Category: Professional

here’s my conference notes category: http://www.epersonae.com/ew/index.php/categories/hewd-2004

(I don’t usually use categories here, so there’s no listing for it in my archives.)

these notes represent my summaries, intuitions, inspirations, and opinions. they are certainly not either a transcript nor an authoritative record. oh, and I’m an opinionated bastard.

also, at some point, I’ll clean it up and post a version more like my webvisions notes from this last July.

came in a bit late. 2 guys from URochester. I can see why this did so well in the reviews: they have a good presentation style, maybe one of the best I’ve seen all week.

establish unity, provide communication, basic resource.

URL sent with admittance letter. content added as needed.

first done for class of ’05, started in their sophomore year (was then an incoming student site). that would’ve been 2002, I think. class of ’07 was launched 4 weeks before start of school (2003); ’08 got the early date like they described up front.

this is definitely aimed at the four-year process; I’ll be listening for things we can do in *our* environment, which is significantly less uniform.

calculation of “creative hours” which is a growing trend, but levels off now, because they know what they’re doing. 🙂

benefits, started by calculating site traffic. drawing people back by adding info gradually.

used Yahoo groups, then converted to an inhouse message board where students’ user ids were the same as email addresses. nice.

quotes from faculty/staff on the success of the project. parents said it reduced stress. downward trend in phone calls with questions, quote from orientation staff. heading off questions before they’re asked.

going thru look/feel of various years. 2nd one had a calendar as the centerpiece.

they did some work to sell on having a look/feel that’s different from the main templates, with the goal of differentiating from previous/next years.

all done with Dreamweaver/Fireworks/Photoshop. no dynamic stuff. student/volunteer webmaster in coordination with “dean of freshmen” (?!) also head of orientation.

asked us what we’d wanted to know before we got here. (51% of their students are out of state)

then added more staff, brought in admissions office. lots more content, communication opportunities, downloadable forms.

then added orientation system using college-wide login for filling out forms electronically.

q: why not just use a portal? (so much obsession with portals!) most of their staff is focused on getting content. followup question: keeping it going after the start of school?

had to use school colors for the ’08 site.

(ugh. this is interesting on its own merits, but only vaguely related to our environment. and that spot inbetween my thumb & first finger is starting to ache. weird stuff with using the trackpad, I think.)

they upgraded to CSS2, but forced people to upgrade browsers. said nobody had problems, but I just don’t see any reason why they should’ve.

more technical & content improvements the next year. more connections between depts. moved to PHP/mySQL. selling the university…used article about the class site in promotional materials for prospective students.

class site hand-off…their goal is not for an incoming students site, but for a site that’s connected to the actual class. they hand it off on Sept. 1 to Student Activities. they get to keep the site until the very last person in the class *dies*. jesus christ on a crutch.

ew, he just quoted back the idea that gets slammed in “conference presentation judo”:http://perl.plover.com/yak/presentation/samples/slide001.html — which I used to some extent as my guide for my presentation.

some wireframes of what they’re looking at for next year. quick facts, live weather, rss (! “we don’t touch it, it changes daily, we like that”), hot topics (from the message board).

highed.dulongvanscott.com

q: who gave signoff on showing weather? wow, weather is a big deal here.

q: what about transfer students? a lot of info works for them, but they also can use the orientation site. (I’m not thrilled with their answer.)

q: what does your site look like now? (to one of the students) not too bad.

I’m finding the discussions related to non-standard students, not just transfers, but 5-year (engineering majors).

q: what about content policing? no administrators moderating. these two guys moderated. followup: student life questions, who answered? some other year students, but they gave some misinformation.

my q: were students informed of policy? yes, and it’s their basic acceptible use policy.

q: how did you find problem messages? he was just there all the time.

I’ll need to think about how/whether any of this has an application to us.

Daniel from UWisconsin Platt
http://www.uwplatt.edu/web/webstandards

talk about changes in methodology, along with concepts, reasons to make the switch.

zen thing: is standards, aren’t standards.
if you think of the W3C as the UN… if the countries in the UN don’t want to play well, they don’t. but the UN at least has an army; maybe the W3C should?

XHTML, CSS, DOM, ECMAScript 262 (he keeps pronouncing ECMA as a word rather than an acronym, makes me crazy)

“HTML is dead.” (okay, whatever.) if there’s no HTML, then what the heck is XHTML? (digression: SVG got merged into XML) huge freaking quote on what XHTML is.

how to convert to XHTML: doctype, lower case, quoted attributes, end tags everywhere, proper nesting, validation. “validate first before you ask me a question; it’ll save us both a lot of time.”

benefits? accessibility (at least more so), eliminate silly mistakes — works well in old browsers, because it’s tight (my word) no guessing needed.

XHTML is our future, moving from HTML to XML. now he’s tripping; XHTML 1.0 transitional/strict is doable I think for most people, but 1.1?! and talking about 2.0, you might as well be smoking crack.

q: why transitional? I don’t know about his answer.

HTML structure. most corporate is going to use table design (except not so much anymore): nice layout, predictable. hard to find stuff (although his example is faulty, I think, because it’s the kind of thing that would likely be drawn from a db). don’t do it.

div is alternative to table. huh? this sounds like the road to divitis. separation of structure from layout/presentation. divs as the skeleton.

