If you missed the Zürich conference, there are still some tickets for Paris Web in October 2011., where I’ll hold a Typography for Programmers workshop.

What makes it different from other web events?

We are keeping it small. Only 60 seats on the first day, and a small workshops groups of 10 or 20. We have a strange habit of asking each participant to introduce themselves to everyone in the room the first thing in the morning.

We are there for you the entire day, so whatever question you ask, we’ll be able to answer. There is plenty of time for every participant. We want you to wake up the day after full of new ideas.

When, where?

WMD Center in Zagreb, Croatia on 25 + 26th May 2010.
(International visitors, please contact us at info@webradionice.com)

The greatest collective experience

The day one brings you names with the strongest portfolios in this part of the planet. Genuine producers dealing with real projects, real clients and real deadlines:

• Vanja Bertalan, Co-founder & CEO, Web.burza
• Alen Grakalić, Founder, CSS Globe
• Vedran Gulin, Creative Director, Proximity
• Goran Peuc, Senior Designer, Nivas
• Marko Prljić, Creative Director, Freelance
• Marko Dugonjić, Creative Director, Creative Nights

Expect nothing less than topics about inside agency life, what affects pricing, what percentage of work is actually showcased in portfolios, what can go wrong with the project and how to deal with that… or simply how much time does it take to create an extraordinary web site.

No theory bullshit, only pragmatic experience.

Interactive intimate workshops

Interactive workshops are held in two parallel tracks with tiny groups of 10 for Usability Testing Basics or 20 for Pro jQuery.

Bring your laptops and load your own project or current client work in a browser and update it instantly with what you’ll see and learn on the spot. We will be able to conduct mini usability testing sessions for a participants’ selected projects on the day or suggest user interface improvements with jQuery.

In a mean time, become a fan on Facebook or subscribe to our newsletter.

How we decided about holding web design workshops?

We found that there is a huge gap between top guns in the industry in this part of Europe and beginner-level CSS coders. At the moment it’s quite difficult to find at least an intermediate level client-side recruit. It’s even harder to hire a CSS rock star.

Various courses don’t provide web standards training at all, and only a few colleges in Croatia — by the share enthusiasm of the individual professors — barely introduced web standards through brief presentations and seminars.

Quite obviously, what’s current on the Internet now, will be outdated by the time it gets approved by the ministries responsible for the scholarship programs. And the materials will be even more obsolete when those students leave their schools and colleges in search for a job.

Why focusing on a single segment?

We decided to go with single topics, because we feel this is the best value for the money. We have been visiting conferences in the past, with broader range of presentations: from strategy, to branding, to user experience, to design, to CSS, to JavaScript, to server-side programing, to server management — all in one.

Not everyone is interested in everything. It’s rare that a web professional is intimate with all of the planes, so we are focusing on a single topic one workshop at the time.

Are you on your own?

Luckily not. We still have client work to do, so for the sanity, we formed some awesome partnerships:

• Plus hosting covered operational costs and as a result provided lower registration fees.
• Ivan Brezak Brkan is handling all the administrative/promotional tasks.

Misc F.A.Q.

• Q: Do you plan to hold workshops other than about Web Standards, HTML and CSS?

  A: Yes, we do — some of the next workshops will introduce you to Design for Web, User Experience, Usability and Accessibility, Typography for Web, DOM and jQuery, WordPress Themes, Content Strategy and Production, Small Business Management, Client Relationship Management etc.

• Q: Do you plan to visit other cities than Zagreb?

  A: Yes, we do — please DM @webradionice and we’ll consider bringing the show somewhere near you.

• Q: Are you giving a certificate?

  A: No we don’t — we don’t test participants at the end of the workshop, hence there’s no certificate. We are never meant to be the judges or appraisers, we are aiming to educate people in a way we’d like to be educated — telling a real stories from the trenches.

• Q: Alright, but what do I get then?

  A: You get the experience, tips and best practice advice from the experienced professionals.

