News from 2006

Memories and articles from back in the day

Digital Web/​Web Directions design competition update

You’ve got until just Monday to get your designs in for the Digital Web design a snow­board com­pe­ti­tion, to win a ticket to the con­fer­ence, trips to Whister on the after con­fer­ence ski trip, as well as a tonne of other great prices, includ­ing 50% off for life on … Read more »

Web Directions North Affiliate Program

Want to come to Web Directions but not sure whether tyou have the bud­get? We’ve just made it a bit eas­ier for you. We’ve cre­ated an oppor­tu­nity for you to get your­self a free ticket, as well as hotel acco­mo­da­tion and places on the ski trip.

Join our affil­i­ate pro­gram … Read more »

Get creative and win a ticket to Web Directions North with Digital Web Magazine

Our very good friends over at Digital Web Magazine are giv­ing away a ticket to the con­fer­ence (includ­ing a post con­fer­ence day ski­ing or snow­board­ing at Whistler), and two run­ner up prizes of a day’s ski­ing or board­ing at Whistler.

To win, sub­mit your very own snow­board design! In the … Read more »

Announcing Webjam 2006 — December 12 at 6.00pm

Got a han­ker­ing to relive a bit of the Web Directions expe­ri­ence? Missed the con­fer­ence but keen to stay in touch with the devel­oper com­mu­nity? Like par­ties? Be there for Webjam on the evening of December 12.

Brought to you by Sydney devel­op­ers Anson Parker and Lachlan Hardy, Webjam will … Read more »

World Usability Day

Last year the usabil­ity com­mu­nity very clev­erly started “World Usability Day” to pro­mote the pro­fes­sion, prac­tice, and impor­tance of usabil­ity. This year, WUD is next week, November 14th, and Events are planned around the world, includ­ing in Sydney, at the State Library.

The focus is com­mu­ni­cat­ing ways of improv­ing the user … Read more »

Web Directions North — Super Early Bird Tickets Now Available

After months of fever­ish behind-​​the-​​scenes work, putting together a killer pro­gram, an amaz­ing lineup of speak­ers, work­ing on dates, venues, the site, a reg­is­tra­tion sys­tem and more, Web Directions North is now offi­cially open for registrations.

After a fan­tas­tic con­fer­ence in Sydney, we are really excited to … Read more »

More podcasts and resources online

As promised, as they come to hand, more of our pod­casts are going online.

We’ve just uploaded, Ben Barren’s “RSS will change every­thing” and Thomas Vander Wal’s “Information archi­tec­ture for the come to me web”.

Follow this link to sub­scribe to our RSS feed for the podcasts.

We also have … Read more »

Laurel Papworth — upcoming courses

One of the meany fab­u­lous local speak­ers at Web Directions this year was Laurel Papworth (whose col­lec­tion of user gen­er­ated video con­tent was fan­tas­ti­cally enter­tain­ing, but whose pre­sen­ta­tion on build­ing online com­mu­ni­ties was all the more inter­est­ing) is giv­ing two courses in the com­ing weeks. If they look remotely rel­e­vant … Read more »

Web 2.0 T Shirt Competition — Winners!

We had to do a bit of delib­er­at­ing on this, and between myself and John and REMO there was cer­tainly some con­tro­versy. Thanks firstly to all those who entered, and all those who wore their t shirts to the conference.

After many heated argu­ments and soul search­ing we decided that the … Read more »

Podcasts and more coming online

Now we’ve all had a lit­tle time to recover after the whirl­wind of the con­fer­ence (one day I hope to be able to just relax and enjoy it) we are putting together the resources that emerged from all the mar­vel­lous speaker’s sessions.

The first two of our pod­casts, recorded and edited … Read more »

Announcing the McFarlane Prize winners

Last Thursday, at the end of day 1 of the con­fer­ence, we announced the win­ners of the inau­gural McFarlane Prize for Excellence in Australian Web Design.

We were very hon­oured to have Nigel McFarlane’s par­ents at the cer­e­mony, and the Prize was awarded by Nigel’s sis­ter, Colleen.

Congratulations to the web devel­op­ment … Read more »

Web Directions and Web Standards Group presents Jeremy Keith in Melbourne this Thursday

Fresh from sell­out shows in Sydney, Ireland’s best export since Guinness, Jeremy Keith will be appear­ing for one night only, in Melbourne, pre­sented by Web Directions and the Web Standards Group.

Centre for Innovation & Technology Commercialisation

Level 1, 257 Collins Street

Melbourne VIC 3000

For more info and to RSVP, see the … Read more »

Andy Clarke — Creating Inspired Design

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

Andy Clarke Portrait

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 »

Laurel Papworth — The business of online communities

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

Laurel Papworth Portrait

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 »

Ben Barren — RSS will change everything

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 »

Dave Greiner and Ben Richardson — The story of Campaign Monitor

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

Dave Greiner and Ben Richardson Portrait

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 »

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

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 »

Jeremy Keith — Hijax

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

Jeremy Keith Portrait

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 »

Derek Featherstone — Accessibility 2.0

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

Derek Featherstone Portrait

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 »

Kelly Goto — The Iterative App

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

Kelly Goto Portrait

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 »

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

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

Thomas Vander Wal Portrait

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 »

Kelly Goto — Designing for Lifestyle

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

Kelly Goto Portrait

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 »

Cameron Adams and Kevin Yank — JavaScript APIs & Mashups

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

Cameron Adams PortraitKevin Yank PortraitAdding 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 »

Derek Featherstone — Designing for Accessibility

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

Derek Featherstone Portrait

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 »

Jeremy Keith — Explaining Ajax

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

Jeremy Keith Portrait

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

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

Cheryl Lead PortraitBen Buchanan PortraitThis 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”

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

Donna Maurer Portrait

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

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

Thomas Vander Wal Portrait

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

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

John Allsop Portrait

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

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

Mark Pesce Portrait

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 »

Mark Pesce – You-​​biquity

Virtual real­ity isn’t the tele­vi­sion of the future, it is the tele­phone of the future

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