Below is what I took away from the each presentation I attended and my own presentation (notes coming soon). It’s quite long and my original notes were longer. If you click through each presentation should be available to download and some sessions were recorded. You can also checkout the Flickr stream of photos which are still rolling in. Enjoy.

ADA and Section 508: Best Practices for Web Accessibility for People with Disabilities

• 508 is easy to read but not super useful
• University of Illinois built upon 508 but are in real life environments for people and developers
• Developers are going to make the difference, not the standard
• FAE – Functional Accessibility Evaluator
• Firefox Web Accessibility Toolbar has the ability to send authenticated pages to FAE
• Without the ground workers embracing it it will not happen

The Infrastructure That Protects Vassar from Out-of-Date Content

• Not relying on emailing content updates
• Custom design for every site (130+ centrally maintained)
• Ticket system – Web Help Desk
• Goal: distribute the course list and requirements to all the sites from the course catalog
• Using the official information from the central catalog to be used all throughout the web
• Exporting from catalog to PDF or indesign to use that content past web
• Most everything is coming from external sources
• http://webdesign.vassar.edu

Creating an Online Brand: From Buy-in to Execution

• Integrated Marketing and Communications – It’s is everyone’s job to be a marketer
• Web Presence – Audience centric, eliminate fragmentation of messaging
• Think about the web site differently, not from technology standpoint but from the integrated marketing model
• Web groups are new, asking for resources need to be done strategically
• Data needs to back up every decision and not because person wanted it that way
• Use wireframes to outline how things will be placed on the site

General Session with Jared Spool

• Vision: “Can everyone on the team describe the experience of using your design five years from now”
• Feedback: “In the last six weeks have you spend more than two hours watching someone use either your design or a competitor’s”
• Culture: “In the last six weeks, have you rewarded a team member for creating a major design failure?”
• 5 second test is a really easy way to tell if a page is doing its primary job or not (Very useful, I know)
• Paper prototyping is another good way to do cheap usability testing
• There is a difference of being creative and clever

Web Project Management

• “Ongoing with many false starts and chronic scope creep. Governed by committee(s), success is not often tangible”
• Chaos is everywhere, developers that come in after noon, designers that dont answer email, using “pedagogy” with parents, committees, changes upon changes
• Pick a strategy, understand it, Version control, Issue tracking
• Have a process and follow it, launch a product
• Staff time is not free
• There needs to be a communication strategy between team members even when they are not working in the same place

Using XML to Create an Online Course Catalog

• The power of the XML XSL and XSLT can create CSV, HTML, PDF.. etc.
• Printed bulletins cost a lot and are out of date by the time they go to print
• Search ability is also possible when exporting as XML
• XML file for each program then a file for all the other info
• Building on the XML it can be transformed into a mobile site, phone app, anywhere

Goal-Driven Web Strategy: Implementing Technology with an Eye on ROI

• Universities should be run like a business
• “Communications make marketing tactics tangible”
• Set Strategy – What are your higher level goals? What does success look like?
• Plan Tactics – What types of communications will we use to achieve our goals and how will we measure results?
• Execute & Assess – How many direct lines can you draw? Did that conversion result in a return? What can I do better next time?
• ROI Calculator
• Buying names does not result in high ROI, wasting time and making people mad
• Saying “We should have a Facebook page” is not a marketing strategy

Interactive Maps: Making Them Work for You

• There is a lot of incorrect data all over printed maps, a lot more than you think
• Scope creep on building an interactive map is crazy, set some simple goals and define phases
• Biggest step is to determine how you will get this data on to the map
• Conversion time for the map overlay takes about 100 hours per update
• A lot of campus building don’t have mailing addresses. Hand held GPS will help
• No one comes back to use something confusing, keep it clean like Google Maps
• Search is a nice feature to free up your interface

Better Living through Minions: A Guide to Student Workers

• Took a survey of 130+ web offices
• “Students are our most valuable resource” – Cheap, Abundant, Resourceful, Innovative, See things in a way that we can’t
• Students are mainly from career services, faculty recommendations are second
• Students do mainly small web tasks, copy-paste, data entry, tech support
• Students are not managing social networks, tutorial development, database work
• 17% changed plans after working for the office
• 97% feel they are learning skills that will help them after they graduate, regardless of their field
• Replacing students for FT staff is not free, they have to be told to do everything
• 86% of web offices use student workers
• 79% of the web offices say their operations would hurt without students

