Webmaster Jam Session

Creative inspiration is a wiley beast. You may never know when or where it will strike, but that doesn't mean you can't experience it consistently. This session will demonstrate the lifestyle of a creative mind, and how it can benefit from nearly everything that surrounds it, including the use of all five senses, a keen understanding of history, and a little luck.

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. This session will demonstrate using CSS and other modern web technologies to display type on screen with elegance and impact.

Darrin Ward, SEO Industry Professional & Founder of SEO-Chat™, discusses optimizing website for better organic search traffic while avoiding the common pitfalls that result in penalties and website filtering. Darrin regularly consults with and provides strategy recommendations for some of the Internet"s most popular websites, but he also works with some of the Internet"s smallest niche websites, which means that there will be some great SEO info up for grabs for webmasters and website owners at every end of the spectrum.

Discovering Keywords: We will look at creative ways to find new keywords that can deliver high volume, targeted, organic search traffic that converts into sales.

Content Optimization: Content is King, but not all content is created equal, and only the best will do for SEO.

For many Web professionals content can be the hardest part of the job, especially when you've got to design and develop without it. A truly great design will support it's content in the best light possible. As any tried and true Web professional knows, getting the content to work with, let alone getting to the best possible design, can be a tricky proposition. D. Keith Robinson will discuss content strategies as well as give tips, tricks and techniques to not only getting your content, but getting the most out of what you've got to work with.

Thanks to non-disclosure agreements and legal challenges, it's almost impossible to share real-world examples of the interface design process. For once, that's not the case. We'll pull back the covers and examine the intricate details of designing and creating an interface for an upcoming application. From sketches and brainstorming to working code and a real interface, we'll open the kimono and share all of the methodology and processes that translated the ideas into reality.

In traditional business, the old saying "You can't improve what you can't measure" is just as true for internet professionals. This discussion will look at what kinds of site visitor behavior can be measured and how we can act on this information to improve our sites.

Molly takes a different look at why we’re challenged to be designers and developers. She will look at how browsers are developed, show several test cases that reveal problematic issues from various browse perspectives, and what it will take to solve these concerns and get back to the vision of a truly inter-operable, accessible web.

She will present some cool demos as well as photos of the IE7 Trident Engine mapping, DOM trees in Mozilla and so forth.

Some may scoff and say that CSS designs are boring or difficult to build. This session will show off some ways to break outside the box and use positioning techniques to aid in creating complex solutions while still maintaining flexibility and accessibility.

If you ask programmers how they made a certain function work, they can usually tell you in a logical fashion how they coded it up. On the flip side, if you ask designers to explain how they came up with a particular visual effect, you rarely get a quantifiable answer.

The mysterious and seemingly instinctual ability that designers have of inventing creative, unique, and visually pleasing designs is often built up on a solid foundation of practical design theory.

Come learn how to use the new Adobe Creative Suite 3 products to their fullest potential. Greg will help you master the new features and features you may not be familiar with in Flash, Dreamweaver, Photoshop, and Fireworks so you can prototype, design, and build amazing web experiences.

As the technology for supporting more personalized experiences becomes available, we’re entering a new era of “adaptive interfaces”, where functionality is revealed over time and interface elements change based on individual usage. We can create interfaces that respond, suggest or change based on actual usage data.

While much of this is still speculative, we’ll explore some concrete examples of how such ideas have already been used, and many instances where this could be implemented, resulting in applications that are truly conversational and context-aware.

In this session, you will:

• Learn about the unique advantages and challenges of working with adaptive interfaces
• Explore concrete examples of ways in which adaptive interfaces have been implemented
• Identify opportunities in which an adaptive interface would create a conversational, context-aware experience

Web apps are meant to be played with. This session is about extending API thinking into all aspects of your design to give your team, your users and other developers room to make your app more about them.

We’ll take a look at some of the more successful ‘sandbox’ style applications and go through a list of specific things you can do to give your Web development work Gumby-like flexibility.

Empower your design projects with the power of color. This presentation will explore and explain the many moods and actions you can infuse into your design projects through the proper use of color. While color theory and how it effects humans has been around for years you will see many new examples of effective color usage in today’s world and how companies enhance their messaging with effective color strategy.

Learn what thousands of top graphic designers know about color and its effective use in advertising, packaging, web design, corporate logos, corporate identity programs, direct mail campaigns and more.

Many times, what separates a great design from a good design is the attention to the smallest details. Dan and Bryan will take you through many of the techniques they put to use, teach you how to think about the details, and show you how to add extra polish that will set your design apart from the rest.

In this session Stephanie will discuss the building blocks of CSS and the use of semantic HTML to prepare your site’s content for optimum flexibility and accessibility by a variety of user agents. We will discuss proper techniques to ensure that content is still king and search engine spiders have an enjoyable meal.

With over a third of online sales originating from Comparison Shopping Engines, there is no debating the need to use a portion of your advertising budget on them. However, doing so is not as easy as simply signing up.

In this session John will show you how to get in the best engines, figure out what works, and maximize the effectiveness of your advertising dollar.

Have a question for our speakers? This session opens up to your questions for a candid discussion of what’s happening in the Web Design World.

Our panelists will answer your questions, debate hot topics, and give you their un-rehearsed thoughts and opinions about what matters to you. This is a must see session!

Ajax and CSS 3 on a mobile device? Sweet! Don’t get carried away though. Learn real-world tips and tricks for the new hotness, while maintaining unobtrusive, standards-based development techniques that work for anyone, anywhere, on any device.

The next generation of the web isn’t going to be on your desktop, it may not even be on your mobile device. Context is going to be increasingly important and Nick will take you through the process of designing and architecting for context as well as regardless of the context.

A few of the Web’s top designers talk about similarities in their different approaches to design. They will discuss grid layouts, mockups, comps coding, process and more.

Michael will discuss techniques he has applied at Apple to successfully manage teams of designers and developers through the process of making Websites and Web Applications

Engaging, surprising, and inspiring, Derek Featherstone is an internationally-known authority on accessibility and web development, a respected technical trainer, and author.

In this hour, he will help you:

• grasp the difference between accessibility for web apps and for websites
• build intelligently – plan for accessibility from the outset of a project
• understand the significance of JavaScript and how to use it wisely
• implement simple HTML techniques that help ensure accessibility success
• recognize the impact of Ajax and dynamically-generated content on people with disabilities – and know what to do about it
• create an effective strategy for building more accessible applications that work with current assistive technology and anticipate future developments
• see how various assistive technologies interact with modern web development techniques such as DOM Scripting and know how to make developmental decisions based on this first-hand experience
• define best practices for testing the accessibility of your own web applications

De Stijl, Bauhaus, Futurism. What do these classic movements in design history have to do with the Web 2.0? A lot actually. See how much our past is influencing our present and future conventions around form, function and simplicity in design for the Web and how you can incorporate these principals into your design.

Platforms, tools, standards, processes and the ubiquity of connectivity are changing the constraints that designers have typically had to manage in unlocking the value in software, products and services. The palette of options available to designers to prototype and iterate for the standards-based Web, rich Web and rich clients has never been filled with more opportunity. Learn how your design peers are taking advantage of these new breakthroughs today in compelling and profitable ways via a panel discussion with some of today’s top design professionals.