Mini Seedcamp Ljubljana aims to connect the startup communities in Albania, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, Slovenia and beyond!

Overheard: Seedcamp is a competition for prospective IT and web entrepreneurs. Each of first five teams gets an investment of 50K Euro — plus: three months of training and business development lectures in London, UK — held by expert consultants from Google, Microsoft, Mozilla and Facebook.

Official site: Seedcamp Ljubljana 2009.

BarCamp is a free event, there is no entry fee, but the attendees are encouraged to participate with questions and open discussion. Take a look at the schedule, consider submitting with your own presentation/panel and don’t forget to grab your seat!

They are showing off their grid and maratz.com joins the party.

For the geek in you, turn off JavaScript and reload the Ezadar cover.

This year the schedule is really, really promising. If you are around and you understand Croatian, you shouldn’t miss the opportunity to hear what’s going on at the local startup scene.

On the other hand, if you have an interesting project yourself, then there is a chance to meet some quality VCs to help you out.

I’ll be there both days, so drop by and say “Hi!”. If I look confused, don’t worry — that’s just me being full of excitement about my presentation ”What the users want?”. The presentation will give a short insight in user’s needs, based on our work with users and focus groups at Croportal.

You probably wonder about how do you clean your Inbox? Since you are asking, we intensively worked on the relaunch of Croportal last week, and as a reward, the team had a couple of days off.

At this very moment I’m writing the post in one of the 40+ tabs in Safari. And I still haven’t option-spaced NetNewsWire. There’s recent unpacked shipment from Amazon on a shelf across the table. If only days would last longer.

There was a time when web standards pioneers had all the important stuff only in the Bookmarks, because there was simply just a few resources. It was quite handy and convenient having them all in the Bookmarks bar. I sometimes miss that comfort.

Where there was just a dozen of on-topic resources to follow, now is the hundreds. Where there was 2 or three events a year, now is the ten or 20 at least.

I was introduced by 80/20 rule back in 2004. Fast-forward four years later and I wonder which ones are considered today’s 20% must-read authors? Even if I knew, one would still need considerable amount of time for all the latest stuff.

The above question applies to events, too — are there 20% events that cover 80% of the current topics?

The schedule can be occasionally a serious threat, time and budget-wise. Especially if you have to travel across the continent and have tons of work that just don’t allow frequent travel breaks.

We’ve been practicing various media diet programs. Should we also consider event diet?

How to judge which one to choose and which one to discard from the list? With media, you test it for some period and then decide is it good enough to enter reader’s A-list, but for obvious reasons, you can’t apply the same method with events.

• Superfast web sites in 20 minutes beginning at 19:20 and ending at 19:40 in Gray room and
• Typography for web, 10 dirty tricks from 20:00 to 20:20 in White ‘the Geekier’ room

Just a few more seats are available, so hurry up and grab yours for an intensive Wednesday afternoon.

The event is organized by Initium, the guys behind the successful web.start conference, held earlier this year.

At the time of this writing, I already got a booking confirmation from EventWax and if you are coming (and I hope you are), keep an eye on the official web site.

BarCamp rules for attendees are pretty simple: all of the crowd should participate actively in some way. I’m still not quite sure about the topic which would be the most appropriate for me to join with, but I have a few dirty ones — if I am lucky enough so the others would find those interesting:

• Typography for the web
• DIY high-performance web sites
• Usability testing on a shoestring
• Bit-literacy on the web

Now, I whipped this list in hope that I will at least make myself publish an article or two in the near future about the mentioned matters.

Networking

Prior the conference every attendee was asked to sign-up to FOWA Crowdwine and choose her interests, so the organizers can help us meet more people. Those who did, received unique badges at reception with their tags, matches and opposites.

My tags were naturally: user experience, web standards, typography… and my matches were Robin Christoperson, Andrew Pendrick, Sarah Ward and George Zafirovski. I actually met George, who moved from Macedonia to London some 10 years ago, so we easily switched to Croatian (Macedonia and Croatia are both former Yugoslaw republics).

