Forepoint

@Media Conference 2009

It was a pretty uneventful train journey from Preston to London on the evening of Wednesday 24th June 2009. I say uneventful but the pies and coconut slices I'd picked up from Gosforth Bakery on the way back from a meeting at Sellafield earlier that day were a momentous occasion for Lewis who didn't believe me when I said they were the best pies in the world...he now agrees!

The reason we were on a train straight after work was to attend the @media conference on Thursday 25th and Friday 26th June 2009. The event is pretty high up the list for people interested in web design and development and as budgets don’t stretch to a week in the USA for SXSW, the second best event to attend this year would do nicely!

The event has only been running since 2005 but has always had first class speakers at the event. The likes of John Hicks (designed the Firefox logo), Chris Wilson (lead developer for Microsoft Internet Explorer) and other leading figures of web design and build have been pulled together to speak to 300 web geeks at the Southbank Centre on London.

After a full English beakfast at the hotel (http://www.fullershotels.com/rte.asp?id=15) we made our way to the centre to register and get stuck in to the talks.

With the credit crunch affecting many businesses, the first session by Andy Clarke was a discussion on the methods of working with clients and how to focus on the job in had to get the best out of budgets.

The second session by Simon Collison moved on to the process of working through a job by having a selection of flexible approaches to ensure a project has a clear roadmap, but allowing for organic and collaborative processes.

Being the icon and logo guru, John Hicks discussed the use of icons for the third session and how they should aid the user interaction on your site.

Dan Rubin from the USA discussed for the fourth session how you can bring texture and subtle lighting onto designs to help websites mimic the world around us.

Mark Boulton then challenged the use of fonts on websites and how future technology may be able to help with building a much richer typographic website.

Finally for day one, Jason Santa Maria asked us to think small. He discussed common design misconceptions, visual design strategy, and small and achevable ways everyone can improve their website designs.

It was now 5.30pm on a hot day in London and our brains were full of thoughts and idea that we could bring back to the office. Luckily, the Guardian had sponsored The @media Party at a bar round the corner…and there was a free bar! With a dash round the corner and 300 web geeks thirsty for a beer, I was amased that we were one of the first people to reach the venue and enjoy a well deserved (and free) pint of beer. We spent the evening meeting fellow web people and discussing the days sessions and how the different people who already work this way, or like us are planning on taking back all these ideas and putting them in to practice. We were also able to chat to some of the leading people in the web standards community and discussed how mobile was ‘the next big thing’ for websites.

It was quite late when I finally dragged Lewis from the bar (he probably can’t remember) as everyone except the hardcore (us included) had left. Back at the hotel we learned that Michael Jackson had died. Lewis used this as an excuse to call one of the guys we’d met and let him know…it was 12.30am and he doesn’t really remember doing it!

Day two and we were all set for more thought provocing sessions. We’d had a good night socialising with like minded people and we’d met some very interesting characters. Lewis looked rough though and blamed his ‘illness’ the lack of food to soak up the copious amounts of free alcohol he’d consumed.

The first session was all about quality and how we should ensure we avoid “cruft and bloat” when writing code. Chris Wilson from Microsoft came second with a very interesting discussion regarding the challenges posed by having multiple browsers and how it can actually open new opportunities to web developers.

HTML5 is the new language specification being developed for building websites. We currently work with HTML4 and the third session concentrated on what will be coming up in its release. The presentation was made by a rather eccentric mad American woman alled Molly Holzschlag. She obviously enjoyed making a rather boring sounding subject in to one that turns out, for us developers at least, to be quite an interesting subject. We’ll be keeping an eye on the developments with HTML5.

After lunch, Andy Budd discussed user testing and how this can be done on a small scale to help refine your product.

The penultimate session by Robin Christopherson opened the eyes of many of the audience. No pun intended bur Robin is blind and works for AbilityNet. His session was about new approaches to a modern accessible web. He showed us the barriers that blind and disabled users come across, and how the overcome them. He showed examples of what makes a website inaccessible and the simple things that developers can do to fix it. Having not really seen a blind person surf the Internet before, it was very educational to see what we can do to help improve the accessibility of websites.

The final session of the conference was the “Hot Topics” session, with some of the speakers taking to the stage to answer pre-submitted questions. These were mainly dominated by the release of the HTML5 specification and the hurdles we’ll have to jump to implement it.

The big message from all these sessions was that websites should not have to look the same in all browsers – especially Internet Explorer 6. Why not IE6? That’s a whole separate discussion!

We took a lot on board and will be looking at working many of the things we learned into the way we’ll be working in the future.

The train journey back was a lot more interesting as we’d managed to get in to 1st class so spent the journey back surfing the internet to find out more about Agile frameworks, CSS3, HTML5, web fonts, workflows… and to set-up Twitter to follow some of the people we’d met!