Workshops in detail

  • Andy Clarke — Tran­scend­ing CSS

    Mod­ern tech­niques for design­ing a beau­ti­ful web

    Pow­er­house Museum

    Tues­day 25th Sep­tem­ber 2007 9.00am to 5.00pm

    Descrip­tion

    Andy Clarke PortraitDo you feel that we have reached our full poten­tial for what is pos­si­ble using cur­rently prac­ti­cal CSS? Do you wish that there are ways to achieve the strik­ing, the rad­i­cal, the beau­ti­ful with CSS?

    In this full-​​day ses­sion, designer and author of the best-​​selling Tran­scend­ing CSS: The Fine Art of Web Design will chal­lenge you to think dif­fer­ently about cre­at­ing inspired design for web using mean­ing­ful markup and CSS. The ses­sion will be packed full of visual inspi­ra­tion, backed up by prac­ti­cal tech­niques for cre­at­ing amaz­ing work for the web.

    Who is this work­shop for?

    This work­shop is not designed for begin­ners or new­com­ers to CSS. It will not teach you the basics. To get the most of this work­shop you will be an inter­me­di­ate to advanced user of CSS and be famil­iar with mean­ing­ful, acces­si­ble markup.

    If you are a visual designer look­ing to advance your CSS skills with new tech­niques and tech­nolo­gies, or a tech­ni­cally minded devel­oper who wants to under­stand more about work­ing visu­ally, this work­shop will take your knowl­edge of CSS to the lim­its of what is cur­rently pos­si­ble and beyond.

    What are the learn­ing outcomes?

    By the end of the day you will be able to

    • see markup in a new light, from the con­tent out
    • cre­ate ‘advanced’ CSS selec­tors and know how best to use them
    • know how to push what is pos­si­ble with today’s CSS floats and positioning
    • cre­ate excit­ing lay­outs and inter­faces from the most min­i­mal of markup
    • tackle browsers issues within a pro­gres­sive web design workflow
    • move for­ward with pro­gres­sive tech­niques in actual client work

    Register now for this workshop

  • Lau­rel Pap­worth — Build­ing and main­tain­ing vibrant social net­works for your business

    Pow­er­house Museum

    Tues­day 25th Sep­tem­ber 2007 9.00am to 5.00pm

    Descrip­tion

    Laurel Papworth PortraitPeo­ple are agge­grat­ing on the net in social net­works and online com­mu­ni­ties. Suc­cess­ful cor­po­rate sites are mov­ing away from sta­tic infor­ma­tion por­tals and are now enabling vis­i­tors to talk to each other and con­tribute con­tent using Web 2.0 tools. In this full day work­shop you’ll learn all the main fea­tures of a social net­work as well as how to build and main­tain a com­mu­nity online around your busi­ness. The tech­ni­cal tools are not enough — there are plenty of beau­ti­ful, fea­ture rich dig­i­tal grave­yards out there — so let’s make sure that your social appli­ca­tions incor­po­rate the greater social context!

    We start by look­ing at the var­i­ous types of pur­pose of a social net­work and then work our way through cre­at­ing spaces for dif­fer­ent types of con­nect­ing, aspects to keep in mind when devel­op­ing per­son­al­i­sa­tion mod­ules and encour­ag­ing the dif­fer­ent role­play­ers in the com­mu­nity (vol­un­teer and oth­er­wise). We then move onto really enabling ini­tia­tors of user gen­er­ated con­tent, devel­op­ing in-​​depth rules of engage­ment (code of con­duct, FAQ, new­com­ers wel­come), mod­er­at­ing mem­ber forums and chat rooms, lay­er­ing social tex­ture through events and rit­u­als and encour­ag­ing mem­bers to imple­ment word of mouth cam­paigns in swarms to grow the net­work. At all times we are focussed on how busi­ness needs can be met by sup­port­ing an online social network.

    Who is this work­shop for?

    This work­shop will ben­e­fit any­one who is inter­ested in build­ing a com­mu­nity around their busi­ness’ online pres­ence. To get the most out of this work­shop you will be pre­pared to spend a day focussed on the social and com­mu­nity side of the Inter­net. This is not a tech­ni­cal course but a rea­son­able grasp of user appli­ca­tions such as blogs, wikis, and tag­ging will be assumed.

    What are the learn­ing outcomes?

