Webstock - conference Day One

I am so exhausted! It was an awesome, full on, day. Probably the highlight of the day was Joel Spolsky's talk "Shiny geegaw vs great design", which was very similar content to Kathy Sierra's workshop that I went to the day before. Essentially - make an awesome experience for the user.

After lunch was the 8x5 sessions, which I was taking part in. My talk was on Web Standard and .net - which is a pretty contriversial topic!! To be honest, 5 minutes isn't long enough, and I think 5 minutes wasn't long enough for any of us because we all had really in-depth topics. But it was fun making it fit into that, and it was great having the fast-paced stuff!

I chose to go to Rachel McAlpine's stream which I found really interesting. She really brought writing for the web down to street-level. The fact is that anyone and everyone these days write content for their website or intranet. So she pulled out some basic guidelines for making that better - like using a lot of headings and making sure your main points are at the start of the paragraph.

Kelly Goto's talk was of course really good! Again, she brought up the whole user-centered design of applications and sites. Getting to know - really know - who will be using your application and what matters to them.

And, the Kiwis won in the Tim-Tam, Chit-Chat Trans-Tasman Taste-off! Yee-ah! Then the day finished up with cocktails :-)

Webstock - Kathy Sierra's workshop

To kick Webstock off, I went along to Kathy Sierra's Workshop - Creating Passionate Users. It was SO good that afterwards I ran to the office to tell the others all about it!! It is really exciting for me cause I now I have some really cool ideas of stuff we can do with Go Fetch! and make it better for people who register and use it. There was so much stuff that I learnt, and there is no way I could cover it all here, but here are some key cool things:

1. People are passionate about things in their lives, and this is characterised by certain behaviour. But we can also use this in a backwards way to spark people's interest in products/services and to keep their interest up.
2. For people to be interested and attracted to something there needs to be a brain-level reaction. Our brains react and pay attention to things that are:
   • Novel - something strange, different, unique.
   • Beautiful
   • Cute and innocent
   • Funny
   • Faces and facial expressions - and these don't need to be human faces it can be animals or drawings
   • Unresolved - things that make you go *huh?!*
   • Sexy
   • Scary
3. If things are written in conversational tone rather than facts and information then people pay attention much better.
4. Animation - we take notice of moving things and tonal changes. So this should only be used well to draw attention to a specific thing on the page.
5. So now we have people's attention, we need to retain it by giving them a compelling picture to aim towards ("That looks cool, yeah I want to do that!") and a way to get to it, an easy way to get started.
6. We love learning and understanding, so there needs to be a way for people to learn more and more about what they are aiming towards. Also to keep learning, the tool or site needs to be very unobtrusive so that people don't have to learn to use the tool, but instead focus on achieving their goal.
7. Games are really good at keeping people motivated by providing levels - and the same idea can be applied to our tools. They don't need to be as specific as levels, but people are continuously motived if they feel they have achieved something and are more able or get some reward afterwards.
8. If people feel they are part of a bigger picture or meaning then they will be more enthusatic. E.g. Coldplay and Fair Trade. And people will want to and encourage others to do things like wear the Fair Trade braclet or t-shirts.
9. Community is really important -for people to be able to interact, comment or have some part with others going through the same things.
10. And of course the most important bit of all, is that it isn't about us webdesigners, or about the tools that we are trying to sell, it is about how the people using the tool feel.

Redesign... finally!

Yay, my site is finally redesigned...! Not only has it been delayed because of spare time, but also because it took me a long time to decide what to do. You see at work I know that websites have to follow reasons, purposes and goals - and this applies to the content of the site as well as the look of the site.

So my first thing was - what is the reason for having a site?? And this was why I was initially slow in actually getting round to posting my very first entry. In the end I decided that my site was going to exist just because I wanted one. This, I think, is just as valid a reason for an individual as anything I come across for work. I am a webdesigner, so I do need a website. But also I come across stuff all the time that I want to comment on or make a statement on, and that is exactly what a blog is for.

So then, if my blog exists just for me, then the design I feel needs to reflect that. So what about me do I want to portray visually? I like so many things, so many artistic styles, etc. and again I was stuck! I seriously think that when you're a webdesigner that the worst client you can have is yourself!! Well again, one day I realised - why not use the things that are right under my nose every day?

I am a compulsive doodler. Apparently this is because I am a kinesthetic person and so I understand the world and information around me by doing. So I always need to be doing, and this comes out in doodling. So what a better thing to put on my site that is about me, than my dooles?!

I also loved this idea because I am on the computer all day at work, and the last thing I feel like doing when I am home is being on the computer! So I love the idea of using things that have been really drawn, not computer generated, and this is where I decided to bring in the paper texture. This paper is some of my favourite in my collection - one of those items that I like too much to use so it was still in pristine condition to scan in!

So here it is. Still not *quite* finished - still some tweeks to do - but here is my site with my doodles, all hand drawn and all uniquely me!

Webstock

WOW! I've just been accepted to speak at the Webstock conference in the 8x5 sessions!! WOW is just about right, I feel a mixture of excitement, nervousness, panic and joy! I'll be speaking on creating validated web standard applications in the Microsoft .net framework, which doesn't naturally lend itself to being web standard. Although the web team at Microsoft have been making leaps and bounds in catching up to the rest of the industry (especially with the .net 2 framework release end of last year), it does still take more work to get a .net application to fit within web standards. This is why most web standard applications are developed in PHP or Ruby (e.g. Flickr, Basecamp, etc.). So I have 5 minutes to speak on that!!

hmmmmm!

*whine*

Oh man... to be living in Britian or Europe would be cool right now. The @media 2006 conference looks sooo good! And altho the tickets aren't that expensive, it costs a minimum of $2500 return to the UK. I should be happy with what I have, I mean Webstock will be brilliant too. It's just that Andy Clarke's topic looks really cool and they seem to have a lot more design emphasis than WE05 had, and it's the design stuff I'd love to see more of. Combination of cool design and pushing the edges with CSS. Ummm... guess that means I should really get onto redoing my own design aye.

Finally!

Okay finally I actually write something on here - hee hee Pauly should be happy!!! Seeing as he set it up so long ago and he's gotten real into blogging... then again he actually has an interesting life in Japan, and a digital camera... two things I'm lacking haha! So why have a blog at all then? I've thought about this long and hard and come to some main conclusions.

1. I can't be a web designer and not have a website! And a blog is an easy way to do that.
2. I hope to have some useful information for someone at some stage (oh so vague!). What I mean is that so much information you find on the internet is copied from other people so you always find the same information.
3. I have such a variety of interests that I thought it would be an interesting observation to how this blog takes shape.

A redesign is also in the plans. (Which are all in my head at this stage...!)