There was a couple of considerable job offers on the conference and if one was available, she could walk away with a brand new position.

Randoms bits

• Erika Hall said Users don’t complain about wording as long as you don’t change colors. (Copy is Interface)
• Matt Biddulph said Internet is small pieces loosely joined. (Coding on the Shoulders of Giants)
• If you need reliable standalone “DOMContentLoaded” JavaScript function, take a look at the shortloaded by famous Stuart Langridge.
• Identity Matcher, extracted from dopplr.com codebase, enables you to pull in social network information from sites such as GMail, Twitter, Flickr or Facebook.
• This one’s my favorite; Daniel Burka said You simply have to say ‘No’ to more features. Look at the Firefox and Mozilla Suite. Firefox would never be so popular if they didn’t decide to keep it simple.

On to presentations… or better yet, speakers

Super-optimistic Chief Performance Yahoo! Steve Sounders, the author of YSlow for Firebug, confirmed what Nate Koechley first introduced at @media this Spring about speeding-up web pages.

You can’t fight the numbers and High Performance Web Sites surely whipped some shocking ones out. I already saw some of the graphs at YUI Blog earlier, but many attendees were left surprised.

Following the High Performance directions, any site can be 50% leaner within a few hours. Given the fact that the companies/organizations invest considerable amounts of money into hardware infrastructure and/or back-end development (for instance, a development of an advanced caching system), it is just silly to skip this first and the easiest step in optimizing site’s performance.

If you’re ready to start making faster web pages, but don’t know where to start, I encourage you to buy a book.

Robin Christopherson, a Web Consultant at AbilityNet, held pretty impressive demonstration about how visually challenged people use the internet. Listening to screen reader playing the endless strings of meaningful text was scary, but at the same time enlightening experience.

The curiosity of the session was — it takes approx. 20 minutes for screen reader to start reading the main content on Amazon.co.uk, because they simply didn’t provide skip to main content link.

Daniel Burka, a lead creative behind Digg and Pownce was a true refreshment. His presentation about community feedback was honest and authentic. He was surprisingly patient to rivers of attendees, without a blink of celebrity pretending. Thanks to his feet standing firmly on the ground, we’ve collected some pretty valuable tips & tricks during the informal discussions afterwards.

Erika Hall from Mule Design in her Copy is Interface gave a bunch of great examples of how careless choice of copy used on the site’s interface can make a site either miss-interpreted or completely blunt. She also pointed out that without knowing your users/audience, it’s difficult to come with the right choice.

The sweet desert of the second day was a survival/essential startup session by Feedburner co-founder Dick Costolo. He extended the presentation well over his minutes, but with a good reason and greatly approved by the crowd.

Launch Late to Iterate Often provided a great insight in common pitfalls in the first year or so of a projects life-span. Pointers like Ask for money when you have it, There’s no such thing as a Standard Deal and Flat Organization are just a few of 14 selected bullets I wrote down; and there was even more… What’s more important — he covered every thesis with a valid example.

All in all, many bits collected and a few randoms I will hopefully post in the next couple of days. In a mean-time, check out the available presentations at SlideShare.

Sessions

Sessions were held in two tracks, so unfortunately one couldn’t catch up on everything.

I went to see more of the design-oriented talks, while Tomaš, our lead developer, was more interested in technical topics. Vanja (web.burza CEO) and Daniel (our personal paparazzo) visited a little bit of both.

The most inspiring presentation was Jon Hicks’ How to be a creative sponge, after which I couldn’t resist to photographing every single street sign and shop display on the way back to our appartment.

All other sessions were quite interesting, although not revolutionary. We were happy to get the confirmation that we were already following advices given as “best practice”, with one little exception — the eye-opening session High Performance Web Pages by Nate Koechley. At the conference, Nate offered 12 rules for speeding up your pages, but added two missing rules later on in his slides, which can be downloaded from his site.

Special thanks goes to Malarkey for mentioning Croatian design a few times in his presentation Royale with Cheese (slides can be found at his pages, under the events, right-hand column).