    By the end of the day you will be able to

    • look through a social net­work and pin­point what weak­nesses in pur­pose, spaces, per­son­al­i­sa­tion, roles and so on may cause a lack or slow­ing of membership
    • eval­u­ate tools and tech­niques for build­ing the best pos­si­ble net­work for your purpose
    • assist peo­ple to cre­ate per­sonal con­nec­tions and main­tain rela­tion­ships through your site
    • exam­ine ways to increase num­ber of vis­i­tors and length of stay to your site, brand recall, brand loy­alty, and decrease tech­ni­cal and cus­tomer sup­port through a peer-​​to-​​peer online community
    • amaze your boss and be the envy of your col­leagues as you rat­tle of the 10 pri­mary fea­tures of a social net­work, the 5 fun­da­men­tal needs of sup­port­ing com­mu­nity and 6 tips for expand­ing your network

    Suc­cess­ful online com­mu­ni­ties are not a mat­ter of luck but rather the result of the rig­or­ous appli­ca­tion of these tried and tested ideas and tech­niques. This full day work­shop will help you find your way.

    Register now for this workshop

  • Dr Nic Williams — Begin­ning Ruby on Rails

    Write beau­ti­ful code for beau­ti­ful web appli­ca­tions, fast!

    Pow­er­house Museum

    Tues­day 25th Sep­tem­ber 2007 9.00am to 5.00pm

    Descrip­tion

    Dr Nic Williams PortraitRuby on Rails is a full-​​featured, industrial-​​strength frame­work for web appli­ca­tions. It’s very fast to learn and get started, and will pro­vide a life-​​time of pro­gram­ming pleasure.

    Ruby on Rails is only a few years old but has taken the web devel­op­ment world by storm. Every­where you look there are new, advanced web appli­ca­tions com­ing online, built in only a few months, with small, agile teams, using Ruby on Rails. It sure beats fail­ing to go live, after sev­eral years of devel­op­ment with huge teams using older technologies.

    The really good news is that get­ting started and pro­duc­tive with Ruby on Rails is incred­i­bly fast. Use­ful web appli­ca­tions can be devel­oped after one or two days of edu­ca­tion. This work­shop will give you that edu­ca­tion to get started.

    Who is this work­shop for?

    This work­shop is per­fect for any­one who has basic pro­gram­ming skills in any lan­guage and a desire to find out more about Ruby on Rails, and put it into prac­tice. Have you

    • Writ­ten PHP appli­ca­tions and exhausted your­self main­tain­ing the spaghetti?
    • Writ­ten Java web apps but found it took so long to get started you lost the excitement?
    • Designed web­sites, but thought learn­ing to write the code was for Geeks and Nerds?
    • Won­dered how to spend more of your time solv­ing inter­est­ing appli­ca­tion prob­lems instead of con­fig­ur­ing a database?
    • Wished pro­gram­ming could be plea­sur­able again?
    • Wanted to write appli­ca­tions twice as fast as before?

    It is very use­ful if you already know:

    • HTML
    • Basic pro­gram­ming skills in any language
    • Knowl­edge about object-​​orientation
    • Data­base design and access using SQL

    To do the exer­cises dur­ing the day you’ll need to bring:

    • Lap­top (Win­dows, OSX)

    What are the learn­ing outcomes?

    Ask for your money back if you don’t learn how to

    • Start a new Rails appli­ca­tion in 5 minutes
    • Read and write to a data­base with­out using any SQL state­ments or advanced knowledge
    • Use the Model-​​View-​​Controller method of appli­ca­tion design
    • Cre­ate dynamic HTML using the data from the database
    • Gen­er­ate mod­els and con­trollers so you don’t have to type as much yourself
    • Work with “con­ven­tion over configuration” — Rails makes a lot of deci­sions for you!
    • Write tests for your appli­ca­tions so you know instantly if some­thing has gone wrong

    And ulti­mately, feel con­fi­dent that you can do it all your­self the next day after the work­shop! This work­shop will be an enlight­en­ing, prac­ti­cal day that will stand you in good stead as you move deeper into devel­op­ing apps with this new framework.

    Register now for this workshop

  • Aaron Gustafson — Pro­gres­sive enhance­ment with JavaScript

    Hone your DOM Script­ing skills

    Pow­er­house Museum

    Wednes­day 26th Sep­tem­ber 2007 9.00am to 5.00pm

    Descrip­tion

    Aaron Gustafson PortraitYou’ve writ­ten a few scripts, played with some of the libraries, and even wrapped your head around the whole Ajax thing, but you can’t help feel­ing there’s so much more to JavaScript. In this one day work­shop, DOM Script­ing guru Aaron Gustafson will walk you through the cur­rent best prac­tices in JavaScript development.

    Using clear exam­ples, Aaron will demon­strate the ben­e­fits of pro­gres­sive enhance­ment and unob­tru­sive script­ing tech­niques. Dur­ing a por­tion of the work­shop, Aaron will also offer his one-​​on-​​one men­tor­ing skills to help you tackle a hands-​​on JavaScript chal­lenge. You’ll walk away from this work­shop with a solid under­stand­ing of mod­ern JavaScript devel­op­ment and the method­olo­gies to tackle just about any DOM script­ing challenge.

    Who is this work­shop for?

