Session Detail

The Web in 2007: A Blurry Snapshot

Tim Bray, Director of Web Technologies, Sun Microsystems

A lot of people have trouble with the hype around the "Web
2.0" tag, but no matter how cynical you are, this is obviously a
great time to be a part of the Web community — good, new things are
arriving every day.

In his opening keynote address, Tim Bray will bow in the direction of the
trends that matter — and will snarl at some hype vortices. As a geek and
employee of a computer company, he won't avoid talking technology. But
culture is driving the technology right now, so he'll start there — and keep coming back to it.

Ajax Frameworks & Design Patterns Survey

Dion Hinchcliffe, Editor-in-chief, AjaxWorld magazine

Ajax and other Rich Internet Application (RIA) technologies are fast becoming one of the most in-demand skill sets for Web developers, Web designers and other Web professionals. This session will be an in-depth, practical tour of the latest Ajax frameworks - their features, strengths and weaknesses to help today's Web professionals understand better how to begin to choose and then use one of the Ajax frameworks. The session also provides a tour of Ajax design patterns' emerging story, as well as the most popular design elements in Ajax applications today. Using the "design patterns" metaphor of Christopher Alexander - i.e., "common, recurring problems" - we will examine Display Manipulation, Web Remoting, Dynamic Behavior, Web Services and Performance Optimization, among other popular Ajax design patterns.

CSS Mastery: Part III — The Wonderful World of Bugs

Andy Budd, Creative Director, Clearleft

In an ideal world, our sites would work properly in every browser.
Unfortunately, we do not live in an ideal world, and browsers are littered with bugs and inconsistencies. Hacks are seen by many as the answer. Hacks are definitely potent tools in your armory, but with great power comes great responsibility, and hacks should not be used lightly. In this session, Andy will discuss where CSS bugs come from, how to find them, and what to do with them.

Designing for Conversion

Lance Loveday, CEO, Closed Loop Marketing

Designers have always known how powerful simple design changes can be. Now learn how minor design and page layout changes can yield big results for your company's bottom line. The secret? Designs that convert more traffic into leads and customers, increasing your return on investment. This session will explain how placement, visual flow, emphasis and even color can affect your site's conversion rate. We'll discuss key landing page design tips, review before/after case studies on how specific design changes impacted business metrics, and view some insightful user testing videos to see how users surf — and how they think.

Turning Mashups Into Money

Dion Hinchcliffe, Editor-in-chief, AjaxWorld magazine

Can you really build a business model based on mashups? What are some of the current best practices? What are some of the pitfalls encountered by those who have tried to build a business model based on a mashup product? This management-level session will provide a tour of current trends in mashups to find out who's doing what in the mashup space, as well as the leading mashup tools for the enterprise. The session also includes a discussion of monetization strategies behind mashups and provides real-world information about how a business model can be built. Presented by Dion Hinchcliffe.

Getting Found: Search Engine Optimization Strategies

Lance Loveday, CEO, Closed Loop Marketing

Search engine marketing (SEM) has long been one of the most cost-effective marketing vehicles available to online businesses. Your site may look beautiful and work perfectly, but if you haven't made a concerted effort to optimize and promote it in major search engines and directories then you are not getting the maximum return on your Web investment. See how your site's design affects search engine placement, learn about the different kinds of search engine marketing, and find out how to develop a SEM strategy that works for you.

Yahoo! vs. Yahoo! Case Studies of Three Mainstream, Large-Scale Ajax/DHTML Implementations

Nate Koechley, Senior Engineer and Designer, Yahoo, Inc.

How are DHTML and Ajax used under the pressures of massive scale and global distribution? Get an inside look. This presentation offers case studies of three state-of-the-art Yahoo! products that compare and contrast JavaScript, CSS, DHTML and Ajax implementation and approach details. These products share base infrastructure and goals, but unique requirements and influences lead to different decisions and compromises, and vastly different outcomes. Even with the differences, there are several patterns that are repeated depending on a product's location of the Documents-Applications Spectrum.

CSS Mastery: Part I

Andy Budd, Creative Director, Clearleft

Drop-down menus and sophisticated interface elements have traditionally been implemented using JavaScript and kludgy coding workarounds that often don't work. It's increasingly practical to deliver rich, beautiful, functional interfaces using semantic markup and CSS. Learn how modern markup can deliver great Web interfaces that are fast and reliable.

CSS Mastery: Part II

Andy Budd, Creative Director, Clearleft

While CSS is a relatively simple technology to learn, it is a difficult one to master. When you first start developing CSS-based sites, you encounter all kinds of infuriating browser bugs and inconsistencies. The range of possibilities seems endless and makes for a steep and daunting learning curve. This session is your guide to cutting-edge CSS development.

Keynote: The Dawning of the Age of Experience

Jared Spool, Founding Partner, User Interface Engineering

Experience design is no longer a nice-to-have luxury of a few organizations with tons of money and exceptional visionary management. It's become commonplace for organizations that build products and Web sites. Experience Design is a centerpiece of boardroom discussions and quickly becoming a key performance indicator for many businesses.

However, you can't just hire a couple of "experience designers" and tell them, "Go do that voodoo that you do so well." Today's business environment forces us to build multi-disciplinary teams, compiling a diverse group of skills and experiences to handle the many facets of the technical, business, and user requirements.

