Web Design World, Boston -- December 6-8, 2004

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Conference Sessions
Design Track Coding Track Strategy Track Usability Track Workshops

DAY ONE — December 6 Where beauty and brains come together. Successful Web design is a marriage of design and technology, a combination of aesthetic vision and well-crafted code. On opening day of Web Design World, you'll explore both. Begin your day with Jeffrey Zeldman, one of the great minds in Web design. Then, master cutting-edge markup techniques and Web-centric design philosophies.

9:00 a.m.	Keynote — Web Design: A Decade Under the Influence Jeffrey Zeldman After nearly ten years designing commercial websites and publishing independent content, you're bound to learn something about how to connect your content to real people. Jeffrey Zeldman has. He's the author of Designing With Web Standards, publisher of A List Apart and Zeldman's Daily Report, and founder of design studio Happy Cog, and he kicks off Web Design World by sharing what he has learned over the years — including Ten Things You Can Do To Improve Your Site.
10:15 a.m.	The Marriage of Presentation and Structure Douglas Bowman and Molly E. Holzschlag You hear it all the time in the world of HTML and CSS: separate structure from presentation. That's true in theory, but in the real world, presentation and structure are often strongly related. Without understanding the relationship of a document's structure to the style sheets that enable you to create beautiful designs, you're at a disadvantage when attempting to resolve conflicts, use advanced CSS selectors effectively, and gain better control over every aspect of your work. Learn the right way to marry presentation and structure — and get the power you need to move your CSS designs forward in creative, compelling ways.

Design Track Inspiration and insight. In the Web world, design isn't just about making pages that look good. You also need to create effective, intuitive user interfaces. You need to take global cultural differences into account. And you need to consider the growing number of Web users who have physical challenges. In the Design track, our expert speakers share insights and techniques for interface design, accessibility, global design challenges, and more. Take your design skills — and your sites — to the next level.
11:30 a.m.	The New Usability Kelly Goto These days, it isn't enough to determine if a site is easy to use. A site must be useful, likeable, and entice return traffic. Learn new techniques for an integrated and iterative approach to usability testing, including quick-turn testing, remote testing tricks, and café testing. Review effective online tools for surveys and feedback, and receive a comprehensive overview of one-on-one testing and customer interviews.
2:00 p.m.	Color and Design for a Global Web Molly E. Holzschlag The colors you use are as important an element of persuasion as the images and words your sites contain. What's more, the response to certain colors can be dramatically different from one culture to another. Learn the sociology of color, learn how to use color effectively when designing sites for international audiences, and get the big picture of how Web design is influenced by both our local and global cultural identities.
3:15 p.m.	Pushing the Limits of Accessibility Andrew Kirkpatrick When it comes to improving Web site accessibility, most designers know the basics. That's great, but it isn't enough. A growing number of sites employ complex forms, Web applications, dynamically updating pages, and JavaScript enhancements — and each of these elements brings its own set of accessibility challenges. See where today's accessibility bottlenecks are, learn about development decisions you'll need to make when addressing them, and weigh the pros and cons of automatic page transcoding tools.
4:30 p.m.	Interface Design Insights: The Building of Basecamp Jason Fried Your visitors and customers don't care about back-end technologies, server platforms, "scalability," or "robustness" — they care about the interface and what it allows them to do. They want something that's easy to use, useful, quick, flexible, and respectful of their busy lives and hurried tasks. In this session, you'll journey inside the mind of one of the lead interface designers of the popular Basecamp Web-based project management tool. Learn practical interface-design tips and techniques, and get an inside look at the design philosophies behind a product that's been called "astonishingly elegant."

Coding Track Coding the next-generation Web. If you're like most Web designers, you're already using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to specify typographic attributes. It's time to take the next step. It's now practical to use CSS to create menus and other interface elements, and to replace awkward tables for page layout. In the Coding track, you'll learn modern markup techniques from designers and CSS gurus who have helped to blaze the trail. Say goodbye to awkward workarounds, and learn how to create sites that are fast, reliable, compatible, and gorgeous.
11:30 a.m.	Delivering Beautiful Interfaces with CSS Douglas Bowman 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
2:00 p.m.	No More Tables: CSS Layout Techniques Douglas Bowman Creating complex multi-column layouts used to mean having to nest multiple HTML tables — a technique that's cumbersome and introduces accessibility and compatibility problems. You've heard it's possible to eliminate those layout tables by using Cascading Style Sheets, but you haven't made the jump yet. In this session, CSS guru Doug Bowman will walk you through the steps of a real-world conversion. Learn the advantages of doing away with tables, and see how to avoid common pitfalls.
3:15 p.m.	A Designer's Introduction to XML Joe Marini XML is becoming more common in mainstream Web development every day. In this session, you'll learn how XML works, what it's good for (and not good for), and what you need to know about it as a designer to put it to good use. You'll see how XML can be used to separate content from layout, drive dynamic interfaces, and be transformed for display in different ways.
4:30 p.m.	HTML to XHTML in 60 Minutes Molly E. Holzschlag XHTML is, according to the World Wide Web Consortium, "the next step in the evolution of the Internet." By migrating to XHTML, you can gain XML's benefits while retaining strong backward and future compatibility. Whether you're ready to make the move to XHTML or you're just curious about the differences between HTML and XHTML, this session is for you. Learn the rationale behind XHTML, how to author it properly, how well it's supported across today's software, and how to get started using it today.

