Web Source East
Posted by System | Tuesday, April 06, 2010
It was a first for Norwich; a day-long web conference with industry leading speakers, taking place at The King’s Centre venue in the middle of the city.
While boldly and questionably advertised as, “The most amazing web conference ever held”, the day promised at least a few interesting insights given the variety of topics covered by the eight speakers.
The line-up included a mixture of ages, experiences and professions, with some local to East Anglia and others travelling from further afield. Recognisable and impressive names such as web designer Elliot Jay Stocks, user experience professional Cennydd Bowles from Clearleft (.Net magazine’s Agency of the Year 2009) and copyrighter Relly Annett-Baker sat amongst lesser known web strategist Joel Hughes, team leader/developer Dave Ashenden and amateur speakers Alan Hamlyn and Dan Gates.
Alan Hamlyn opened his talk “SEO Magic” with a clip from The IT Crowd. While amusing and arguably relevant, the audience was left wondering whether they were about to view the episode in it’s entirely, but the talk soon picked up and pages of notes were scribbled at all tables. Alan covered the basics of SEO before banishing a few common myths, but the area of most interest, which generated much chatter at the end of his talk, were the tips and tricks he shared. XML sitemaps were a no-no, the justification being that when a search engine spider reaches the sitemap it need not look any further through the rest of the website. Straying into grey hat territory, Alan demonstrated a website which contained a small amount of text near the footer that he changed on a daily basis, causing search engines to assume that the entire page had been updated (he advised using this technique only for a short period of time).
Relly Annett-Baker’s talk included twenty-seven lolcats across her slides and covered the undervalued topic of website copy. In the summer of this year Relly will be releasing a free copy and content guide (http://poppycopy.uservoice.com/forums/41048-designers-developers-copy-and-content-guide) to help developers and designers use more meaningful messages in their work. It will serve as a reference point when creating form validation messages and deciding between labels such as ‘login’, ‘log-in’ and ‘log in’.
The unequivocal highlight of the day for me was the last speaker on the list and author of the book "Sexy web design", Elliot Jay Stocks. Presenting "Stop Worrying & Get On With It: Tips and Tricks for designing for the Modern Web", his slides had been carefully designed and included the controversial statement, "Validation is irrelevant".
Elliot argues that while validation can help to pinpoint mark-up errors, it is also possible to build a wholly table-based layout with a complete lack of semantics that will validate. Conversely, some of the progressive techniques outlined in his talk will not validate but he impressed upon the audience that this is no reason not to use them. The slide stating "10% of users today will be 100% of users tomorrow" urges developers to use progressive techniques not only to offer a richer experience for those using modern browsers, but to also future proof their work. Even if these enhancements reach only a small percentage of users today, this number can do nothing but grow with time.
Techniques such as the CSS3 border-radius method of rounding corners will not currently be visible to those using Internet Explorer, and as an aesthetic enhancement this may not be considered too important, but I believe a balance needs to be struck between clean, progressive code and backward compatibility. This is entirely dependant on the purpose and audience of the website.
These concepts were covered further in the Q & A portion of the day, which took place during "no show" Dean Hunt's slot. When questioned about the use of warning messages directed to those using older versions of Internet Explorer, Cennydd Bowles pointed out that the majority of IE6 users work in the corporate division and are unable to change their browser - a warning message would serve little purpose other than to frustrate them. Elliot thought a message would be acceptable, but better used on a personal project rather than client work.
I attended the Web Source East conference to gain inspiration, ideas and knowledge from the speakers and in that respect I was not disappointed. The quality of the talks and slides varied (spell check really is essential) and I thought some of topics could have been covered in a little more depth. Despite this however, I came away with several new and important concepts, in particular, a strong desire to become better acquainted with HTML5/CSS3 and to spend less time getting a website to look pixel-perfect in IE6, the dinosaur of the browser world. I thought the ticket price of £50.00 was good value and I will look forward to attending again next year.