To channel a famous motivational speaker, I could go out there tonight, with the materials you’ve got, and rewrite the sites I showed you at the start of this talk to make them load in under a second. In two hours. Can you? Can you? Of course you can! It’s not hard! We knew how to make small websites in 2002. It’s not like the secret has been lost to history, like Greek fire or Damascus steel. But we face pressure to make these sites bloated. I bet if you went to a client and presented a 200 kilobyte site template, you’d be fired. Even if it looked great and somehow included all the tracking and ads and social media crap they insisted on putting in. It’s just so far out of the realm of the imaginable at this point.
Maciej Cegłowski talk about bloating sites, fake fixes and “chickenshit minimalism”, for Web Directions 2015. You can also see the video here.
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Texto de Maciej Cegłowski sobre el peso excesivo de sitios, falsas soluciones y minimalismo inútil para Web Directions 2015. También puedes ver la plática aquí.
During the late 90s and early 2000s, the world of web design was a much more confusing place. Web designers tried to make sense of it all with workarounds and hacks – this was a time of table layouts, iframes, flaming text flash banners, and inspect element didn’t even exist. Though it seems things haven’t changed much since browsers today still have their own quirks, trust us when we say we’re a lot better off now.
Web standards came along and tried to unify the way we design, putting in place a convention on the way we create our websites. Enter one of web design’s many early super heroes, John Allsopp.
He wrote A Dao of Web Design, an article that is still at the corner stone of every web designer’s must read list. He started Web Directions, a conference that focuses on the future of the web and the medium we work on. He runs the company that is behind the much-loved app, Style Master, and develops other software & online tools that make web designers’ workflows much easier.
Here’s a clip of John Allsopp about the prehistory of Responsive Design at a SydCSS Meetup.
The Philippine Web Designers Organization is proud and deeply honored to announce that John Allsopp will be flying to Manila this November for the fifth Form Function & Class Web Design Conference brought to you by the Philippine Web Designers Organization.
Some of the best talent from the NSW Web Industry were recognised last Wednesday night at the NSW Web Awards. The winners all progress to the National Finals to be held on the 24th October during the Web Directions conference.
The awards are judged firstly by making it through a validation process using tools like W3Validator and Jigsaw, sites that don't validate are removed from the running for a Web Award. We then look at accessibility, this year we used the OzArt tool with some manual inspection also. If the accessibility isn't deemed to be up to standard the website is removed from the running for a Web Award.
Remaining sites are then allocated among judges who score them based on 5 criteria;
1. Visual Design
2. Content
3. UX
4. Development
5. Accessibility
Each criteria has its different attributes and we rate them on a 5 point scale.
The results are exported to a spreadsheet and we wight the scores, because some attributes are more important than others.
Things like "innovation" are used for tie breakers, so you can still win an award with a great site that is not innovative. (Except in the Innovation Category.)
Shortly we will publish all the attributes and all the weightings on the AWIA website webindustry.asn.au and you get to tell us how they can be improved.
The night kicked off with 4 showcases picked from our NSW entrants;
Showcase 1 - Anurag Chakradhar, Development Manager Thinkun
GoGet CarShare
Showcase 2 - Katie Finnegan, Design and UX Manager The Web Showroom
Salvation Army Aged Care Plus
Showcase 3 - Edmund Tadros, Data Journalist The Australian Financial Review
Australian Financial Review
Showcase 4 - Geoff Bowers, Director Daemon Internet Consultants
Sochi 2014 Australian Olympic Winter Team
Here at the AWIA, we're going to keep giving awards to companies that build well-designed, accessible web sites with well-structured markup.
These are our NSW winners;
In the hotly contested Commercial Category, sponsored by Parmia Insurance we would like to congratulate our joint winners:
Love Me Again Boutique by The Web Showroom
ONSydney by OnMedia
In the Culture and Events Category, sponsored by Partner and Prosper we would like to congratulate our winner:
Sochi 2014: Australian Olympic Winter Team by Daemon Internet Consultants.
In the Not for Profit Category, sponsored by Eduka we would like to congratulate our winner:
Wesley LifeForce Service Finder by Rowan Atkinson Photography.