Pop Culture Communication: Microsites, Major Impact

• Things that were once the things that were only for uber geeks are now part of every day life. Mainstream has taken control of technology.
• Micro sites are all about the story, the auto industry is the best at making micro sites
• Its about a one night stand with your audience, sharp spike in traffic then all goes away
• Main stream media gives you third party credibility
• 1. What is important to you, the other side is that is important to everyone else
• 2. Timely, Why is it news today?
• 3. Video, Media is competing with TV, it doesn’t even have to very good, most of the time good video looses credibility
• Preparing. Keep your site a secret, Prepare you site for traffic, Create a media page with all the assets, Setup a Google Alert, Have quotable quotes, Media love to hear a great alliteration, pay on words and colorful analogies

Maybe the Purpose of Our Redesign is Only to Serve as a Warning to Others

• The homepage is controlled by a long standing committee, Painted themselves into a corner with the page and the comittee
• Created a two level committee level, What it did was remove the politics from the decision making process
• Having a team of web nerds alone is not enough, You need to have a team that does everything, not just individual tasks
• Budget is what is defining the scope of the site
• Do the research, if you don’t know whats broken you can’t fix it
• Did surveys and the open ending questions gave the best responses
• The number one reason a redesign site fails is the content
• Students hate marketing, they can smell 1/100000 part marketing out of anything
• Just because you wear a suit or have eye balls you can critique the design
• Budget, budget, budget lets you focus on what you need to do instead of what you want to do

Cross-site Scripting: What Is It, and How Can You Protect Your Site from Becoming a Victim?

• Browsers adhere to the same origin policy, XSS tries to bypass that
• Indication of a larger problem with your site
• 233% increase in the number of malicious sites in the last 6 months
• Anything that has a browser and runs JS is susceptible
• It can spread very very fast, faster than regular virus’s
• Three types of attacks – Non-persistent/Reflective, Persistent/Stored, Local
• Loading an off site script to take over the DOM and rewrite everything
• How to fix your site – Be paranoid, Don’t trust the user or even the database, layers, layers, layers, Attackers are lazy

Building Relationships: Tying Together Students and Their 2.0 Tools

• Dance floors and college campuses are the same
• Follow the school on twitter is a 2.0 tool with 1.0 thinking
• 2.0 version of the directory – Photo, year, major, interested, social sites they use
• Promoting the groups that are already on campus
• Instead of asking for money asking for feeds
• Sweet spot is to get them as they come in the door as freshmen
• Never publish emails have a lightbox where they can fill out a form
• Writing quality increases when students are writing in a blog for peers and not for a single professor
• Emails that are being sent out are based on their relevant interests
• Current university mentality “We are going to spam you a lot and there is nothing you can do about it except ignore the emails”
• 80-90% sign in with Facebook, Facebook connect is the best way to connect, not LDAP

My Presentation

Starting a Web Office From Scratch: Trials and Tales

Conference Lessons Learned

Know your audience. During the second keynote David Galper presented about college students and was completely out of touch with the state of the university student and the web. This was a great lesson about knowing your stuff and knowing your audience because immediate feedback doesn’t lie.

If you follow the Twitter hash tag #heweb09 (noon till 1 p.m.) you can see some of the comments. What it came down to was the speaker was out of date and out of touch, not to mention who ever designed his slides had no concept of visual composition.

I won’t go into too much detail here but our conference hash tag became a trending topic on twitter and there was a few articles already written on the backlash. If you are interested how bad it really was checkout this Ustream of the presentation.

Overall Take Aways

This group of people are simply amazing, most web offices are underfunded, understaffed and under appreciated. But still the higher ed web workers charge on, doing whats right for the end user and sharing all along the way. I feel humbled to be part of such a great community.

Before and After

Turn your everyday photos into something that looks like it was taken by a semi-pro. This four-step tutorial is fun because it doesn’t require hard work and the final outcome never disappoint! Lets start!

