TODCon Day Two Abstracts
Friday | Saturday, June 7th, 2008 | Sunday
The Essential Elements of Great Web Applications - Robert Hoekman, Jr.
Most great web applications have a few key things in common. But can you name them? Better yet—can you achieve them consistently in your own projects?
In this session, Robert Hoekman, Jr., author of the Amazon bestseller Designing the Obvious (New Riders) describes the seven qualities of great web-based software and how to achieve each and every one of them by learning to communicate through design. See why it's important to build only what's absolutely essential, apply instructive design, create error-proof interactions, surface commonly-used features, and more in this informative session that will change the way you work and enable your users to walk away from your software feeling productive, respected, and smart.
Database photo gallery - Paul Davis
From the camera to the web - getting your photo gallery up and running
using the server behaviors built in to Dreamweaver (and a little CSS!).
Learn the easy way to get a photo gallery, driven by a database, on your
websites! (The session will use PHP and mySQL, but the method can be
applied to any server/database combination Dreamweaver supports)Design Challenges, Standards Solutions - Stephanie Sullivan
Liquid and elastic layouts, multi-classing, forms, inline elements and more. What’s a web professional to do? Join us for an exploration of practical design approaches and techniques to provide solid, standards-based solutions, using the right tools for today’s design challenges.
Easy Content Management: Intro to content management systems for designers - Neil Giarratana
Leveraging the right content management system, web designers can offer powerful new capabilities to their clients without writing a single line of server-side code. In this session, Neil Giarratana will walk you step-by-step through installing, theming and managing a best-of-breed, open source (free) content management system (Drupal). You'll learn where a CMS makes sense and how to wield its power without losing your design freedom.
Codeless ColdFusion - Rob Huddleston
This session shows off Dreamweaver’s Server Behaviors features for ColdFusion, allowing designers to create rich, interactive, data-driven web sites with little or no code. The session will demonstrate the creation of a data-driven page from start-to-finish.
Creating graphical clickthru’s with Fireworks - Jim Babbage
Anything you can do to lock down client approval and minimize changes during site development is a good thing. Fireworks can help by creating an interactive mockup of your design. This gives you a visual, means for the client to check design and flow before you start building pages. This session will demonstrate one method for creating clickthru’s and will also address some Best Practice issues and suggestions for moving from concept to design.
Beginner's QA testing of websites - Danielle Mickey
QA testing — you think you test it but do you do it well? Sure it's done. Maybe you deliver it and leave it for them to test out in stead. You've checked someone else's work and found all kinds of bugs before when they thought it was rock solid, right? The same could be true for you. Can you still sleep at night? Can you really test your own site objectively? This session is geared towards improving your QA testing know-how. We'll cover procedure, who should do it and when, use cases, what to test, cross-browser display and functionality, site breaking and busting and wrap up with a dash of usability.
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Lunch
Super-Size It! Displaying Hi-Def Video in Flash - David Stiller
The lastest version of Flash Player, originally code named "Moviestar," adds support for the H.264 standard in high-definition video encoding. This is the same video compression used by MPEG 4 (think Blu-ray!), and now you can display those hi-def motion pixels on your website.
In this session, you'll learn how to encode video for hi-def display -- including how to avoid some unexpected pitfalls -- then bring that video into Flash using the pre-built FLVPlayback component and the roll-your-own approach powered by the NetConnection and NetStream classes. You'll also learn how to toggle your video back and forth from in-screen to full-screen display.
10 techniques to improve your accessibility now! - Derek Featherstone
In this session, you will you see and hear the impact of some of the choices you make when you are developing and designing, and discover what you can do to help ensure that what you're building can be used by as many people as possible.
Learn simple techniques, tricks and gotchas that help you take accessibility to a new level.
Marketing Your Services: How to package your services and grow your web design business - Neil Giarratana
Discover how to build a thriving web consulting business with a limited (or non-existent) marketing budget. Neil Giarratana, President of Lucidus Corporation, will reveal his marketing blueprints for building a web business from scratch and dramatically increasing revenue for existing businesses.
Creating a Flash video web site using Adobe Encore - Jesse Harding
Encore is a great tool for DVD authoring, but in CS3 it also became a web publishing tool. In this session we’ll look into Encore as a Flash video website creator. We’ll talk about the best formats of video to start with and walk through the process of creating menus, assets, timelines and even background motion. We’ll go through the build process and list the benefits and also some of the limitations in building Flash sites using Encore.
Creating Attractive, Accessible and Usable Forms - Rob Huddleston
An increasing number of web sites today use forms, and yet there seem to be many more examples of bad form design than good. This session will discuss how to make forms that are visually attractive, accessible and usable. We’ll talk about several of the lesser-known but necessary form controls such as fieldsets, legends, labels and buttons. We’ll show how CSS can be used instead of tables to lay out forms and make your forms visually stunning. We’ll also talk about the do’s and don’ts of form usability and accessibility.
Tools we can all use - Danielle Mickey
Join me in exploring many new tools that you can use to improve your workflow. These are low-cost (or free), no-frills, practical tools that will help you save time, improve productivity and your organization as a web development professional. Being efficient and organized can improve the value you can bring to your work! You may even have more free time. If you feel totally on top of your game, this is not the session for you. If you want to have a little fun and talk about new ideas and tools for improving how you work, come on in!
Effective Standards-based Workflows for Ajax- Greg Rewis
Greg Rewis will show you how to easily develop standards-based Ajax Web sites using Dreamweaver CS3 and the Spry framework for Ajax. Learn best practices for Ajax development and see how recent enhancements to the Spry framework allow you to implement Web 2.0 capabilities without sacrificing standards, including progressive enhancements to XHTML and unobtrusive JavaScript techniques.
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Web 2.0 for Higher-Ed, Foundations and Non-profits - Denise Jacobs
Cross-industry, web 2.0 technologies are powerfully shaping the face of the internet as well as users' expectations. Higher-ed institutions, foundations, and non-profits can benefit from incorporating web 2.0 technologies. We will explore various web 2.0 concepts and techniques that these groups are using to break new ground, better serve their users and take their organizations to new levels.
From Freelancer to Company: Tips to grow from one to many - Neil Giarratana
Over the past five years, Lucidus has grown from two guys in a closet-sized office to a ten employees and more than $1M in annual revenue. Using Lucidus as a case study, Neil Giarratana will share his top ten (hard) lessons learned like how to find the right people, when to grow and ways to fund your growth.
- ColdFusion •
- Flash •
- Fireworks •
- Dreamweaver •
- Photoshop •
- CSS •
- Web Business
