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Web Design World Chicago: more then I expected

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I just got back from the Web Design World conference in Chicago. It was my first WDW. I learned a lot, met some great people and best of all, had fun. The conference is going to be in Seattle July 21-23 and in Boston December 8-10. I highly recommend it. Here is the link to the agenda.

Most of the sessions I attended were in the "Strategy Meets Technology" and "User Experience" tracks. My favorite sessions were by Steve Mulder, Jared Spool, Dan Rubin, Lance Loveday and Amy Greer.

  • Steve Mulder spoke on "Rich Interface Design: How AJAX Changes Everything" and "The User is Always Right: How Users are Changing the Web".
  • Jared Spool's presentations focused on Web 2.0 and "Enhancing Experiences with AJAX, RIA's and Browser-Side Intelligence". Jared's presentations are an EXPERIENCE. The guy knows his stuff and is really FUNNY. Oh, and I had a chance to see some of his card tricks. The guy is POSSESSED.
  • Dan Rubin is an amazing designer who shared with us some of his CSS techniques. Great presentations. He is also an acapella singer with a group called "Rounders". You can see him sing here. He is the guy on the right.
  • Lance Loveday and Amy Greer presentations were all about web design for SEO and ROI. Lance wrote a book called "Web Design for ROI", which I highly recommend for anybody working on any type of a web project: designers, managers, accounts, art directors, marketing people etc.
What's nice is that all sessions were recorded and will be available online. So if you go, don't worry about missing anything.

After the first day of conference I had a chance to have a dinner with Jared, Dan, Lance, Amy, Greg Rewis (Adobe), Stephanie Sullivan (Founder/Principal, W3Conversions) and Joe Marini (Microsoft). I learned that back in the day, Joe and Greg worked together on creating Dreamweaver and Stephanie was the one who designed all the templates available in Dreamweaver. Stephanie and Greg presented on day three of the conference. They presented on Adobe CS3 suite, and Stephanie told me that Greg was going to give a sneak peak to CS4. Unfortunately I couldn't attend their sessions, because I had to come back home to teach my Dreamweaver class :)

I also learned that Greg was responsible for the updates to the CSS panel in Dreamweaver CS3. The ability to rename styles or move them around from within CSS panel was way overdue, so GREG THANKS AGAIN for making it finally happen.