Leech
• September 30, 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 »

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

• In: Resources
• By: Guy Leech
• September 30, 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 »

Donna Maurer — IA: a “how to”

• In: Resources
• By: Guy Leech
• September 30, 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 »

Thomas Vander Wal — IA for Web Developers

• In: Resources
• By: Guy Leech
• September 30, 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 »

John Allsopp — Microformats

• In: Resources
• By: Guy Leech
• September 30, 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 »

Mark Pesce — Youbiquity

• In: Resources
• By: Guy Leech
• September 30, 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 »

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