    To get the most out of this work­shop you need a decent famil­iar­ity with JavaScript (i.e. you’ve writ­ten some scripts, know what an object is, etc.) and web stan­dards. An inter­est in acces­si­bil­ity and user inter­face is rec­om­mended, but most of all you need to be ready and eager to learn.

    You should also bring a lap­top with your favorite text edi­tor installed and a will­ing­ness to work with other atten­dees on a group project.

    What are the learn­ing outcomes?

    After this very full day you will be able to

    • break com­plex inter­ac­tions down into dis­crete actions
    • iden­tify obtru­sive script­ing and right its many wrongs
    • reduce your scripts’ markup dependencies
    • cre­ate scripted inter­ac­tions which layer per­fectly on top of tra­di­tional ones
    • build scripts which enable them­selves and their asso­ci­ated styles only when they run properly
    • lever­age avail­able JavaScript libraries to improve your devel­op­ment speed

    Register now for this workshop

  • Brian Fling — Mobile web design and development

    Every­thing you need to know about cre­at­ing sites for the mobile web from start to finish

    Pow­er­house Museum

    Wednes­day 26th Sep­tem­ber 2007 9.00am to 5.00pm

    Descrip­tion

    Brian Fling PortraitMobile tech­nol­ogy is poised to rev­o­lu­tion­ize how we gather infor­ma­tion. Already today mobile tech­nol­ogy can dis­play infor­ma­tion and ser­vices rel­e­vant to the users phys­i­cal loca­tion and activ­i­ties, cre­at­ing a whole new world of inter­ac­tion pos­si­bil­i­ties. By 2010 half the pop­u­la­tion of the planet will have access to the inter­net through a mobile device, mak­ing the mobile web an essen­tial part of our lives. Yet the mobile indus­try has few if any resources to help would-​​be mobile devel­op­ers from div­ing in other than applied expe­ri­ence from within the industry.

    This full-​​day work­shop will be one of the most com­pre­hen­sive and in-​​depth tuto­ri­als on not only design­ing and devel­op­ing mobile web­sites from con­cept to com­ple­tion, but also how to inte­grate mobile tech­nol­ogy into desk­top web­sites and web appli­ca­tions. Par­tic­i­pants will walk away from this work­shop with a firm under­stand­ing of the mobile ecosys­tem, how to develop an inte­grated mobile web strat­egy, mobile design and devel­op­ment prin­ci­ples and best prac­tices and most impor­tantly prac­ti­cal tech­niques and infor­ma­tion to start cre­at­ing mobile websites.

    Who is this work­shop for?

    This work­shop is per­fect for any­one want­ing to get into the mobile web. Web design­ers, web devel­op­ers, infor­ma­tion archi­tects, prod­uct man­agers, usabil­ity pro­fes­sion­als, con­tent pub­lish­ers, essen­tially any­one with a web­site will ben­e­fit from the con­tent cov­ered through­out the day. A basic knowl­edge of how to code XHTML markup by hand will be help­ful, but not required.

    What are the learn­ing outcomes?

    After this very full day you will be able to

    • assess the value of the mobile web for your business
    • plan your own mobile web strategy
    • inte­grate web and mobile technologies
    • employ mobile web design principles
    • apply mobile devel­op­ment practices
    • imple­ment mobile stan­dards and best practices
    • cre­ate a mobile infor­ma­tion architecture
    • con­duct mobile usabil­ity testing
    • work with mobile ser­vice provider requirements
    • analyse con­tent adap­ta­tion strategies
    • under­stand location-​​based services
    • under­stand mes­sag­ing services

    Register now for this workshop

  • W3C Aus­tralian Office — W3C Spe­cial Inter­est Group Day

    W3C experts detail the future of web standards.

    Pow­er­house Museum

    Wednes­day 26th Sep­tem­ber 2007 9.00am to 5.00pm

    Descrip­tion

    This year at Web Direc­tions we are proud to be host­ing the W3C’s Spe­cial Inter­est Group day, in con­junc­tion with the W3C’s Aus­tralian Office at CSIRO. It’s a whole day sem­i­nar cov­er­ing the lat­est devel­op­ments from the World Wide Web Consortium.

    This full day fea­tures pre­sen­ta­tions from

    • Bert Bos, co-​​inventor of CSS
    • Chris Wil­son, chair of the HTML W3C Work­ing Group
    • Sofia Celic, Vision Aus­tralia, on W3C acces­si­bil­ity guidelines
    • Renato Ian­nella, from National ICT Aus­tralia, on Policy-​​Aware Web
    • Anne Cre­gan, from National ICT Aus­tralia, on Deal­ing with Uncer­tainty in the Seman­tic Web
    • Mar­cos Cac­eres, from QUT, on Web Appli­ca­tions For­mats (Wid­gets, XBL2)

    and a num­ber of other domain experts on W3C stan­dards, cov­er­ing a range of top­ics such as

    • CSS3
    • The future of HTML
    • “Web 3.0″ and the seman­tic Web
    • RDF
    • W3C Acces­si­bil­ity Guidelines
    • OWL
    • Webapps
    • XForms
    • SVG

    and more.

