Two things up front:
1. You will notice that I am using the pleasant but ubiquitous default Wordpress theme at the moment for this part of the site. I've decided to just go with it for the moment, while I work out a new design for the site. The last one just wasn't working. Trying to keep the site alive has been a long a frustrating endeavor over the last few months — I'm committing new energy to it now and hope to have it fully functional again soon. I'll write up the full story and post it soon, for those few who might be interested.
A truly valuable experience.
2. OK, so I'm late with my wrapup, but others were as well, and I have a pretty good excuse since I immediately upon returning developed excruciating tooth pain that culminated in a root canal yesterday. That sort of killed the buzz of winning the award, for sure.
On with the wrapup...
Talking Points
Two of the most interesting points came up during the How to Inform Design panel, hosted by Nick Finck, Jeffrey Veen, and Kit Seeborg.
Jeffrey is a very engaging speaker, and obviously a born salesman. It's easy to believe in the things he imparts with such enthusiasm. His USDA Hay Net interface example was fun and illuminating, pointing out how to get the user straight to the point of the site — by simply selecting "Have Hay" or "Need Hay".
The part I found more compelling was a flow-chart breakdown of the Blogger site before the recent redesign. Jeffrey explained that the previous flow to get a new user to their first post on a new blog involved some 8-10 steps, and that by cutting this down to a three step process they could eliminate a lot of places where a user would say "screw this" and just fall off. I'd never quite thought of flow in that manner before — usually you dream out a scheme and then it gets amended and extended as people add more and more "musts" to it.
Kit's point about the money trail of a potential site is interesting as well. Figuring out where the client gets their business is a great idea for zeroing in on the most important interface elements in a site.
The independents rule
It was very inspiring to be out among all these people who do pretty much the same things I do, and see so many success stories. It just goes to show that the web is a great tool for those who have ideas, and that you can totally bypass mainstream methods of promotion and distribution. In fact, it was amazing how few people were actually affiliated with larger corporate entities.
Another side of this is the aspect of independent promotion and revenue streams — promotion is so often by viral means or by what was referred to as open-source marketing, where the materials are simply released into the wild and the users do the marketing for you. Revenue streams in a lot of these businesses seem to come from collateral rather than the main product, as in HomeStarRunner getting revenue from t-shirts and DVDs rather than their "main" product, the cartoons.
The meet-up
The best part was putting faces to names, I met (in no particular order) Jeffrey Zeldman, Andy Budd, Dave Shea, the HomeStarRunner crew, the Maxis folks, the MadeInMTL guys, Ryan Sims, Thomas Fulp (Alien Hominid) and countless other people in the business.
I'm looking forward to next year already.
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