STEP 1

Once you’ve picked your photo, Duplicate the layer.

STEP 2

With the duplicated layer selected, go to Image > Adjustments > Desaturate. This will turn your photo black and white.

STEP 3

With the duplicated layer still selected, apply Gaussian Blur. Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur (about 3.5 Radius). Play around with the amount after you’ve finish the tutorial completely. The higher radius will add more diffuse glow to the image.

STEP 4

After the layer has been desaturated and blurred, using your Layers Palette, in the blend mode, select Overlay. Ta-dddaaa! Ooh soo DRAMATIC and fun!

RECAP

Before and After

OTHER SAMPLE

About 20 communicators from across campus attended the meetup. We had salad, pizza and pop to offer and a few topics to get the discussion started and get feedback on. I took detailed notes and summed them up below. Unfortunately the raw notes and results are only available to the Wayne State communicators but I did list out some of the broad topics we talked about.

Topic’s and Notes from the Meeting:

• Promoting faculty research/accomplishments
• Media report created by PR
• Quote “At the end of the day all of the University’s research impacts our lives in some way”
• Idea: Weekly News Reel
• Discussion: Current state of the university’s culture
• Thought: People seem to be responding well to the Wellness Warriors program
• Idea: Quiz bowl for Wayne State facts with prizes
• Idea: “Watch for Wayne State in..” email or message prior to media
• Idea: Make the scholars on campus accessible
• Discussion: Faculty orientation is a great place to start engaging
• Discussion: Presidential communication
• Discussion: Faculty/staff/student ambassador’s
• Topic: Digital signage
• Discussion: Social Media

If you would like to be invited or updated on future meetings just let us know, email campuscommunicators@lists.wayne.edu and we will make sure you get the updates about the next meetings.

I gave the presentation as an overview of the importance of web standards and accessibility. Not only as the right thing to do but also how they can benefit any web project. Not only is there a cost savings to having and using standards but there is also a search engine benefit and overall your users will be happier.

Unfortunately the real world execution is not so cut and dry. Scope, time constraints and lack of communication effect the end result of both standards and accessibility. The key is communication, letting everyone know what the standards are and if there is an addition. Making standards and accessibility a habit and baking it into every piece of work you do will make it that much easier to execute on a consistent basis.

Presentation Video

Presentation Slides

Resources

• Opera Web Standards Curriculum
• The W3C Markup Validation Service
• Section 508: The Road to Accessibility
• jQuery: The Write Less, Do More JavaScript Library
• My DebugBar | IETester
• Cynthia Says – Accessibility Tester
• Web Development Tools – What’s in your web toolbelt?
• Understanding Web Accessibility Obstacles

Last but not least

!important is not your friend, please stop using it.

If you are not familiar with microformats the goal is to use plain HTML and embed through classes and Semantic HTML information about the content. Similar to XML to describe content but in plain of HTML so an additional document is not necessary. Recently Yahoo released Search Monkey which takes advantage of microformats to mesh search results with the information on the result pages.

Support for hCalendar is on both the event listing page and the individual event pages. Below are some screen shots of the pages and what can be pulled from them.

As of right now we don’t have any plans to implement a Search Monkey app just yet but this is the first step for us or the community to pull from these events. Especially since the Academic Calendar is now in the events calendar.

This is just a small change to the calendar but it shows our contuned support and drive to support web standards and initiatives.

Thanks to the local Adobe user groups, FlashFocused and Detroit Area Adobe User Group for joining us in sponsoring this special event. Joey will be selling autographed books. Thanks to O’Reilly, there will be some books to give away too!

Abstract

Want to know how to use your existing Flex and/or Flash skills to build applications for the desktop using Adobe AIR? In this presentation we’ll look at what AIR is and is not, and we’ll look at the key features of AIR. We’ll go beyond the standard marketing presentation for AIR and instead focus on what is possible using AIR and what it takes to get up and running using AIR.

Joey Lott Biography

Joey Lott is one of the founders of The Morphic Group, a Flex and Flash application development company. Joey has also authored or co-authored numerous books on Flex and Flash and related technologies including Programming Flex 3, ActionScript 3 Cookbook, Adobe AIR in Action, and Advanced ActionScript 3 with Design Patterns. Joey has spoken at many industry conferences such as Adobe MAX, Flash on the Beach, Flashforward, and FITC.