In the Mobile Category, sponsored by Bankwest we would like to congratulate our winner:
Goget by Thinkun
In the innovation Category, sponsored by Web Directions South and judged by Russ Weakley and John Allsopp we would like to congratulate our winner:
Women Love Tech by Women Love Tech.
A special thanks to our sponsors for supporting the night;
Parmia Insurance
ReInteractive
Media Access Australia
and to our judges;
Buzz Usbrone and Jonathan Crossfield.
Who is the AWIA?
It stands for the Australian Web Industry Association.
It's the association that represents web developers and people who work in or around the web. We don't represent everyone. We’re actually only interested in the people and companies who have high ethical standards.
Now you probably have an idea in your head about what a professional association is. But the culture of our organisation is very much a work in progress. It’s pretty clear we’re not going to be stodgy and conservative. It's not going to be a committee and a newsletter. It's going to be events and projects and content and it's going to be an organisation that has a public voice. It's early days but here's a bit of what we're up to:
Widelines stands for Web Industry Guidelines. A Code of Conduct for the web industry. It's what separates us from the cowboys. And it's a set of useful questions that clients should be asking their web developer before they sign a contract. So when they ask you those questions, because you're an ethical operator, you'll give different answers to a shonky operator, which should win you business. It's a tool for us to show that there's more to web development than the lowest advertised price. With Widelines we're educating the market and we're giving ourselves a marketing advantage. You'll be Widelines-compliant. Dodgy Brothers will not.
Geeks for Good. We're starting a project that promotes the work we do for Not for Profit organisations. Most of us do free or heavily discounted work for NFPs and it makes a huge difference to their influence on the world. That's a story we should be telling. It promotes the charity, it promotes our members and it makes the industry look good. If you have an NFP whose effectiveness has been transformed by your generosity, let us know; we're putting 2 minute videos together.
Port80, We do Port80 meetups in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide & Perth. And we support the Web Design Meetup Group in Brisbane and Web Developer 42 Degrees in Hobart. People get jobs, people learn stuff, people make friends. It’s meant to be social, it’s meant to be different every time you go. It’s the place where people’s eyes do not glaze over.
EOTW - Edge of the Web, we run a conference called Edge of the Web. Next year it will be a distributed conference, running in all cap cities. Perhaps you’d like to get on our mailing list.
AWA - And we do this, the Australian Web Awards. Because we want to acknowledge the people who do good quality work and lift the level of discussion about what's happening in the industry.
Some of the best talent from the NSW Web Industry were recognised last night at the NSW Web Awards. The winners all progress to the National Finals to be held on the 24th October during the Web Directions conference.
The awards are judged firstly by making it through a validation process using tools like W3Validator and Jigsaw, sites that don't validate are removed from the running for a Web Award. We then look at accessibility, this year we used the OzArt tool with some manual inspection also. If the accessibility isn't deemed to be up to standard the website is removed from the running for a Web Award.
Remaining sites are then allocated among judges who score them based on 5 criteria;
1. Visual Design
2. Content
3. UX
4. Development
5. Accessibility
Each criteria has its different attributes and we rate them on a 5 point scale.
The results are exported to a spreadsheet and we wight the scores, because some attributes are more important than others.
Things like "innovation" are used for tie breakers, so you can still win an award with a great site that is not innovative. (Except in the Innovation Category.)
Shortly we will publish all the attributes and all the weightings on the AWIA website webindustry.asn.au and you get to tell us how they can be improved.
The night kicked off with 4 showcases picked from our NSW entrants;
Showcase 1 - Anurag Chakradhar, Development Manager Thinkun
GoGet CarShare
Showcase 2 - Katie Finnegan, Design and UX Manager The Web Showroom
Salvation Army Aged Care Plus
Showcase 3 - Edmund Tadros, Data Journalist The Australian Financial Review
Australian Financial Review
Showcase 4 - Geoff Bowers, Director Daemon Internet Consultants
Sochi 2014 Australian Olympic Winter Team
Here at the AWIA, we're going to keep giving awards to companies that build well-designed, accessible web sites with well-structured markup.