DAY TWO — December 7 Strategy and usability. Should you use Flash on your site? Will a blog increase your traffic? How can you error-proof your site? And how can you tailor your site to your visitors' preferences? Web designers ask themselves these and similar questions every day, and our experts are here to answer them. They'll help you make the strategic decisions that will maximize your Web budget, and answer the critical usability questions that will make for satisfied visitors and customers.

9:00 a.m.	Keynote — Web Redesign: Workflow Redefined Kelly Goto Streamlined budgets and reduced timelines have created a need for a more flexible, results-oriented workflow. With increased audience expectations, focusing on the user experience is mandatory. Learn how to integrate an iterative development strategy into your existing workflow, and see how to create a strategic roadmap and utilize online tools to assist in measuring success. No one knows or teaches workflow and Web project management like Kelly Goto, author of the best-selling book Web Redesign: Workflow that Works, now in its second edition.
4:30 p.m.	Deconstructing... You! Kelly Goto, Jeffrey Zeldman, Jim Heid 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 lively wrap-up session.

Strategy Track Strategy is money. Web budgets are stretched thin, but the expectations of users, bosses, and clients haven't changed. See how to best leverage the latest Web technologies and trends, and learn easy, low-cost ways to improve your site.
10:15 a.m.	Why Flash? Creating Rich Media Web Applications Tom Green Mention Macromedia Flash, and many people think of animated navigation buttons and annoying intro screens. Think again. Flash can be a superb tool for developing Web applications. Flash lacks many of drawbacks of HTML's client-server approach, and as such, allows for a greater degree of interactivity and for intuitive interfaces that more closely resemble desktop application software. Find out if a Flash application makes sense for your site, and learn the best ways to implement and deploy it.
11:30 a.m.	Rich Media Accessibility Andrew Kirkpatrick While access to basic Web content has improved dramatically, ever-increasing amounts of rich media online present significant barriers for people with disabilities. This session will provide examples and practical advice for incorporating rich media such as QuickTime, Real/SMIL, Flash, Shockwave, and others into Web sites while addressing accessibility concerns.
2:00 p.m.	Web Writing: Seven Steps for Success Kelly Goto Writing for the Web is different from copywriting. Veteran Kelly Goto takes you through the tried and true practices of content development, from outline to integration. Learn how to integrate best practices for web writing including the development of a communication brief, audience profiles and a realistic workflow.
3:15 p.m.	The How and Why of Blogging Molly E. Holzschlag Web logs, or "blogs," aren't just for personal sites -- not by a long shot. Sites of all kinds can employ blogs and blog-creation tools to keep visitors informed and up to date. Learn what blogs can do for your site and for your business, and see the best tools for creating and maintaining them.

Usability Track Designing for users. In the Usability track, top designers and usability experts share their secrets. Learn how to identify and fix "crisis points" that can trip up your site's users. Find out how users really surf by examining the results of actual user-testing studies. And get practical tips for enhancing your site's usability with JavaScript and CSS.
10:15 a.m.	How Users Surf: What Usability Tests Reveal Steve Mulder How do real people use websites? Are there patterns in user behavior that we can learn from and design for? Yes and yes. We’ll cover how users move around a site, how they scan pages, what they see and don’t see, and much more. You’ll get the findings of hundreds of usability tests -- without having to sit through them.
11:30 a.m.	Defensive Design for the Web Jason Fried Let's admit it: things go wrong online. No matter how carefully you design a site, people will still encounter errors or make mistakes. How you handle these breakdowns is critical to the overall user experience. Learn how to use defensive design to prevent errors and help get your visitors back on track if problems do occur.
2:00 p.m.	Improving Usability with JavaScript and CSS Joe Marini Today's modern, standards-compliant browsers provide whole new ways of improving your site's usability. In this session, we'll explore ways of using CSS and JavaScript together to create pages that are responsive, intuitive, and user-customizable. You'll see how these technologies can allow users to control display properties like fonts and colors, create forms with better navigation and validation, and build pages with automatic features like table formatting and sorting. Best of all, you'll see how to make use of these technologies so that even if the user disables them, the page content remains accessible.
3:15 p.m.	Personas: Making Your Users Real Steve Mulder Personas are an effective tool for focusing decision making and design process on the goals and behaviors of real users. We'll discuss why personas are valuable and how to create them, including research techniques, user segmentation, and the details that make these fictional characters come to life. Then we'll look at how personas can be useful throughout the site creation process, from prioritizing features through information architecture and visual design.