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:

Higher Ed-related:

• Sept. 21-22 – EdUi – Charlottesville, VA
• Sept 28-29 – WV Higher Education Technology Conference – Morgantown, WV
• Oct. 4-7 – HighEdWeb – Milwaukee, WI

Web Design & Development:

• An Event Apart (various  dates and locations)
• Web Design World (incidentally Greg Rewis and Stephanie Sullivan are both speaking at WDW this year).

Other Conference Suggestions?

These are just a few of my favorites, if you have suggestions for other great conferences to attend, post to the comments!

The OIT Web Communications team (e.g. Alisha and I) have been working on coverting the entire OIT website from its current static html form to one powered by a content management system – WordPress Multiuser (WPMU).  We’ve taken our time with this project carefully evaluating every requirement for each OIT Unit and have come to appreciate the overall flexibility, ease of use, and stability of this platform.

To implement this transition, we will need to have some website downtime so we can shift the domain name (oit.wvu.edu) to the WordPress driven version of the site and make sure the switch has not broken any links to files, etc.  To minimize the impact of the site being down, we’re planning on implementing the change on Sunday, June 28.

One thing that will need to be taken into account (as with any switch in platform such as this) is that it will invariably break links that people may have had bookmarked, referenced in emails, documentation, on websites, etc.  We will redirect broken links to an updated sitemap, however.

Overall the website will have the same design and content, but there have been some changes/improvements to the look & feel in places to “freshen” the appearance a little.  We are planning to start working on a redesign for next year, though.

During this last week while we’re tying up loose ends and tweaking, I would love to get some feedback and…  well… help.  Alisha and I have been looking at this for months and as you know when you are working on something for a long time, you can easily overlook things.  We’d really appreciate it if you could look the site over while it’s still “in the wings” and let us know about anything that we’ve overlooked or that you simply don’t like. Kudos are ok, too, but I want to know anything and everything you spot that is off, so we can tackle it.  (Suggestions on new content are welcome too.)

So if you have a few minutes, please visit http://wpmu.oit.wvu.edu and look around.

Also, I’ll be glad to answer any questions you might have about the website, WordPress, WPMU or whatever.  Just post to the comments.  Thanks!