A little over a month ago the OIT Web Communications team (a.k.a. Alisha Myers and myself) drove down to Athens, OH to attend the 2009 Spring <br /> (pron. “break”) conference held at Ohio University. This conference is targeted at anyone who works in web design and development. This is the second year we’ve attended. I was impressed last year and this year’s conference was just as good.
First of all, the conference is a steal at only $65.00/per person. Most conferences in this field will cost you upwards of $600.00 + travel expenses. Both times we stayed at a local Holiday Inn Express and it was quite nice and very reasonably priced. There are also some really great places to eat in Athens…but this isn’t a travel blog, so I’ll spare you the details.
Anyway – the conference was as good as the Web Design World conferences I attended years ago in Seattle and Denver.
The conference is also only one day. This is actually kind of nice because it means less time out of the office, but just enough time at the conference to get a lot of great information. I did feel at the end of the day that there was enough momentum to do a second day, however.
They get excellent speakers. Last year Eric Meyer, renowned author, speaker, and expert on all things CSS, was the keynote. This year we had the pleasure of hearing from Greg Rewis and Stephanie Sullivan. Rewis is currently an “Adobe Evangilist” and way back when was part of the team that developed GoLive (before Adobe bought it) and later Dreamweaver. Stephanie Sullivan owns W3Conversions and is part of the Adobe Task Force with the Web Standards Project. They recently co-authored Mastering CSS with Dreamweaver CS4.
In addition to giving the keynote, both gave additional presentations during the conference. We attended both of Stephanie Sullivan’s: Content: Everywhere, Everyone, Everything and CSS Tips & Tricks for Design Challenges. I thought both sessions were really informative. She went over things that I kind of knew already, but it was great to have the affirmation and to see how she deals with web design challenges.
Other great sessions I attended were Eric Meyer’s session on Javascript, Richard Worth’s session on JQuery (a really nice intro for someone who has not yet used it), Chad Udell’s session titled “Developers are from Mars, Designers are from Venus” (loved this one).
If you or anyone on your team works with the web, I cannot stress enough, the importance of attending at least conference a year related to web development. Spring <br /> is a good option if you are in the OH, WV, KY, PA region an only swing attending one conference a year. This industry (web design and development) moves quickly and if you don’t keep up, your web work will soon look and feel dated – believe me I know.
If you haven’t attended or planned to attend anything yet this year, consider attending one (or more) of these conferences:
These are just a few of my favorites, if you have suggestions for other great conferences to attend, post to the comments!
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