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The Irish Web Technologies Conference 2008
Mar 2, 04:08 PM | Events | 0 Comments
Back to BlogThe 2008 Irish Web Technologies Conference finished up on Friday afternoon after running from Wednesday. I managed to make it to some interesting (and some not-so interesting) talks, and I think may have even learned something…
The What Now?
Organised by Irish Dev and First Port, along with a load of others, the conference had a good range of speakers, covering the three aspects of the web industry nicely. Track 1 was aimed at business owners, entrepreneurs and start-ups, Track 2 was pitched towards designers and front end developers (that’d be me, then), and finally Track 3 was for the hard-core developers. (Take a look at the full agenda here.)
I spent most of my time on track 2, with the occasional jump to track 1 for some of the start-up/entrepreneur talks, such as Nic Brisbourne ‘s VC Demystification talk, and caught some really interesting discussions over the course of the conference.
I learned something today
The talks I got the most out of were split evenly between Wednesday and Friday. On Wednesday I went to the talk on Accessibility by Robin Christopherson of AbilityNet, which was a real eye-opener. Robin, who is blind, showed us a lot of case studies using JAWS, which I had seen in action in videos before but not in practical examples.
Immediately after Robin’s talk Lisa Halabi of Webcredible discussed Increasing Online Conversions Through Useability, with a focus on eCommerce sites. While a lot of the information wasn’t particularly new, and would be covered in any book on the subject, the examples and case studies Lisa has compiled were excellent pointers on how to do it right (and wrong). Confirm Password? Yes. Oh, how we laughed…
I also went to the Internet Psychology talk by Grainne Kirwin of IADT later that day, but didn’t get much from it. It was interesting enough, but I was there to get some insight on user behaviour on the internet, which wasn’t covered in great detail. A lot of time was spent discussing how virtual reality, artificial intelligence and immersive environments would be the next big thing, and they’ve been the next big thing since at least 2003…
Moving on, Friday morning was devoted to marketing & blogging, and there were two excellent talks by Krishna De and Tom Rafferty. Krishna discussed how brand marketing was changing and how internet marketing can be leveraged for businesses, in particular through blogs. This dovetailed nicely when Tom elaborated on the subject in his talk “Why Blog?”. I enjoyed (and took a lot from) both talks, and particular thanks to Krishna for her tips and advice when we were chatting afterwards.
Regrets (I’ve had a few)
There was a lot more going on than I have mentioned here, and I wish i’d had the time to get to more. I completely missed Thursday, which was a shame because I wanted to catch Eoghan McCabe’s Design for Developers Using Blueprint talk. I had a wee look at Blueprint when it was first released but havn’t had a chance to mess about with it yet. Next time maybe.
High-fives All Round
All thats left to say is thanks and congratulations to the organisers, speakers and everyone else involved, well done. Hope to see yis again next year.
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