WalkerTek Blog

This past October, I had the privilege of attending “An Event Apart”, one of the leading conferences for web developers in the United States. Organized by A List Apart, a premiere web development blog, the topics of the event ranged from content strategy, to web design, to development practices, as well as future technologies that the web is moving toward.

The conference tours across the United States, with a different collection of lecturers at each. I attended the Chicago conferences and I could not have been happier with the panel of speakers. If anyone ever has the opportunity to go to An Event Apart, make sure you go: there are great speakers, great attendees, and overall a great learning environment for a web developer or designer at any stage of the game.

Summary of the Lectures:

• Jeffery Zeldman, founder of Happy Cog, spoke about how to better ensure that we are addressing our clients problems, as well as looking for clues to problems they don’t realize they have.
• Jason Santa Maria, staff member of the School of Visual Arts, as well as Creative Director for A List Apart, talked about addressing the small details of the design and interactions of your website to achieve the big-picture goal of user experience.
• Kristina Halvorson, founder of Brain Traffic, gave an awesome presentation about the placement of content strategy in the life-cycle of website development, as well as easy-to-swallow techniques to get a grasp of the content on pre-existing sites and use that to re-architecture more pertinent data for your site redesigns.
• Dan Brown, a brilliant mind in the field of Information Architecture (IA), spoke about “concept models”, a system he devised to help insure total coverage of client requirements and how they relate internally to their site. Dan’s talk followed up Halvorson’s perfectly and was a real eye-opener as to how companies such as his (Eight Shapes) work with content-abundant sites such as CNN.com.
• Whitney Hess spoke about user experience, and the simple, grass-root steps anyone can take to begin to improve the UX in their site. Citing past examples from her freelance career, she demonstrated what techniques other companies used to improve their site experience for their target audiences.
• Andy Clarke, the amazingly talented man behind Stuff and Nonsense, lectured about designing site mock-ups inside of the browser, instead of in graphic design software. While not for everyone, his technique pointed out how web mock-ups offer user interaction and faster changes to type and layouts – a technique he used when designing The New Internationalist (note: as of 11/09/2009, his design hasn’t been implemented yet).
• Eric Meyer, noted HTML and CSS expert, spoke about how we can use JavaScript to handle many design issues we have, as browsers are now powerful enough to handle the work. Like Clarke, his view isn’t for everyone, but he did take the audience through a list of noted examples of how we have been relying on JavaScript to ease design issues.
• Aaron Gustafson, following Meyer’s lead, talked about eCSStender, which is a JavaScript library to level the playing field of browser capabilities as well as create your own CSS toolkits.
• Simon Willison spoke about development technique to help you design and build sites faster by prototyping with features native to your language of chose, such as libraries and frameworks, as well as tandem and team development approaches.
• Luke Wroblewski gave a phenomenal talk on web form strategies: why we don’t like using them, which layouts work better for which situations, and what you can do to make the form experience more pleasant.
• Dan Rubin’s talk, entitled “Designing Virtual Realism”, showcased examples of software trying to bridge the gap from non-tangible mediums to actual entities in nature. He also spoke about techniques you can use to make your websites or applications seem more “real”.
• Lastly, Dan Cederholm became the authoritative leader of progressive CSS enrichment with his talk, as well as his website Do Websites Need To Be Experienced Exactly The Same In Every Browser?. His summary was that we should not be striving to provide the same experience in every browser, but instead to build the best experience for every browser.