    This day will be a great oppor­tu­nity to hear high level tech­ni­cal pre­sen­ta­tions, and hear where the web is going, as well as engage with those peo­ple at the heart of the organ­i­sa­tion which is “lead­ing the web to its full potential”.

    Register now for this workshop

    • 20 responses to “Workshops in detail”:

    1. […] Startup and free­lance boot­camp. Every thing you need to know about going out on your own as a free­lancer or startup company. […]

    2. […] Andy Clarke — Tran­scend­ing CSS […]

    3. […] Web Direc­tions South 2007 announced their line up, and that included a work­shop on Mobile Web Design and Devel­op­ment with Brian Fling. […]

    4. […] good. Web Direc­tions South, as usual John and Max­ine have placed me in a dif­fi­cult posi­tion, which work­shops to do. Franky there are just too many choices. Damn you John and Max you are mak­ing life hard for […]

    5. […] just attribute them if you use them eh?)), and is back again this year, run­ning a full­day work­shop Build­ing and main­tain­ing vibrant social net­works for your busi­ness, and speak­ing on the inter­sec­tion of social net­works and mobile […]

    6. […] One of the things we really focussed on this year with con­tent for the con­fer­ence was the mobile web, which ties in well with the excite­ment that we think the next few months will see in rela­tion to the mobile web. We are priv­i­leged to have one of the real Mobile Web design and devel­op­ment gurus, Brian Fling speak­ing at the con­fer­ence on “Web 2.0 + Mobile 2.0″, and deliv­er­ing a full day work­shop Mobile web design and devel­op­ment — Every­thing you need to know about cre­at­ing sites for the mobile .… […]

    7. […] Work­shops on CSS, Javascript, Mobile Web Design, Online Com­mu­ni­ties, and a W3C SIG Day […]

    8. […] con­fer­ence and the work­shops. Speak­ing of work­shops, if you are inter­ested in Andy Clarke’s Tran­scend­ing CSS then don’t wait too long. It’s sell­ing like hot­cakes, as well it should — Andy is one […]

    9. […] the 25th of Sep­tem­ber I’m doing a one-​​day work­shop for Begin­ning Ruby on Rails (announce­ment) at the uber-​​cool Web Direc­tions South […]

    10. […] had VA speak­ers at Web Direc­tions before (and this year Sofia Celic is one of the speak­ers at our W3C SIG Day, pre­sented in con­junc­tion with the W3C Aus­tralia Office), and as you’d expect, they really […]

    11. […] Nic Acad­emy — com­ing soon in August, Ams­ter­dam & Oslo[soldout]; Sept, Syd­ney — Begin­ning Ruby on […]

    12. […] at the SIG day, fea­tur­ing inter­na­tional and local experts work­ing on cur­rent and future web stan­dards like HTML5, […]

    13. […] I even know if I will under­stand whats hap­pen­ing once there. I have also signed up for this and a Pro­gres­sive enhance­ment with JavaScript work­shop. I am really excited(and usu­ally not thrilled by much at all) about this and with under a […]

    14. […] at the work­shops are fill­ing up fast as well — with Andy Clarke’s Web Design work­shop just about full. If you are keen on that, you had bet­ter move […]

    15. […] Well, it’s a week and a day ’til our work­shops, and we’ve just had our first sell out — ‘Dr. Nic’ William’s Begin­ning Ruby on Rails. […]

    16. […] ensured that we can entice Bert Bos to our shores, but they are also co-​​hosting with us their spe­cial inter­est day for 2007, fea­tur­ing local and inter­na­tional speak­ers focussing on the future of web […]

    17. […] forth for bite to eat then take a walk to get my bear­ings to the Pow­er­house Museum (the venue for tomorrow’s work­shop with Andy Clarke. I’m really look­ing for­ward to this con­fer­ence, as I’m not only a fan […]

    18. […] but due to the lack of wifi here at the Pow­er­house Museum, I decided to just take a few notes from Andy’s work­shop from time to time, then col­late them into some­thing to post at the end of the day. This worked out […]

    19. […] was day two of work­shops, time for Aaron Gustafson and Pro­gres­sive enhance­ment with JavaScript a after try­ing break­fast at the Pen, not Con­crete (got to check them both out). A review of these […]

    20. […] Wednes­day, I attended the W3C Spe­cial Inter­est Group, fea­tur­ing pre­sen­ta­tions from a vari­ety of peo­ple on top­ics includ­ing CSS, HTML, Wid­gets, SVG and […]

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