Andy Clarke's presentation was a great way to kick of WD Day 2 - he talked about Creating Inspired Design, really pushing creativity for all members of a team, even code developers. How can we use design to convey a deeper meaning about the website? And how can we start to think outside the square of web design into the level of creativity that you see in strong Flash designs? These days the tools are no longer a hurdle, our imagination is the limit (although I think he may have been thinking ahead a bit to IE7's release ;) ). One idea I especially liked is the collecting of anything that inspires you creatively - like keeping a scrapbook. It has been a long time since I have done this, and after his presentation I took a little crappy disposable camera and took shots of everything! The highlight of the day was meeting up with Andy over morning tea. We had a quick wee talk about stuff, but I can't believe it - he remembered me from leaving this comment on my blog!! Then after that he editted the connection thingee to say crush and cute lady! Cheeky!
Laurel Papworth's presentation on the business of online communities was great, there were some really good stats there that I shared with the others; such as 9 times more visits that last for 5 times as long when you have a genuine online community on your website.
Jeremy Keith did a presentation of implementing unobtrusive Javascript practices with AJAX (aka HiJAX). I found this really valuable as I have spent so long teaching myself the best practices with CSS and seeing the major advantages that come of seperating presentation and strucutre, I would love us to apply these theories to the Javascript too. I just wish that Damian was there to see this presentation, cause I don't think he believed Kirti and I LOL! ;)
Poor Kelly Goto was loosing her voice by this stage!! However she powered on and gave a brilliant presentation on using the SCRUM practices alongside her Workflow practices. I first saw Kelly a year ago at the Web Essentials conference, and since then we have changed the way we approach our projects entirely. So it was very interesting to hear her developments, and I'm really looking forward to getting some time to look further into the SCRUM stuff. This is where you break your projects into three week blocks and at the end of each block there is a working functional result. She also gave a few more pointers on how to implement this succesfully.
What an awesome conference!! We didn't want to leave...! :( Kirti and I were too late to the after party though :( because we kinda got distracted by the shopping en route *blush* but I bought a really cool top for $10! *blushes more*