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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 »
Derek Featherstone — Designing for Accessibility
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 »
Jeremy Keith — Explaining Ajax
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
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”
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
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
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
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 »
Mark Pesce – You-biquity
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 … Read more »
Derek Featherstone — Designing for Accessibility
- 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 … Read more »
Jeremy Keith — Progressive Enhancement with Hijax
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 … Read more »
Kevin Yank and Cameron Adams — Web APIs and Mashups, work you don’t have to do
- 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 … Read more »
Cheryl Lead and Ben Buchanan — Moving your Organization to Web Standards
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 … Read more »
Andy Clarke — Inspired design
- 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 … Read more »
Molly Holzschlag — The New Professionalism
- 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 … Read more »
Derek Featherstone – Accessibility 2.0, Where do we go from here?
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 … Read more »
Microformats — John Allsopp
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 … Read more »
Dave Greiner and Ben Richardson — What We Learnt Building Campaign Monitor
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 … Read more »
Jeremy Keith — Exploring AJAX
“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. … Read more »
Keynote: Kelly Goto — Designing for Lifestyle
- 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 … Read more »
Notes from the Front Line
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 … Read more »
Introducing Web Directions North — Feb 6 – 10 2007 Vancouver
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 … Read more »
Wanted! Technical Editor (Web Design & Development)
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 … Read more »
It’s coming — Monday

Make Connections at Web Directions
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 … Read more »
Web Directions T shirts and T shirt slogan competition
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 … Read more »
Port80 event in Sydney on the eve of Web Directions
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 … Read more »
Got the developer skills? Then you can “name your price”
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 … Read more »