My take on Webstock 09
February 21, 2009
Webstock is one of those conferences where it takes you days and sometimes weeks to mentally process all of the information. There’s so many little gems of information and factoids each of the speakers passed to the audience, and the discussions around the coffee machine always give you something to ponder.
I thought I’d try and distill down some of the major points while its still relatively fresh in my mind.
My top 10
As a web designer / developer I will:
- Look at what’s not popular about my website and ask why, plan for and predict how users will use my site and participate by eating my own cat food.
- Not get mad with “trolls” I’ll just ask them “Dude are you having a bad day?”
- Rethink where the heavy computational stuff on my site happens, the client is king, and there are already some cool toys you can use, without waiting for HTML 5
- Make a mashup. Take something and make it better. Find some data, combine it with something else and open it up to a completely new use or audience.
- Embrace the chaos, “pink bits, happy endings and all”, own my failures, make lemonade, have colouring contests and cut circles out of paper so people can put their boobs through — the visual image of this being translated into sign language is just too strong.
- Not apologise for being a geek and protecting myself by creating my own zen space geek cave, or for playing in the spaces I’ve already created, and having a talking frog.
- Stand on the shoulders of giants and work on the size of my foo, and take time to reassess my thoughts on accessibility.
- Continue to remind people that copy makes all the difference, and one type or level of detail is not enough, there’s at least 3 different types of users and 3 different levels of detail.
- Recognise the genius of the people around me, and publicly acknowledge it, starting a presentation with “I am sooo f*cked” might not be the right approach, funny as sh*t though…
- Sign up to Damian Conway’s hippocratic oath for web developers, and ask the people on my team to do the same.
Entry Filed under: Thoughts (aka my Brain), Webstock09. Tags: accessibility, boobs, cat food, chaos, copy, genius, hippocratic oath, html5, mashup, popularity, talking frog, trolls, user types, zen space.
1. Webstock - what you said | March 6, 2009 at 12:47 pm
[...] Week of geek So that was Webstock What I learnt On Webstock and life Peace, love and a eulogy for Web 2.0 Webstock 2009 – A Look Back In Anger I went to Webstock and I all got was a brown t-shirt What we learned at Webstock Why Webstock rocks Tools for the Online Community Circle Webstock 2009 – Roger Hudson Webstock 2009 – Xero This is why Webstock rocks I love you Webstock 09 My take on Webstock 09 [...]
2.
depaget | March 5, 2009 at 9:42 pm
Hey, too true to all. (Actually, I only ‘got’ number ten having attended DC myself and would be completely lost if you hadn’t explained number five to me).
My take aways from Webstock:
Some ice cream. And some pens.
And i took away from Webstock, Conway’s lecture, largely – names matter and like-minding doesn’t work (one of the auto ‘related’ posts on your post is for budget travel…). Which is a big one – how do you put that to work on sites that are practically built on like-minding? I’d be interested to learn how valuable/useful it is to users.