A big part of the focus of this years conference was Mobile devices and the impact they will have on the web. Ajax, CSS, Accessibility and Social networks also featured highly. Many of the slideshows are available on SlideShare.
I met many great people while in Sydney, students, speakers, authors, designers, developers, managers and everyone in between. Of course I mentioned CSSCreator to most of them and many of them knew of it. One guy was very excited as he had just found the site that morning and used it to get him out of a tight spot with CSS.
At the conference Bert Bos, spoke about the future of HTML and CSS, and priorities. Bert was introduced as the 'CSS Creator', so I had to have a chuckle and tell the person sitting next to me that CSSCreator was the name of my site. After his presentation, I introduced myself to Bert and thanked him for linking to my site when I first started the CSS forum.
Things to Consider
- How will people visit your site?
- Opera is available on wii, the iphone, ipod touch and many mobile phones and other devices, even fridges are using the web.
- Will all users be able to use your site?
- Think not only about devices and if they have a keyboard to enter data to signup. Also consider types of users, language, disabilities
- Do you really need to use Flash or Ajax?
- Sure, use them when you can enhance the visitors experience. Consider users and devices that don't support flash, AJAX or whatever, will they still be able to use your site. Think about load time it is still relevant even in the broadband era. Use flash and AJAX sparingly.
- The web is not a printed broucher
- Design your site with different screen sizes, resolution, devices and users in mind. Follow the web standards and you will be on your way towards an accessible, usable web site.
- Give users a choice
- Users may want to decide what information they see on the page. If you give them the choice make sure you remember the settings they choose for the next time they visit.
- Will 2007 be remembered as the year of the mobile web?
Thanks to John and Maxine of westciv for all the effort involved in organising Web Directions South 2007
Sounds like an interesting
Sounds like an interesting conference, cheeky that Bert Bross pinched your name, did you not stand up and cry " no I am css creator" followed by other audience members in homage to that famous end scene from Sparticus
It's is going to become increasingly important to focus a lot more on mobile devices, those things that up to now we have been able to consider probably as slightly peripheral to our jobs are now coming of age, more and more we will be expected to deliver web content to these devices and we need to get up to speed on how to develop for them.
In my current job it has been agreed that the heart of the provided application/admin will need to be delivered to mobile devices and a large part of my development work is going to have to focus on this area and is going to require a good understanding of what works and how to deliver content quickly and with as little overhead as possible, we are looking at Iphones and all forms of hand held devices, Opera Mini, Opera Handheld, and I have already have started working up media="handheld" stylesheets for those devices that will work with them.
It looks as though it is going to place a large amount of additional dev time in testing and refinement but it simply is not an area that one can or should overlook any longer as these devices are very rapidly going to mature and people are going to expect to be able to access content on their mobile devices.
neglect
I must admit I have mostly ignored mobile usage up till now.
and an iPhone once they come to Australia so I can test it on websites.
Luckily using standards based design principles makes the move towards mobile relatively easy.
There's a good couple of articles by Craig Hockenberry at A List Apart if anyone is interested.
I think I am going to get a wii for my son
I think a Wii is a very good
I think a Wii is a very good idea for testing
as well as an Xbox, Ipod touch, Iphone, suddenly testing has become fun!
Opera
Don't forget my nice new shiny Nintendo DS, which also can run Opera:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_DS_Browser
It was great!
Hi Tony!
It was great wasn't it! It was great to meet you at the conference, and hope to see you at further geek conferences in the future.
I'm looking forward to the Mp3s of the presentations to be released on webdirections.org so I can catch up on all the things I missed
How was the Microsoft party?
party
Hi Penny,
The MS party was great, heaps of food and drinks for everyone.
I'm sure a few there were trying to send Bill broke by drinking his fortune away