The 6th Annual Webmaster Forum
Wednesday, May 4, 2005 at the Illini Union, 8:15 am - 4:00 pm
Now in its 6th year, the Annual Webmaster Forum has become something of a campus institution. We're not sure if that's good or bad, but we do know it's a great place to catch up on some of the most important topics in web development, to network with everyone responsible for the campus web, and to get inspired for the coming year.
- The University of Illinois Webmasters Forum is sponsored by CITES
- Archives of the breakout sessions where available are provided in the session descriptions below
Schedule
| Illini Room A | Illini Room B | Illini Room C | Room 407 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 8:15 | Registration and coffee 8:15-9:00 a.m. West Entrance | |||
| 9:00 | Welcome 9:00-9:15 a.m. | |||
| 9:15 | Keynote address 9:15-10:30 a.m. | |||
| 10:30 | Break 10:30-10:45 a.m. | |||
| 10:45 | DreamWeaver MX 2004 Vs. FrontPage 2003 10:45 a.m.-noon | Christine Perfetti: Designing Sites for the User 10:45 a.m.-noon | Web/Database Design Fundamentals 10:45a.m.-noon | |
| noon | Lunch noon- 1:15 p.m. Accessibility Best Practices: Review of University Policy and Perspectives 12:35-12:45 p.m Cool Web Awards12:45-1:00 p.m | |||
| 1:15 | Table-less Web Design 1:15-2:30 p.m. | Outsourcing Web Design 1:15-2:30 p.m. | Web collaboration: English meets art+design 1:15-2:30 p.m. | |
| 2:30 | Break 2:30-2:45 p.m. | |||
| 2:45 | XML Basics 2:45-4:00 p.m. | Morae Usability Testing 2:45-4:00 p.m. | Blogs, Wikis, and RSS Feeds 2:45-4:00 p.m. | |
| 4:00 |
Accessibility Best Practices: Review of University Policy and Perspectives
Best practices for accessibility of web resources combine cultivating an awareness of user needs with implementing appropriate markup and style. The Center for Instructional Technology Accessibility maintains Best Practices for User Centered Web Design, which contains guidelines and links to resources to support web developers increase accessibility of their sites. This presentation discusses the most current version of the UI Best Practices, and explains how the University's policies augment and complement state, federal, and W3C recommendations. Presenter: Jon Gunderson, CITA
Blogs, Wikis, and RSS Feeds
The Internet is still the Internet, but the ways to use it to communicate keep multiplying. How do you decide which are genuinely useful and (equally important) which provide a good return on your time investment? These three technologies are in broad use -- and have staying power. This session covers some campus applications of blogs, wikis, and Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds, and exposes the truth: they're all easy to implement, fun to use, and have expanded beyond the entertainment and fringe-tech boundary to be productive for 'real' work. Presenters: Renice Wernette, CITES; Jack Brighton, WILL; and Joe Grohens, Department of English
Presentation Archives :
Renice Wernette's talk on Blogs (html)
Jack Brighton's PowerPoint on Blogs and RSS
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.. Presenters: Jack Brighton, Director of Internet development, WILL-AM-FM-TV and 2004-2005 Webmasters Coordinating Group Chair
Presentation Archive:
Cool Website Powerpoint Presentation
Christine Perfetti on Designing Websites for the User
You heard our keynote speaker talking about designing for the "scent of information." As a designer, how exactly do you do that? This session will look at the details of drawing users into your site for the best experience. Presenters: Christine Perfetti, instructor at User Interface Engineering.
Dreamweaver MX 2004 versus FrontPage 2003
As the most popular WYSIWYG web design tools, both Dreamweaver and FrontPage have evolved over the past couple of years. This session will compare the most recent versions of DreamWeaver and FrontPage, and demonstrate their most powerful features. Presenters: Peter Kimble, Computer-Assisted Instructor Specialist, Center for Teaching Excellence, University of Illinois
Keynote presenter: Christine Perfetti
As one of the most requested instructors at User Interface Engineering, Christine has worked with dozens of companies on their toughest web design problems. With her extensive knowledge of human factors, task design, user recruitment, and usability testing practices, Christine has been a top-rated presenter at CHI 2001 and 2002, the UIE Research Forums, Intranets 2001, and STC regional conferences. She has also taught Human Factors at the Tufts University Gordon Institute for Engineering Management. Christine previously worked at Fidelity Investments, where she was an influential member of their highly-talented instructional design team. At Fidelity, she specialized in the areas of corporate training, instructional design, project management, and web-site design and development. She received her Master's degree in Experimental Psychology from Brown University.
Outsourcing Web Design
This session gives an overview of the process of outsourcing your web design: deciding which parts to outsource, planning and scheduling, developing proposals, estimating cost, reviewing the work, and maintaining the site "happily ever after". Also discussed are writing Request for Proposals and the resources and guidelines for outsourcing created by the Office of Publications and Marketing. Presenters: John Bonadies, Precision Graphics; David Glenn, Precision Graphics; Meagan Hennessey, College of Business; Michele Plante, Office of Web Services
Table-less Web Design Using CSS and Dreamweaver
Following on our series of brownbag seminars on Cascading Style Sheets, this session will demonstrate simple methods for designing web sites exclusively with CSS for positioning page elements. Presenters: Doug Burgett and Victor Cortez from the Office of Public Affairs.
Usability Testing with Morae
If you wanted a systematic way to test your site with users and to document how they interact with it, you might use the Morae Usability Testing tool, available free at the Office of Public Affairs. This session will demonstrate the Morae tool so you can see how it might help you. Presenters: Morae specialists from TechSmith Corporation.
Web collaboration: English meets art+design
Ninthletter is an arts and cultural literary magazine and website. It has already has won two national design awards and the website was a finalist in the sxws web competition. This session touches on how two units (Department of English and School of Art and Design) collaborate to create a unique yet complementary site to the magazine as well as the strategy of how to build a webzine interface.
Presenters: Nan Goggin and Joseph Squier, School of Art & Design
XML Basics
This session touches on the basics of XML and XSLT, but more importantly explains how valuable it is and shows examples of why you would want to use it. Presenters: Amit Kumar, Instructional Technology Developer, GSLIS
Presentation Archive :
Amit Kumar's Presentation in PDF
Web/Database Design Fundamentals
A database-driven website can be incredibly dynamic, but also vastly easier to maintain - if structured correctly. This session will cover the architecture of Web/database design, entering and extracting database information in web pages, and some of the techniques used for web-based content management systems.. Presenter: David Goldfeder, Web and Database Specialist, Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering.
Presentation Archive:
David Goldfeder's Powerpoint Presentation
