WOW Web Design and Project Management Conference

September, 2005 - 16,17,18 (Silicon Valley, CA)

Location:

De Anza College
21250 Stevens Creek Blvd
Cupertino, CA 95014
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Silicon Valley Event Highlights

Are you challenged to make sense out of today’s Web design practices with HTML, XHTML, CSS, and related tools? Where to find inspiration for your work? How to create and use graphics effectively with CSS? Make your sites beautiful on screen, successful in print and useful for handheld devices as well as being accessible and Section 508 compliant? To top it off, one of the greatest challenges is to figure out how to manage those web projects, which we all known have grown increasingly more complex over time.

If this sounds like the challenges you’re facing, we promise this three day event is exactly what you’re looking for.

The WOW Web Design and Project Management conference isn’t about software vendor agendas, marketing buzz words, sales hype or products. This is a serious workshop for serious practitioners. Conducted by industry leaders Molly E. Holzschlag, Aaron Gustafson, and Andy Clarke (see bios below), participants are assured of not only an informative and cutting-edge experience, but one that’s fun, too!

Whether you come from education, government or military, or the corporate environment and you work with any aspect of web design, development, and project management, you’re facing a changing world when it comes to dealing with your web sites effectively. The WOW Web Design and Project Management conference will cut through the hype and give you serious training in a range of need-it-know practices.

Key Objectives -
During these sessions you will:

Conference Program

Day One:
Program Start 8:30 am Open Plenary

Following introductions to speakers and WOW dignitaries, you will discover speaker perspectives on the goals for the workshop. You’ll also gain insight into the performance value, ROI, and legal compliance issues as they relate to Web standards. Participants include: Bill Cullifer, Executive Director, WOW; conference speakers, and invited guests.

Day One: Morning Session
■ 9:00 am -12:30 pm

Authoring great documents

If you work with HTML and XHTML, this course will provide fantastic insight into how to do things even better. Even if you’ve never worked with XHTML, you’ll learn it as the morning session progresses – so you can implement it at any time. The key to great standards-based, accessible web sites lies in the structured, semantic document. This session will explain what that means and how to create it – no matter the development tools you’re using.

Attendees will learn:

Speakers: Molly E. Holzschlag and Aaron Gustafson

Day One: Afternoon Session
■ 1:30 pm - 5:30 pm

CSS: Beyond the Retrofit

Cascading Style Sheets are a hot topic these days. Why? Well, the reasons are more than you might imagine at first glance. Sure, CSS can help us manage fonts and colors – but it does so much more. From the prototyping phase in workflow to mass document management, to ensuring your documents can be made easily accessible for those with disabilities, CSS is a tool that is far more than just another pretty face!

Attendees will learn:

Speaker: Molly E. Holzschlag and Aaron Gustafson

Day Two: Morning Session
■ 9:00 am - 12:30 pm

Web Standards Workflow

This session will demonstrate how to plan a web-standards design project from concept to delivery. By using intelligent architecture, developing conventions, and tapping into emerging standards-based workflow techniques, attendees will learn how to improve development situations where team members are working on the same project, enhance productivity and reduce the margin for error. Participants will see how developing graphical wire-frames during the design process and how creating visual mark-up guides can help to improve productivity, consistency and reduce code weight, and how organizing and structuring your CSS appropriately can help in creating flexible and lightweight layouts which are designed for longer life-spans.

Attendees will learn:

Speaker: Andy Clarke

Day Two: Afternoon Session
■ 1:30 pm - 5:30 pm

Part 1: (1:30 – 3:00) Practical Solutions to Common Design Problems

In this session, attendees will examine how to work with CSS style-sheet switchers, multiple body classing for multiple layouts, and using CSS selectors to provide different designs to different browsers.

Part 2: (3:30 – 5:30) Put Malarkey to the Test!

Attendees will choose one visual design from a selection and speaker Andy Clarke will build the page using standards methodologies in two hours, while explaining the processes and decisions he makes. Can he do it?

Speaker: Andy Clarke

Day Three: Morning Session
■ 9:00 am - 12:30 pm

Web Project Management a2z

As web design and development becomes more sophisticated and complex, the challenge of managing process and projects is becoming equally complex. This session will cover the important Web project management methodologies that have proven over time to assist in simplifying and streamlining projects.

Attendees will learn:

Speakers: Molly E. Holzschlag, Aaron Gustafson, and Andy Clarke

Day Three: Special Afternoon Session
■ 1:30 pm - 5:30 pm

Web Job Skills and Careers Workshop in Silicon Valley

In this workshop, attendees will review key skills necessary for finding and keeping jobs within the Web design and development field. On hand will be a number of special guests from local companies such as Yahoo! and Google, as well as government and education leaders who will help attendees find out what employers are looking for in terms of current skills, and how certification and continuing education is perceived as a part of ongoing education in a career sure to be filled with many opportunities for growth and change.

Attendees will learn:

Presenter Biographies

Molly E. Holzschlag

An author, instructor, and Web designer, Molly E. Holzschlag has authored over 30 books related to Web design and development. She's been coined "one of the greatest digerati" and deemed one of the Top 25 Most Influential Women on the Web. There is little doubt that in the world of Web design and development, Molly is one of the most fun and vibrant Web characters around.

As a steering committee member for the Web Standards Project (WaSP), Molly works along with a group of other dedicated Web developers and designers to promote W3C recommendations. Molly serves on the Advisory Board for the World Organization of Webmasters. You can read more about Molly at, where else? http://www.molly.com/.

Aaron Gustafson

Aaron Gustafson is Sr. Web Designer / Developer at Cronin and Company in Glastonbury, Connecticut. He is a major proponent of web standards, accessibility and usability, speaking often on these topics and helping clients, large and small, meet the growing need for well-structured and accessible websites.

Andy Clarke

Andy Clarke has a background in advertising and started Stuff and Nonsense, a design firm in North Wales in 1998 (http://www.malarkey.co.uk ). He is a passionate advocate of creative, accessible design. He is one of the United Kingdom’s leading exponents of web site accessibility and has designed some of the UK’s foremost sites including Disney Store U.K., The British Heart Foundation, and The WWF UK site and stores.

Outside of the studio, Andy also writes a popular design journal, And All That Malarkey (http://www.stuffandnonsense.co.uk/) and is on the Web Standards Awards (http://www.webstandardsawards.com/) judging panel. Andy is also a member of the Web Standards Project (http://www.webstandards.org/).