… inspire, engage and inform women showing how bloomin’ marvelous the digital world can be.

As I explained to .NET Magazine when I was contacted by them to comment on my involvement, I’m not comfortable with women only groups and events where they encourage an “us and them” attitude. I don’t think we do ourselves any favours if we simply huddle up in a corner together. However, given that there are fewer women involved in technology, it doesn’t hurt to make sure that those of us who are working in the business are visible. If only so that women thinking of this industry as a career can see role models, see that there are women working right across the industry.

I presented new material on “Launching a Product“. This is something I have been wanting to speak about for a while, and was based on our experiences launching Perch two and a half years ago. I had some nice feedback on Twitter after the event and I hope that the attendees enjoyed it.

The problem with presenting online is it is really difficult to get a feel for if the attendees are enjoying it. Essentially I was presenting to my own computer for an hour, trying not to get distracted by cats wandering around the office car park. None of the clues I pick up when presenting live are there. I’ve done a few online presentations now and the only way to get a feel for how it went is to check Twitter and hope someone says something about my talk!

I had some encouraging feedback on Twitter from this presentation but it led me to wondering how we can improve the feel of an online conference for speakers and attendees. In addition to feedback when presenting onstage, another important place I get feedback after a presentation is in the breaks afterwards. It isn’t about people coming up and telling me they loved it, but rather the questions they come and ask. The ideas they want to discuss. Then I know that the things I have said have hit a chord with a person, and may also pick up something that should be added to the presentation another time.

For attendees an important part of a real world conference experience is discussion with speakers and with each other. The online conferences I have been involved with have generally had a short period of questions after the presentation. Is there a good way to facilitate a more relaxed question and answer session, perhaps using IRC or similar?

With many companies cutting back, employees may find they don’t have the budget to travel to conferences, so I think online conferences are valuable and here to stay. However with so much of the conference experience being the bits between the presentations, I wonder if we can partly create that atmosphere for speakers and attendees albeit in a virtual way.

On 17th May 2011 I spoke at Future of Web Design London on the subject of 10 Web Development Tips a Designer Should Know. Speaking at conferences is a fairly weird thing. While I’m happy to talk and write about the stuff I do for anyone who finds it interesting, I certainly don’t think I’m any better than any other person doing this stuff. I’ve just been doing it a while and am reasonably able to articulate my thoughts about it.

However when you speak at a conference you essentially say, “Look at me. I have important things to say!” I find this genuinely unnerving as I have no idea if what I have to say will be relevant or interesting to the particular bunch of folk in front of me. In this business it is impossible to make assumptions as to the skillset of people, based on what they say they are or do. One person who claims the title “web designer” may be barely able to string a line of html together, another will be a competent front-end developer and also able to write a fair amount of PHP in addition to design skills. The survey I put together while preparing the talk only served to demonstrate this point, and you can see the survey results here.

In addition, many of the great speakers out there I would consider to be visionaries. People who help us see what we will be doing in the future and get excited about it. I’m no visionary, I’m just a person who builds web stuff. My writing and speaking is purely practical, “here is a problem – this is how I deal with it, this might be useful to you too”.

So, speaking is scary, but the nice thing about it is that once you get offstage people at the conference have seen you spout about stuff, and so know what you are interested in. Often that means they are then happy to come chat to you about the things they agree or disagree with – and interesting ideas come out of that. I have plenty of writing and speaking material currently germinating in my head based on conversations I’ve had over the last two days.

That is one reason why an early speaking slot is a bonus, another being that I could then just enjoy the rest of the conference as an attendee, and Carsonified really do put on a fantastic show. Aral Balkan closed day one with his new presentation, “Making the New Everyday Things”. Aral is a great speaker – and all round nice chap – and much of what he said really struck a chord in terms of what we are trying to do with Perch.

Starting Day 2, Ethan Marcotte‘s talk on Responsive Web Design was excellent for designers and developers alike. I’ll be getting a copy of his book once it is released on June 7th. I also really enjoyed seeing Paul Boag‘s energetic talk on “Getting Down to Business” – his points about how running your own business can end up being more difficult and stressful than working for someone else certainly rang true as I think back over ten years of running my own company. Bruce Lawson, filling in for Molly, did a great job with his presentation, rivalling Paul Boag for peculiar stock photography on slides. I particularly liked the notes about which web development techniques drain phone battery life, useful stuff to know and – despite being the owner of a battery hungry Android device – not something I knew much about.

