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7th Annual Webmaster Forum

Monday, April 24, 2006 at the Illini Union, 8:15 am - 4:00 pm

Updated April 26, 2006:

Thanks to all who attended and presented, and congratulations to our Cool Site Winners. Let us know how we did by completing the Forum Survey.

Cool Site winners:

The 7th Annual Campus Webmasters Forum will be held on Monday, April 24th, 2006 at the illustrious Illini Union. Seven years? Heck, we're almost as old as the graphical web browser.

We're pretty excited about our keynote speaker, especially since he's someone specifically requested by several smart people: Steve Krug is the author of the book Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, now in it's 2nd edition. Yes, it's on a Monday, but we'll make it worthwhile. We'll have the usual balance of breakout sessions on web design, content, and programming, the Annual Cool Web Site Awards, great conversation with your colleagues from across the entire campus, and the patented Decent Free Lunch.

Register by Monday, April 17, 2006. Don't make us call your boss to get permission to attend, but we will if we have to.

  • Forum registration and information times are 8:15 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. (Illini Room Entrance).
  • Lunch and coffee breaks will be supplied.
  • The University of Illinois Webmasters Forum is sponsored by CITES.

Schedule

April 17, 2006: some talks have changed rooms again. It's all still the same great content, though.

Schedule for and Location of Forum Sessions
  Illini Room C, West Entrance, 1st floor (Capacity: 200+ people) Colonial Room, northeast corner, 1st floor (Capacity: 100 people) Room 407, 4th floor
(Capacity: 100 people) 		Room 406, 4th floor
(Capacity: 60 people) 		Room 404, fourth floor (Capacity: 80 people)
8:15 am Registration and coffee 8:15-9:00 a.m., West Entrance        
9:00 am Welcome 9:00-9:15 a.m.        
9:15 am Keynote address: Steve Krug, Usability Expert
9:15-10:30 a.m. 		       
10:30 am Break 10:30-10:45 a.m.        
10:45 am     Beyond News & Events
10:45 a.m.-noon		 SOAP and REST: more than a bedtime ritual
10:45 a.m.-noon		 Campus Template Transformation
10:45 a.m.-noon
noon   Lunch noon- 1:15 p.m.
Cool Web Awards
12:45-1:00 p.m		      
1:15pm     Sites Usability Review
1:15-2:30 p.m. 		CSS Primer: How to Use CSS to Manage Your Website
1:15-2:30 p.m.
2:30 pm Break 2:30-2:45 p.m.        
2:45 pm   Web Design: Back to Basics
2:45-4:00 p.m. 		UIUC Tools for Creating and Testing Accessible Web Resources
2:45-4:00 p.m.		 PPP&J: Choosing a programming language
2:45-4:00 p.m.
4:00 pm          

General Sessions

Cool Sites Awards

The annual Cool Sites Awards honor campus sites that represent excellence in categories of design, content, or programming. The People's Choice Award goes to the site that gets the most nominations. Sites may be nominated by members of the Webmasters listserv, and by members of the Webmasters Coordinating Group. Winners are featured at the Webmasters Forum, and are bestowed a nice plaque and bragging rights. (Nominate a site by Tuesday, April 4, 2006). Presenter: Jack Brighton, Director of Internet development, WILL-AM-FM-TV and 2004-2006 Webmasters Coordinating Group Chair

Keynote

For years (starting in 1987), usability expert Steve Krug labored in pleasant obscurity, helping clients like AOL, Apple, Netscape, Lexus, and [the artist formerly known as] Excite@Home develop products and Web sites that people could actually use and enjoy. But since his book Don’t Make Me Think! A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability appeared in 2000 and sold 100,000 copies, he’s had to settle for relative obscurity. A second edition was published in August, 2005. Nowadays Steve spends most of his time teaching usability workshops, lecturing, and doing expert usability reviews of Web sites and sites-in-progress. His consulting firm, Advanced Common Sense (“just me and a few well-placed mirrors”) is based in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts and online at www.sensible.com.

