During An Event Apart in Chicago 2007, I made six posts for my co-workers to follow live; this ended up being really long.

Instead of those 6 posts, you now have access to this single post, but I’m only going to focus on the really awesome stuff from the conference.

You can still download the original set of 6 posts in .PDF format, if you’d like additional reference material. I hope they help you in your quest to further web standards!

Motivation 2.0

I love large conferences like An Event Apart; it gives you the motivation towards your profession, business, job, or freelance rush! I like to call it Motivation 2.0; cheesy, right?

Part of what gets me fired up at big functions like An Event Apart, besides meeting with legendary web icons, is all the great people. See all of the great people rocking out! How many other professionals rock out like web developers?

Leading the Industry

Another awesome part of An Event Apart is that they take web development to the next level and present concepts that blow your mind. There were so many speakers, and here are the concepts that really stood out at me.

Eric Meyer wowed the audience by turning simple table data into complex bar graphs. He proved that CSS can be used to affect any number of HTML tags in any way you choose.

Jeremy Keith was probably the most anticipated speaker, and proved that the CSS “flexible to any tag” approach applies to Javascript as well. He’s got a lot of groupies; and we surrounded him after to find out his views on Javascript libraries and Hijax.

Accessibility actually isn’t boring; at least not when Derek Featherstone talks about throwing away checklists and focuses on usability. Also, he shows how some really popular websites bomb on screen readers!

Jeffrey Zeldman is a great speaker on processes, and his speech on designing websites that are easy for people to use and navigate was very informative. He’s a funny guy, too, which is always appreciate in the Web community.

Dan Cederholm revolutionized my work habits by talking about Microformats, or small bits of HTML that represent contact information, mapping, events, etc. Although confusing at the time, this is going to be the wave of the future.

Liz Danzico was great! Her presentation focused on the need to reinvent the rules of Information Architecture. This created a lot of controversy during the Q&A, but she never faltered and these 7 rules break open the design of websites.

Luke Wroblewski was the most powerful speaker; he had me cracking up! He showed us research done on forms and showed us how easy it is to help users through the process of completing forms on your website. When done right, it results in websites like Geni, which had 5 million profiles created in 5 months!

Going back to work

This conference definitely had a huge impact on my work process, too. It helped me view Web Development as fun again, and realize that I can always go outside the box.

I’ve been able to standardize the CSS I use and get layouts pumped out in no time at all, and the biggest change has been the use of Microformats, which opens all sorts of possibilities. I’ve even used the XFN Microformat on the speakers listed here.

An Event Apart definitely sets itself apart from the rest of the conferences. Not cheesy, just true!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 24th, 2007 at 2:56 pm and is filed under technology, web development.