Digital Design World 2004: Let's Get Digital!

[Brittany]

Digital Design World 2004, a conference covering web design, Photoshop and digital workflow, is underway in Seattle this week and I'm thrilled to announce that WebProWorld moderator Scott Brinkerhoff (who goes by ghstdrgns on WebProWorld) is in attendance.

He was kind enough to take some time to swing by the cyber cafe this morning and send us the following conference update:

Originally Posted by Scott

Hey guys/gals,

I am here in beautiful Seattle, Washington, for the Digital Design Conference. Their cyber cafe is a great idea and gives me the chance to chat with you now.

While there are three conferencs going on at one time, I have chosen to stay with my field at hand and focus on the Web Design Conference. There is going to be a ton of information flying around and I will do my best to convey as much of it as possible to WebProWorld. I will warn you now that I am not a reporter so I don't know how well I will get the information across, but I will do my best to keep you informed.

If you are attending the conference and are interested in meeting Scott, be sure to drop him a Private Message. Again, his member name on WebProWorld is ghstdrgns.

If you plan on attending any other upcoming conferences, let us know if you would be interested in submitting some live reports or reviews to WebProWorld. We may even feature your reviews in one of our newsletters, offering you free exposure to thousands of readers around the world!

Keep up the great work, Scott! :)

Brittany
and the WebProWorld Team

[ITGProductions]

Greeting from the east coast Scott, looking forward to hearing about the conference in future posts.

We list a number of conferences coming up for the Boston/NY area and throughout the US on www.pihs.com

FYI: LinuxWorld Conference and Expo in San Francisco, August 2-5, 2004

Looking forward to updates Brittany and Team!


"Back in school I found the only written truths in bathroom stalls and telephone booths" -- Ellis Paul

[Brittany]

I just received the following conference update from Scott:

Originally Posted by Scott

Wow! What a first day. From creating table-less sites using CSS, to calling on XML to populate your content, to the how and why of blogging, it has been a whirlwind of information and there are still two days left.

I want to try and focus my first thoughts on the keynote speaker for the beginning of the conference, Jeffrey Veen.

For those of you who don't recognize the name, Jeffrey Veen is the founder of hotwire.com, webmonkey.com and runs his own company adaptivepath.com.

His focus Tuesday was on usability and going beyond what we now consider usability standards. Along with the need to anticipate the users’ experience, we need to keep in mind the full spectrum of clients when designing a site.

On one hand you have the company you are designing for with their list of needs. They want to:
Sell more stuff
Increase profit
and develop a stronger Brand Awareness

On the other hand you have the end user. While the company wants to achieve their goals, the end user has a completely different set of goals:
Surf for information
Find the best price
and do everything without putting a lot of thought into it

Unfortunately the end user doesn't care about profit increases or brand awareness like the company does. That is where the challenge lies. While we have to create for our client, we have to create a usable site for the end user as well.

Some of the main components Jeff focused on were navigation and accessibility.

He made several key points when discussing navigation. The fact that when looking at the same selection of items, some people see colors while others see shapes; creating the point that while you see it one way, your audience may see it another and you need to take that into account when creating a sites navigation. Another example was that of Coke. What do you call Coke? Do you say soda, or pop, or Coke, or cola? This type of thought needs to be placed into how you word content and navigation. For example, a company may use the term "Flibity Gibit" within the organization when referring to widgits. But if you put Flibity Gibits in your navigation to lead people to what they know as widgits, are you making your site usable to the end user? While it works well for the company, it doesn't help with the usability for the end user; thus causing lost revenue and brand awareness for the company even though it makes perfect sense to them.

His other main focus was on accessibility, He used the example of comparing the use of JavaScript in a web site to steps leading into your store. When working online you need to take into account the issues of end users accessing sites when things like JavaScript are turned off in a browser or the viewer does not have the latest Flash plug-in. You are telling the consumer or end user, “If you don't have JavaScript turned on you can't use my site.” While that may be fine online, what if you had a brick and mortar storefront with a set of steps to the door? Are you going to tell the guy in the wheelchair that he can't shop your store unless his legs work? One of these examples would end with a court date.

His other points showed that as the web continues to develop, the real challenges in designing are going to be around using plain language to convey the clients message to the end user instead of using corporate jargon that is so frequently found in sites; and Jeff emphasized the need to focus on growth design. Designing sites that maintained the usability while maintaining a format that would allow for corporate or client growth,

Well I am about to jump into day two of this great conference. I will try to keep you informed as to what is covered and any new issues in future development. Today is all about Macromedia! Yeah!!!!!

Wow, it sounds like he's having a great time out there in Seattle! And learning some very useful information...

I can't wait to hear about the Macromedia update!

Have any questions or comments for Scott? Post them here!

[Brittany]

Macromedia users, listen up! Scott's back again, with a report that might interest you:

Originally Posted by Scott

Another full, brain overloading day came and went at the Digital Design World Conference in Seattle, WA. While I thought I would be mingling with people from around the US, I found myself talking with a woman from South Africa, another from India and the list goes on...

Anyway, Thursday's events on the web design side continued with Macromedia MX. From hitting the highlights of what Macromedia has added to MX2004 over the previous versions, editing the Dreamweaver registry and menu files to create a user interface that screams "This is My System!", integrating the abilities of Fireworks, Freehand and Flash and adding e-commerce functions with WebAssist.com extensions, I found the best part of the day was the coverage on using Dreamweaver to validate your web pages for XHTML and CSS for any of the most widely used browsers.

I will give a quick hit list to what was covered in the validation section. Like many of you, I have been creating (not always W3C compliant) web sites for current as well as previous browsers. There is now the need for all of us to start focusing on (what was the key phrase for the day) "Forward Compatibility Programming." The big thing was that while so many of us are trying to stay compliant with all the browsers of the past, we are not programming or validating for the browsers and interfaces (PDA, Cellphone, Palm PC) of the future. And this was the main focus over most of the discussions. When I can get into the online references available to the attendees, I will give more concrete examples.

But we covered how Dreamweaver holds the standard for web validation applications of today and tomorrow. With a few minor adjustments to some of the xml files used in Dreamweaver, you can make sure that all your XHTML tags include the closing tag, as well as setting the appropriate preferences to make sure your tags are all lower case and validated for XHTML while in the developing process. We also reviewed the validator tools avialable in Dreamweaver and how it helps with CSS as well in that the validator will expand to attached css files. So if there is a validation issue with your site, and if it lies within the attached CSS file, the validator will create a path so you can easily find and correct your errors.

Some of the outside resources referenced included Jeffrey Zeldman's book Designing with Web Standards and web sites such as webstandards.org, browsercam.com and www.browsers.evolt.org to name a few.

I am getting ready to take on the last day of the conference so I will end here. I hope to give much more detailed info on this great conference in the days to come.

Stay tuned to WebProWorld for continued updates.

And be sure to thank Scott for taking the time to fill us all in on this exclusive information!

[mikmik]

And he is worried about his ability to report?

Excellent stuff, Scott, just fantastic!