Content

Beyond News and Events

This session will discuss different content ideas for websites and e-newsletters. The first part of the session will review various websites (both on-campus and off) and campus e-newsletters to see what interesting content--beyond news headlines and events listings--has been used to engage readers and draw website visitors further into your site. The second part of the session will give tips on developing an e-newsletter strategy and formatting approaches.

Presenters:

  • Jack Brighton (WILL)
  • Melissa Edwards (Creative Services)
  • Ginny Hudak-David (College of Business)
  • Marlo Welshons (GSLIS)

Site Usability Review

This session puts into practice the principles outlined in the morning's keynote. Steve Krug will provide mini-reviews of some selected campus websites. Steve will highlight good usability and describe ways to improve user experience.

UIUC Tools for Creating and Testing Accessible Web Resources

This presentation will provide an overview of three tools that are being developed on campus to help webmasters create and test the accessibility of their web resources. The Illinois Accessible Web Publishing Wizard provides a convient way to create highly accessible web version of Microsoft Office documents. The output of the tool complies with W3C web standards on html, CSS and web accessibility. Another tool is the Functional Accessibility Evaluation (FAE) tool is designed to test web sites for use of the CITES/DRES HTML Best Practices. The best practices provide the techniques to create functionally accessible web resources for people with disabilities and the use of the principles also helps make web sites more adaptable to a wide range of technologies (interoperability). The third tool is the Mozilla/Firefox accessibility extension which can check the accessibility of a web resource from toolbar functions within Firefox or Mozilla. This very useful tool to help with manual accessibility testing, especially in web applications that can not be tested with traditional static url based testing tools. Come learn about the tools that you can use to improve the accessibility of your web resources to everyone, including people with disabilities.

Presenters:

  • Jon Gunderson, Director of IT Accessibility Services, CITES; Coordinator of IT Accessibility, DRES
  • Dan Linder, Software Developer, DRES
  • Nicholas Hoyt, Software Developer, DRES

Design

Campus Template Transformation

Learn about CSS and table-less layouts as the campus web template gets transformed into a table-free design. During the course of the presenation the current web template (which relies on tables for its layout) will be changed into a layout that has clear separation between content and styling. Take CSS beyond text formatting and see how to use it for positioning too!

Presenters: Doug Burgett and special guest stars.

CSS Primer- How to use CSS to manage your websites

Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) technology is coming of age as the preferred method for creating and managing the styling of websites. Browser and authoring tool support for CSS has greatly increased over the past few years to make using CSS much easier and more predictable than in the past. Come learn about the capabilities of CSS to help you take control of the styling of your website and how the use of CSS can help make your web content adaptable to a wider range of web technologies, including legacy browsers, printers, PDAs, cell phones and future browser technologies. CSS can also be used to make your websites more accessible to people with disabilities.

Presenter: Jon Gunderson, Director of IT Accessibility Services, CITES

Web Design: Back to Basics

Step away from the spinning globe. Leave the flaming letters where they belong, in 1997. If you are being asked to design a Web site for your unit, what are some of the basic design principles you should be aware of? Val Lohmann, a graphic designer in Creative Services, will discuss some of the basics of attractive Web design.

Technical/Programming

PPP&J - Choosing a programming language

This session will help you decide if Perl, PHP, Python, or Java should be your next, or first, programming language. Our expert panelists can cover many topics, so bring your questions and the panel members will promote their language of choice. Some topics you may want to ask about include:

  • Database APIs
  • Extendibility & code repositories
  • Form processing
  • Objects
  • Regular expressions
  • Security
  • Speed

Presenters: Milt Epstein (Java), Chris Kuehn (PHP), Daniel Lewart (Perl), Mark Nye (Python)

SOAP and REST, More Than a Bedtime Ritual

How are SOAP-based web services being implemented in the portal pilot* This session will cover what SOAP is and a very high-level view of REST and the differences between the two. We'll also go over the components of a web service application (such as WSDL and UDDI), how to deploy/discover web services and how to secure them (from the transport layer to the message layer) and how web services differ from messaging (like OpenEAI stuff). The goal is to educate people on what web services are and when and how to use them (and when not to), and the various toolkits available used to develop web services on the different platforms that we use.

Presenter: Andrew Gherna, CITES

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