Meryl's Notes Blog

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Several people reported that the conference was not as big as it had been several years ago. That’s pretty much the situation for most conferences today including Comdex, which at its height had 300,000 attendees only had 80,000 this year. Despite the slow down, Fawcette did a great job of pulling together a diverse and high quality list of speakers from all walks of Web design.

The first keynote I attended was an ASP .NET presentation. It wasn’t too exciting, but I hung in there knowing the next one was going to be a great one. During the break right before his speech, I met Jeffrey Zeldman. We hugged and it was the first time I smiled since arriving in New Orleans. While waiting for Jeffrey’s talk on "Building with Standards," I chatted with Alan K’necht.

Listening to Jeffrey’s speech helped me decide to use XHTML transitional 1.0 with CSS when I do my Web redesign. It’ll make it easier to move toward XML plus I am familiar with the key points of XHTML markup that Zeldman mentioned. He clearly discussed the importance of standards, the differences between HTML, XHTML, and XML, and the importance of including DOCTYPES in Web pages.

Next, I was greeted with a hug from the lovely Molly Holzschlag. We ran into Nick Finck on our way to the Web Standards Panel discussion. Nick had quite an adventure on his flight that left Portland at midnight and got sidetracked to Pensacola, Florida. He had only arrived 30 minutes before his panel discussion.

Alan, Eric, Molly, and Nick, discussed the hows and whys of Web standards while Zeldman moderated. I was sitting in a lousy location for the panel since they moved the chairs, so I didn’t quite catch the discussion. But, you can get the latest from WaSP Web site.

I had to split my time between two sessions in the next hour: Makiko Itoh’s CSS without Tears and Nick Usborne’s Building Relationships Online. Since I was interviewing both of them for articles, I wanted to try to catch their presentations. I wish I had seen Makikoh’s presentation when I first learned to use CSS. She showed step-by-step how to take a basic HTML document and add CSS to it. So simple. More to come in the article. Nick outlined the steps to help online businesses build relationships, a valuable presentation from a Web marketing perspective.

Eric Meyer had back-to-back presentations: Cross-Browser Compatibility and The Deconstruction of a Dynamic
XHTML Web Page. It was his Using Stylesheets: A Tool for Design (and Destruction!) that most captured my attention and an upcoming article.

I also had the pleasure of meeting Sean Carton and Teri Dahlbeck. It was quite a full day for day 1.

The next morning, I used the time to go see New Orleans with Cheryl Thompson from DigitalEveDallas. We walked through the French Quarter and a clown attempted to mess with us in Jackson Square.

We headed back to the conference in time for Curt Cloninger’s wild and fun keynote on "The Web is Like the Web." It was a blast watching the presentation come alive since I had been interviewing Curt on the topic prior to the conference. That article will be coming soon. (Do you hate me now for the article excuse instead of explaining what it was about?)

Next came Kelly Goto’s "Setting the Stage: Planning a Web Development Project." Familiar with her Web Redesign book and process-oriented presentations, I had been eager to attend her presentation. She hit all the project issues and answered the common questions such as "how the heck do you estimate for a project?" She offered project planning advice from Defining the Project to Launch and Beyond. Unfortunately, I didn’t get more than a few minutes to listen to Audra Rothman speak about project management. I’ve been talking with her offline and I’m sure I’ll gain some insight from her to share with you.

Bob Slote of 500watts.com talked about "Designing with a New Eye" addressing Jakob Nielsen’s blaming cool design for the dot bomb meltdown and how he ironically looks like John Belushi. Bob explained what is good design and how grids can play a role as a useful tool. Also inspiring was how companies used the past as inspiration for today’s design. For instance, Bauhaus typography inpsired the ABC TV, Bloomingdale’s, and UPS logos.

Throughout the frenzy, I ran from session to session snapping photos of the presenters to submit with the articles. The presenters were such good sports about the photos. The links to the six articles are forthcoming. Again, it was wonderful and exciting to meet the faces behind the Web, learn new tricks, see the Big Easy, and oh yeah… blow $5 at Harrah’s for the fun of it. Thanks to local New Orlean resident, Adam Bell, for giving me a heads up of what to do and where.

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