In his usual entertaining and insightful manner, Jared will talk about what it takes to build a design team that meets today's needs. See how successful experience design integrates the needs of the users with the requirements of the business; is learned, but not available through introspection; must be invisible to succeed; is cultural; is multi-disciplinary; and thrives best in an "educate and administrate" environment.

You'll see examples of designs from Apple's iPod, Netflix, the Mayo Clinic, and Southwest Airlines, to name a few.

Experiences with Accessibility in DHTML, Ajax, and Rich Internet Applications

Nate Koechley, Senior Engineer and Designer, Yahoo, Inc.

The Internet's dramatic shift from static to dynamic sites presents a series of new challenges to those committed to and dependent upon accessibility. The new dynamic sites are beginning to offer rich functionality previously found only in desktop-based software applications. On the desktop, accessibility is maintained through interchangeable input (keyboard and mouse), and through OS-level APIs that facilitate detailed and continuous communication with Assistive Technology (AT). In the browser, this interchangeability is often missing, and what primitive AT communication there is bypasses the OS's API and is shared too infrequently. Learn about challenges of DHTML/Ajax accessibility, review the current state of the art, and see a series of four approaches that, in total, can make today's modern interfaces more accessible.

Deconstructing... You!

Panel: Jim Heid, WDW Conference Chair, Lance Loveday, CEO, Closed Loop Marketing, and Steve Mulder, Principal Consultant, User Experience, Molecular

Top Web designers join Conference Chair Jim Heid in critically evaluating several of our attendees' sites. Bring your pencil! Your site may be among the ones we examine in this always popular wrap-up session.

Cooking with Rails: A Survey of the Rails Framework for Web Designers

Rob Orsini, Author, "Rails Cookbook"

This session will begin with a quick introduction to the Rails framework and how it can help designers be more productive. As we work through an example application, you'll get direct exposure to the features of the Rails framework. You'll learn about the Rails helpers, which are designed to remove the pain of the HTML generation of forms, links, and images. The session focuses on the goal of DRY (don't repeat yourself) through the proper use of layout templates and asset organization and reuse.

You'll walk away with a firm grasp of the Rails template system
(rhtml) and how to use helpers, partials, and layouts to keep your projects clean and organized. More advanced topics, such as JavaScript generation with RJS templates, will be introduced as well as using the Rails plugin facility to share helper code across projects.

Dynamic User Interfaces with CSS, JavaScript and the DOM

Joe Marini, Group Product Manager, VSIP, Microsoft

Joe Marini is back for 2007 with a set of updated and all-new examples of how you can build responsive, dynamic, interactive user interfaces and web page features using a pinch of CSS, a dash of JavaScript, and a smattering of DOM. In this session, you'll see how to give your web pages automatic features like adaptive layout, data filtering, and content navigation.
You'll also see how to make forms more usable and how to write your script so that these features gracefully degrade when JavaScript is disabled.

XML in 2007: A Survey of Tools, Technologies, and Strategies

Joe Marini, Group Product Manager, VSIP, Microsoft

XML has entered the mainstream of Web design and development, and has brought along with it a host of associated tools, technologies, and design problems. In this session, all new for 2007, we'll take a survey of the XML landscape with a look at each of these categories. You'll learn about the important XML technologies you need to know, the tools that will help you work with them, and some guidelines on designing and developing with XML data.

Making Web 2.0 Usable: An Ajax Case Study

Steve Mulder, Principal Consultant, User Experience, Molecular;
Glenn Barnett, Engagement Manager, Technology, Molecular

Rich Internet technologies such as Ajax change the way the Web works, bringing exciting new possibilities to Web interfaces. But how do we give users a richer, more powerful interface without sacrificing ease of use? A common example of this challenge is product selection. Web sites that help users select products, services or content often use a variety of tools so that users find exactly the right item for their needs. Come see how we applied Ajax to this common challenge in order to create a rich interface that makes product selection easier (and more fun). We'll discuss how users expect these new interfaces to work and what usability issues occur when testing these types of Web 2.0 sites.

Principles of Social Design

Joshua Porter, Director of Web Development, User Interface Engineering

Most designers are comfortable with the principles of visual design: contrast, repetition, alignment, proximity and so on. Many are also getting comfortable with interaction design principles: consistency, feedback, good defaults, metaphor and the like. These principles provide an excellent foundation for people making Web sites and applications that will be used by individuals working alone. But more and more Web sites are intended for people in social situations. For these cases, we need a new set of principles: principles of social design. These principles, including control, motivation, incentive and governance, will define whether or not people choose to continue using your Web application or service. We've moved beyond the one-way and even the two-way Web. We are now in the many-way, social Web, and it's time for principles that will help us navigate these ever-murky waters.

Let the People Speak: How Users Are Changing the Web

Steve Mulder, Principal Consultant, User Experience, Molecular

The Web has always been about people, but in a Web 2.0 world, this is taking on new meaning. Giving your users more control and influence over your site unveils a whole new set of opportunities — and a whole new set of challenges. How are user ratings and reviews, tagging, editorial control, user-generated content, and social networking changing the way you should be thinking about your site? How are sites dealing with negative user contributions? What does all of this mean for how you design and build your site? Come take an entertaining tour through the social wonderland of Web 2.0 and learn what it means for you.