• Audio recording of session
• Presentation slides
• Session description
• About Relly Annett-Baker

Presentation slides

Session description

Dear app makers,

I love the stuff you have been putting out recently. Supercool maps, guides, syncing and such make my day. There’s just one little thing. As a content strategist and writer, I’ve noticed that some of your instructions aren’t as clear as they could be. The experience is not as fulfilling as it might be. I know this might not be your favourite part of the process. In fact, they are probably the bits chucked in to get it out the door. And so I have created a session to help ease the pain.

I have a framework for you to build on to make sure that your next app is as pithy as it is pretty and elegant to use as it is coded. I’ll even bring a whole virtual suitcase of apps with fantastic snippets of microcopy to inspire you. It’s a pretty simple concept and it’s a bunch of fun to work on, running alongside your app development.

In one sentence: it’s about creating a fulfilling experience, one that puts you ahead of your competition, simply through the power of the written word.

About Relly Annett-Baker

Relly Annett-Baker lives in a leafy market town with her husband and two small sons. As a result, she eats far too many cakes from Waitrose and can be guaranteed to stand on Lego at least once a day. As well as being content strategist and content writer for Headscape, she is employed as live-in domestic staff by two cats. She also writes articles and jabbers on about copy to anyone who will listen, creates scrapbooks, and continues to procrastinate over the draft for her book, a guide to creating web content for designers and developers, to be published in Spring 2011 by Five Simple Steps. She better finish this biography before her editor spots she isn’t writing her book again.

Follow Relly on Twitter: @RellyAB

• Presentation slides
• Session description
• About Really Annett-Baker

Presentation slides

Session description

Humans are drawn to narrative we can engage with and we may have just found the perfect medium for this sort of narrative interaction in the internet. Every site, app or connection is full of the possibility of story – yes, even yours. Especially yours. But is your site making your user the principle character? Or are they just the forgotten redshirt? And who’s writing the script?

In this talk, Relly will show you how narrative runs as deep through websites as it does through your favourite TV dramas, video games, comic books or musicals, and explain how you can write decent help for your users, define personality for your site and create documents to support everyone involved in creating that experience. These methods will allow your team to work together to create a site rich in personality and tell the story of your brand, right from the navigational opening set-piece on the homepage to the microcopy that is the closing curtain on a successful transaction.

About Really Annett-Baker

Relly Annett-Baker lives in a leafy market town with her husband and two small sons. As a result, she eats far too many cakes from Waitrose and can be guaranteed to stand on Lego at least once a day. As well as being content strategist and content writer for Headscape, she is employed as live-in domestic staff by two cats. She also writes articles and jabbers on about copy to anyone who will listen, creates scrapbooks, and continues to procrastinate over the draft for her book, a guide to creating web content for designers and developers, to be published in Spring 2011 by Five Simple Steps. She better finish this biography before her editor spots she isn't writing her book again.

Follow Relly on Twitter: @RellyAB

• Audio recording of session
• Presentation slides
• Session description
• About Donna Spencer

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Session description

By now we all know that the web is not a publication — that it’s a living, evolving thing. But a lot of content I see still appears to be ‘published’ once and then left alone.

This talk is about what happens after content is published. We’ll talk about how to:

• decide what to create in the first place (and what the best format is)
• identify which content types need to be left alone, and which need to be looked after
• revive existing content and give it a second wind
• check your content is still working for its readers
• put it to sleep when it is time
• put a process in place so you can do this yourself and with distributed content creators

We’ll also discuss how this varies depending on your industry, size of site and type of content.

About Donna Spencer

Donna’s a freelance information architect, interaction designer and writer. That’s a fancy way of saying she plans how to present the things you see on your computer screen, so that they’re easy to understand, engaging and compelling. Things like the navigation, forms, categories and words on intranets, websites, web applications and business systems.

She’s been doing this professionally since 2002, is a regular speaker at Australian and international events and has just completed her third book.

Follow Donna on Twitter: @maadonna

• Audio recording of session
• Presentation slides
• Session description
• About Jeff Croft

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Session description

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.

About Jeff Croft

Jeff Croft is a web designer and developer at Blue Flavor, an experience and design consultancy in Seattle. Beyond his work for Blue Flavor, Jeff is a blogger, speaker, critic, and industry thought leader. Prior to joining Blue Flavor, Jeff was a Senior Designer at World Online, an online journalism outfit responsible for a host of award-winning websites and the place of origin for Django, the Python-based open-source Web framework for perfectionists with deadlines.

Jeff has been designing and developing web sites nearly as long as there have been web sites to design and develop. He created his first web page in 1994 and got his first web-related job in 1995. Although Jeff possess many technical skills, his true passion lies in visual design, user interface, communication, and social media.

Jeff has recently co-authored two books, Pro CSS Techniques, published by Apress, and Web Standards Creativity, published by Friends of ED.

• MP3 of presentation
• Presentation slides
• Session description
• About Donna Spencer

Presentation slides

Session description

We all know that great content is a core part of the website user experience. So why is it so hard to find content that isn’t dull, lifeless and uninteresting — blah, blah, blah?

Web content can be vibrant, interesting and fun. It can draw you in, fill your head and make you learn without having to think. And it’s not really hard to write. Three simple tricks can turn poor content into a great experience — remember that readers care more about themselves than you; write in real words with authentic voice; play show and tell.

This presentation will discuss these principles, with plenty of funny and not-so-funny examples. You’ll go away with practical steps to make your writing kick-ass. And you won’t even have to think.

About Donna Spencer