These are our NSW winners;
In the hotly contested Commercial Category, sponsored by Parmia Insurance we would like to congratulate our joint winners:
Love Me Again Boutique by The Web Showroom
ONSydney by OnMedia
In the Culture and Events Category, sponsored by Partner and Prosper we would like to congratulate our winner:
Sochi 2014: Australian Olympic Winter Team by Daemon Internet Consultants.
In the Not for Profit Category, sponsored by Eduka we would like to congratulate our winner:
Wesley LifeForce Service Finder by Rowan Atkinson Photography.
In the Mobile Category, sponsored by Bankwest we would like to congratulate our winner:
Goget by Thinkun
In the innovation Category, sponsored by Web Directions South and judged by Russ Weakley and John Allsopp we would like to congratulate our winner:
Women Love Tech by Women Love Tech.
A special thanks to our sponsors for supporting the night;
Parmia Insurance
ReInteractive
Media Access Australia
and to our judges;
Buzz Usbrone and Jonathan Crossfield.
Who is the AWIA?
It stands for the Australian Web Industry Association.
It's the association that represents web developers and people who work in or around the web. We don't represent everyone. We’re actually only interested in the people and companies who have high ethical standards.
Now you probably have an idea in your head about what a professional association is. But the culture of our organisation is very much a work in progress. It’s pretty clear we’re not going to be stodgy and conservative. It's not going to be a committee and a newsletter. It's going to be events and projects and content and it's going to be an organisation that has a public voice. It's early days but here's a bit of what we're up to:
Widelines stands for Web Industry Guidelines. A Code of Conduct for the web industry. It's what separates us from the cowboys. And it's a set of useful questions that clients should be asking their web developer before they sign a contract. So when they ask you those questions, because you're an ethical operator, you'll give different answers to a shonky operator, which should win you business. It's a tool for us to show that there's more to web development than the lowest advertised price. With Widelines we're educating the market and we're giving ourselves a marketing advantage. You'll be Widelines-compliant. Dodgy Brothers will not.
Geeks for Good. We're starting a project that promotes the work we do for Not for Profit organisations. Most of us do free or heavily discounted work for NFPs and it makes a huge difference to their influence on the world. That's a story we should be telling. It promotes the charity, it promotes our members and it makes the industry look good. If you have an NFP whose effectiveness has been transformed by your generosity, let us know; we're putting 2 minute videos together.
Port80, We do Port80 meetups in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide & Perth. And we support the Web Design Meetup Group in Brisbane and Web Developer 42 Degrees in Hobart. People get jobs, people learn stuff, people make friends. It’s meant to be social, it’s meant to be different every time you go. It’s the place where people’s eyes do not glaze over.
EOTW - Edge of the Web, we run a conference called Edge of the Web. Next year it will be a distributed conference, running in all cap cities. Perhaps you’d like to get on our mailing list.
AWA - And we do this, the Australian Web Awards. Because we want to acknowledge the people who do good quality work and lift the level of discussion about what's happening in the industry.
On 16 August attended conference for 250 delegates organised by Web Directions entitled “What do you know?” Eleven contributors each gave five minute keynote presentations on such subjects as:
Designing information feedback in mobile apps
Moving to a 3D Web in CSS
Creative Coworking Why working together is better
The comprehensive list of subjects and contributors is on: http://whatdoyouknow.webdirections.org/sydney
The most relevant presentation from my point of view was “Improving the Web EX by Biometrics” by Martin Tomitsch because of its relevance to UX. The presentation explored how elements of nature can be used in the design of interfaces. Martin kindly uploaded his presentation to Slideshare. The points raised on the divine proportion were of great interest, a simple but exceptionally powerful concept.
Jared Wyles contributed with another standout talk, a totally irrelevant speech but nevertheless a funny one...
This was my first experience of such a gathering, where concise updating of current progress in web development was offered and also the opportunity for networking with a broad spectrum of colleagues in the industry. On reflection with four colleagues from USiT it was agreed that such events are essential elements of a UX professional. Reiterating a previous comment from a colleague “Its not what you learn before 5pm, its what you learn after”. Also it provides an opportunity for space and time to run through ideas and thoughts away from the normal workplace.