*now* he says don’t overuse, talks about divs for major sections.

browsers: as long as we point back to W3C, we should be prepared. rant vis a vis WYSIWIG editors, the “hi mom” effect: HTML generated in word, which makes Baby Jeebus cry.

then CSS “skinning concept” like face plates for a cell phone. “we just swap out the CSS” — well, in the best of all possible worlds. 1st css design is painful, but then redesigns are easier, faster.

ah, the zen garden; he mentions Dave & Molly’s book.

suggests using lots of stylesheets: base, @import, layout “separate from skin” (huh?), print.

print view of Slashdot. didn’t the user just want the content? I wonder about print stylesheets: they’re a sweet idea, but do “average” users understand the idea?

“information superhighway” not “design superhighway” (photo of Al G) info should come first, design isn’t important. hrm.

backward/forward compatible. ready for the future!

he very briefly alludes to the slashdot makeover. (in ALA?)

bandwidth savings.

oh, hey, he’s the guy who *wrote* the article about redoing Slashdot with web standards. he’s talking about that now, but then again, I read that article when it first came out. talks benefits: not originally impressed with bandwidth savings 2-9 K…but it adds up. 14GB daily.

personal bandwidth story. freakout by server people because of drop in load with CSS implementation. y’know, we’ve done this so gradually, and without ever really having done a big-ass table design, that I can never show those kinds of numbers. sigh.

a journey not a destination, not a quick fix, but lots of benefits.

tells how he ended up writing the story for ALA. “I thought you were kidding.” and getting slashdotted. 🙂

recommends Meyer’s definitive guide to CSS, talks about speaking with Eric. more books, Zeldman, More EM on CSS.

he has 12 minutes, so he’s going to…demo the FIR technique. I mentioned the negative margin technique. (Dave Shea has a whole page full of techniques.)

demo also of a student project, another rework, playing with firefox web dev extension. (which rocks my world)

instead of going to session #10, I went up to my room to get a nap. best thing I could’ve done, even though some of the presentations sounded quite interesting. now I feel like a real live human being again, even with just an hour’s sleep, washing my face, and putting up my hair.

I think I even figured out a design for the IT Kitchen wiki while I was dozing; when I woke up, I had a very clear image of what I want. now I just need to see if I can actually do it.

asking who’s using a CMS, satisfaction.

wacky graphics showing a messed up navigation system.

slide with teeny tiny font. she’s lost her microphone, and she’s not not quite loud enough. hey, she’s asking and now holding the mic…I can hear her!

what it can’t do: write the content (sounds silly, but…. ah, it sounds like our issues with the workforce dev people.), convince reluctant content providers to use the software, set up a workflow/process, stop mission/scope-creep. or do anything about web site governance.

content is the weak link, either missing or duplicative. or just bad writing. providers who don’t know what the hell they’re doing or are too busy. knows just enough to be dangerous. turnover problems. (the longer I work in this biz, the more I see problems as being social rather than technological.)

treat it like a publication, but expected that it’s *always* up to date.

in a perfect world, you’d have writer-editors.

q: but I missed it…oh, who decides on the info arch? (she called it a “no-brainer” but it’s not when you’re trying to develop it…what she meant is that it’s a nobrainer that you need one, but not to create.) should be created by a team. (gah. committees!)

her freaking slides have too small text and she talks too fast.

give web projects equal priority & budget with print.

design should take back seat to content, standards, accessibility.

“dynamic running calendar” — our calendar is crufty and weird, but it does work for that, at least.

she keeps coming back to that one point: keep content managers focused on content not design. but HOW? also suggests outsourcing programming project “black holes” — odd.

mentions the Krug book. that’s definitely the classic of the genre.

I wish I’d gone to take a nap instead of this, esp since my hands are just tweaking out.

asked if people had web governance, and I don’t know what she means by that term. I think there was a question about governance committees with people who don’t know anything…you’re doooooomed.

switched to a guy; dude he has a loud voice.

Veen quote; but of course. this is all part of the CMS meme of the day.

they have a home-grown CMS.

cmswatch, which I haven’t followed in a while.

he’s going to be covering requirements definition. again with the tiny font, reading his damn slides. nothing annoys me more.

don’t start by researching features of exisitng products. interview users/stakeholders, once you know who they are.

6-9 months from starting analysis to selecting a product, if you build your own, give 20%-40% of dev time to analysis.

I’ve been warping off from the presentation…boring boring boring. Victoria, Aus., cms requirements definition report/tool, tho, that might be worth looking into.

there’s a lot of info on their site, but the presentation isn’t all that engaging. or maybe I’m just too brain-dead.

susan mentions a book called “software requirements”

I’m sitting out on the patio in the middle of the hotel, and yes, the wifi reaches out here. the laptop is a little hard to read, but it’s worth it just to get some sun & fresh air.

Susan & I went for a quick walk around the hotel during one of the breaks earlier today, and I realized it was the first time I’d been outside since I got here Sunday evening.

I hear of other people skipping stuff to nap or whatever, but I just don’t want to miss anything, even though my brain is totally melting. I told someone at lunch that I was just madly taking notes in the hope that I’d remember and learn something later. hey, it worked for webvisions, right?

(oh, quicktags turned back on when I re-enabled javascript. fascinating.)