Blue Flavor

Concrete and Shadow by D. Keith Robinson

10 Things I Took Away From An Event Apart

September 19th, 2006 at 8:04 a.m.

As I did for the Future of web Apps event, I’m going to share with your a few things I learned, observed, jived with, etc. from today’s Event Apart.

Overall it was great. The venue (Bell Harbor) was superb. They had great wifi, a nice seating arrangement and a very thoughtful staff. While all the speakers were smart and entertaining and had something good to offer, as with most of these events, I enjoyed mixing it up in the hallways and at the party the most.

10 things from An Event Apart

  1. First off, a great CSS trick from Eric Meyer. You can fake child selectors for IE with the * universal selector. It’s actually pretty easy to do. Learn more here.
  2. A good client/service relationship is much like any other relationship. It takes lots of work, good communication, mutual respect and trusting your instincts.
  3. Your logo is not your brand. It’s something that will become, over time, associated with your brand and is the impression thereof. This is something I think many of our clients know, but need to occasionally be reminded of. As well, it highlights the need for a good over all experience.
  4. Design is about solving problems, not about impressing people with the best looking or most innovative design. Amen to that.
  5. Your web designer should know how the medium well, which means they should know how to code.
  6. Content is the biggest missed opportunity on the web. Copy drives traffic (and use, and sales, etc.) yet it’s sorely lacking in importance for most web projects.
  7. URLs should be human readable, a good opportunity for good copy and an under appreciated way to improve an experience. This is something that came up last week at The Future of web Apps as well. This doesn’t mean you need to lose unique identifying IDs in your URL, only that it should make sense to a person and be “hackable” to navigate back up a site’s hierarchy.
  8. A good way to get stakeholders interested in content is to keep talking about it. Keep bringing it up, write about it, test the usefulness of it and prove to stakeholders that it’s important.
  9. Meeting someone’s needs take more than just making something useful. You should also strive for emotional connections with your products or services.
  10. Mobile is a becoming a huge revenue opportunity in the US, especially among younger audiences who have (relatively) quite a bit of disposable income. Not sure if this means people will finally take the leap towards going for more mobile, but it’s interesting.

A few observations

  • Jason Santa Maria mentioned how he didn’t like full black text on a white background. I totally agree with that.
  • The food (they provided lunch) was awesome!
  • Zeldman used the term “shovelware” to describe copy that wasn’t “web friendly”; too long, no headings, no lists, not chunked, etc. I love that. He explained how to deal with (paraphrased) “when someone dumps a shovel-load of content on you.” See, the “top 10 list” thing is a good idea!
  • Kelly Goto had a lot of great stuff, but it was really too much to absorb in the amount of time she had. Good talk though!
  • All of the speakers took some time at the end of the day to critique some sites from attendees. That was very entertaining and a great learning experience.
Keith Robinson

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