If you were there and saw my presentation, I hope you found something useful. The slides are on Slideshare and there are a bunch of links for further reading. Attendees and Think Vitamin members will also get to see the video once it is available. I am now trying to rest my voice after all that unaccustomed talking, as I’m speaking at Microsoft Tech.Days on Monday.

Presenting online proved to be a slightly weird experience. When presenting at a conference, even the brightest of stage lights in your eyes don’t prevent you from getting a feel for how the presentation is being received. I’m a Geordie and I am very aware that my natural pattern of speech is very fast despite not having a broad accent after 15 years of living away from the North East. The more presentations I do, the more I can pick up on the clues from the audience that I’ve started to speed up and become difficult to follow. Not so when presenting online. I essentially spent an hour pontificating to my MacBook Pro, and hoping that someone was listening and not completely confused!

The saving grace in all of this was that I had been promised by Greg from Carsonified that if anything was going wrong he would let me know – and I’d logged into AIM on my netbook so he could alert me easily. So I continued my presentation, assuming that no message meant all was well. After the presentation and a brief Q&A session I logged into Twitter and was immensely grateful to see so many lovely messages from attendees, who had obviously enjoyed the session. That feedback was worth a lot as I really had no idea how the session had gone.

Technically everything ran very smoothly, so all credit to Carsonified for that. There are some excellent online conferences planned for the future so if you haven’t been a virtual conference attendee yet, it is a great way to hear from speakers who normally would be found at the big name conferences – all from the comfort of your office or sofa!

I’m really happy to have been asked to speak at a few conferences and events this year. After years of being afraid of public speaking, and saying no to opportunities that came my way, I’ve started saying yes. So far no-one has thrown anything at me, I haven’t died and have actually started to enjoy the instant feedback you get when speaking. When you write a book, the feedback is very slow in coming – I still get emails about books that I wrote 5 years ago, which makes it harder to adjust what I am doing to improve. When speaking I get fast feedback during or straight after. I find out straight away if a way of explaining something works or doesn’t which can only improve my writing on these subjects as well as the next presentation that I do.

The University had asked me to come and speak about what I felt was important in terms of web design and development today and also what I saw as being important in the future, given that students on the course today had anywhere from 1 to 3 years to go before they would be graduating and working in the industry. This is a pretty broad subject, and I knew that students were interested in a range of web roles, so I decided to home in on some of the core skills that anyone working on the web needs to have and also look at some of the interesting things that are becoming a possibility.

I get pretty nervous about presenting and like to be very organised and have time to set up so I was a bit thrown by the fact that so many people showed up to the talk we had to move from a small informal room to an incredibly steep lecture theatre. The experience of presenting in this room was a bit like speaking to people some of whom were on eye level and others stood at the top of a hill. I also ended up presenting without my notes and onscreen timer as with only a short time to set up I could only get the projector and my laptop showing the same slide – rather than having Keynote’s presenter view on my screen. Thankfully, I’d rehearsed this a few times and so knew the presentation well enough to do it without my notes. I had printed out a copy of the slides and notes – 4 slides to a page – using Keynote, however somehow they had ended up in a strange order on the page which was confusing rather than helpful!

Despite presenting uphill and without my notes I think the session went well. My hope had been that I wasn’t coming to speak to the students with anything amazingly new, but that what I was saying would underline the things they were already learning and demonstrate the importance of these things in the real world. In the second part of the presentation I talked for a short while about some of the interesting things that are on the horizon with regards to HTML5, CSS3 and also with typography on the web. Many of these students have 2 years to go before they graduate so by the time they are looking for work these technologies will have far better browser support and be skills they need. As students also get to do a larger project in their final Honours year this is potentially a great chance to play with technologies that might be harder to use commercially at the current time but make a great study for a final project – and mean that the project is an interesting concept to show off.

I finished up the presentation with some suggestions gleaned from my recent blog post as to how students can best prepare themselves for work in web design and development so thank you to everyone who contributed to that.

In the evening I re-ran the presentation, slightly tweaked for an audience that consisted of people from local design studios. Having had to get up at 4.30am to travel to Dundee I was pretty tired by that point and grateful to be in the smaller room and to be able to get my notes up on screen!

I really did have a lovely day, the feedback that I gave had so far has been good and I really enjoyed talking to all the students and hearing their questions. Many thanks to Malcolm and all the folk at Abertay for making me feel so welcome.

I’m also going to be heading off to Dundee in a couple of weeks time to present to the students on the Web Design and Development course at The University of Abertay. I’m really looking forward to speaking to these students and I’ll be taking lots of your advice with me.