When: Tuesday, September 23, 2008 6:30pm – 8:30pm
Where: Canton Public Library, 1200 S. Canton Center Road, Canton, Michigan 48188 (map). Phone: 734-397-0999. We’re meeting in the Community Room. Free parking is available next to the library.

Disclosure: This program is neither sponsored, nor endorsed by the Canton Public Library.

Hope you can join us!

The next Refresh Detroit meeting will be 6:30pm, Wednesday, June 18, 2008 at Ann Arbor SPARK in downtown Ann Arbor, Michigan. They are fortunate to have Adobe representative Doug Halliday lead the presentation.

Doug will highlight features in Acrobat, including creating PDFs, sharing, forms and usability. He’ll also discuss the new features in the upcoming Acrobat 9 version, due for release in mid-summer 2008. Adobe expert Greg Pisocky will join our meeting remotely to explain the accessibility features in Acrobat.

Location:
Ann Arbor SPARK
330 East Liberty Street
Ann Arbor, MI 48104

Doug Halliday is Business Development Manager, Manufacturing, at Adobe Systems Inc. In this capacity, he is responsible for driving customer awareness of Adobe solutions in manufacturing, developing partner relationships and formulating strategies with key customers, particularly in the automotive and heavy equipment sectors.

Greg Pisocky is a Business Development Manager in Adobe Systems’ Corporate Product Management Group. As an accessibility specialist, he advises Adobe’s customers on techniques for developing accessible content for those with disabilities.

Some of the team have never touched flash so I wanted to start at the beginning on how Flash was born. Jonathan Gay, the brain child behind Flash developed the idea in college, which eventually evolved into the vector-based program called FutureSplash Animator. Macromedia acquired the software and renamed the program Flash, which was taken from the names “Future” and “Splash”. It is now Adobe Flash and has gained popularity due to interactivity to web pages, creating animations, advertisements , integrating video into web pages, and more recently, to develop rich internet applications.

According to Adobe, Flash has over a 98 percent market penetration for desktop users. The flash technology is utilized to display and stream video on popular video portals like YouTube and Google Video. After going over some advantages and disadvantages that Flash has on the Web, I outlined the tools and the “dreaded” timeline. Hopefully, it made the team a little more eager to learn Flash and give it a try.

If you’re interested in the past and future of Flash you can view the Flash Tenth Anniversary showcase or check out this blog here by Kevin Lynch – Chief Software Architect at Adobe.

Hopefully, this quick workshop made our team feel more at ease with Flash and bring some understanding on what Flash is and where to get started. Take the challenge and start learning Flash today!

Here are some links to basic concepts and tutorials to get acquainted with Flash:
About Flash Symbols
Motion Tweening
Creating a Simple Animation

Check out the slideshow below.

Download the Flash is your friend slides (PDF 772k)

For some of the team who are print designers with no web background this was their first look at how the web functioned both technically and design wise. Stepping through an overview of how HTTP works and how a browser requests and constructs a web page did not seem too harsh. Basic HTML tags is when it started to get a little tense.

It was great to hear all their questions as I was talking because I could draw everything out. I have found that you can explain anything by drawing it on a whiteboard. Once we got through how elements are constructed and the DOM things went a little south. I started to explain the implementation of CSS which may have been too much for the hour and half workshop. But they got through it.

What I should have done was gone straight to the box model, squares were the theme of the talk really and the box model only expands on it.

In the end what really got them excited was talking about designing on a grid. Glad I saved it for last because the use of a grid doesn’t help anyone if they don’t know the behavior of HTML and CSS.

All in all it went very well, so well we are considering bi-weekly talks on various topics related to print and web to educate the entire creative staff on what we all do on a daily basis. Being part of a higher education institution we have a duty to educate even if we are not in a class room, many of our student assistants and technicians have been taught by our senior staff and have grown into full time positions. This was the first time we did cross pollination of skills and we will only benefit from it, hopefully we can bring in the larger marketing staff for future workshops.

Check out the slideshow below.

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Download the Introduction to the Web slides (PDF 850k)