People met

Quite oddish, we mostly mingled with Croatian people while we were in London!

We met Danijela Nađ, the head of design at Croatian T-Portal. T-Portal is one of the top five most visited web sites in Croatia, and despite the fact that it’s under the roof of the local T-Com branch (the site is made with frames!), it’s nice to see that the guys behind it care about the standards and are trying to make it better. Baby steps, I guess…

The social aspect of the conference (soundly named @media Europe) was a little bit disappointing. There was a number of “closed” groups (for instance, The Brit Pack) that we did not approach because interrupting “internal” conversations is considered rude back from where I come from. Funny or sad, we had to introduce ourselves to a certain group of individuals for the second time now, but I guess that’s the way it goes when someone is a celebrity and you’re not…

Back in Februray at FOWA, the conference host Ryan Carson and his team made an extra effort it this area, which resulted in boosting a number of everyone’s industry connections. Nevertheless, I strongly believe that the crew behind @media did everything to make the conference as successful as possible. After all — 700 attendees is not easy to handle. (Note to self: visit smaller conferences.)

Despite my ramblings not everything was so dark — we had a few nice little chats with Mr. Joe Clark (he is Canadian, so no wonder), whom we hopefully taught a few lessons about Croatian recent history, even though the man is a walking encyclopedia and you can hardly impress him… Joe briefly introduced me to Richard Ishida, the Internationalization Activity Lead at the W3C, who was quite a pleasant company, too.

The highlight of the trip was finally meeting Rade Brujiæ (a.k.a. Medo), a long time online friend who was born and lives in London. Medo works for Kingston University London as a web designer/developer in a small, but dedicated web team which is behind some of the great Kingston University subdomains, like the recent International Conference: Excellence in Concrete Construction – through Innovation…

Anyway, Medo was our guide most of the time and thanks to him we spent three nice days hanging out in London’s restaurants and pubs. Hope to see you soon in Zagreb, buddy!

Off conference activities

We had a chance to take a walk around the central London, do some stunts at Traffalgar square and to visit the (unmarked) Abercrombie & Fitch store (where we almost left our life savings). All the cutest chicks work there, so if you are a tourist from Croatia wondering about the lack of cute British ladies on the streets of UK’s capital — the answer is: cuties have to work, too!

Addenum

Podcasts and presenatations from @media 2007. are available for download.

Today, I met guys who I knew only over the internet, so I’ll have to update my XFN relations for the following people: Siniša Dukarić, Stjepan Zlodi, Nikola Plejić, Nikola Denić and Marko Bijelić.

All in all, presentations were quite interesting, especially Joel Spolsky’s The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code and Marko Bijelić’s Information Architecture — mostly because of the presenters’ entertaining style.

Hope to se more of such happenings in our corner of the world.

Update: Vanja and me are not visiting the second conference day. However, in Friday you can meet our fellow developers — Tomaš and Marijo.

Web.Start is the first conference in Southeastern Europe focused exclusively on Web applications and Web startups. The conference takes place on May 17-18th, 2007, in Zagreb, Croatia.

The conference is catering to the authors of Web projects, aiming to help them realize or improve their projects and helping them reach the knowledge and contacts that will help hem position themselves on the market, fund their projects and achieve success.

The conference will introduce a couple of celebrities, Joel Spolsky and Alexander Kjerulf to name a few, and a dozen of local experts in the fields of web development and business.

If this all sounds good to you, then browse to Web.Start official site, register and meet me there.

Even though not the opening presentation at the conference, the things became pretty interesting after Tara Hunt from Citizen Agency talked about Building Online Communities (4,3 MB PDF). Tara covered all the general aspects of building social networking web sites, but the most significant point for me was — “it has to be fun”. Social networking sites have to be fun. Fun to use, fun to read… I encourage you to download the presentation for the examples.

Later on, at the dinner, we all had good time talking about the various industry topics. At some point we discussed about how to convince clients to provide cool, useful, fun and most of all encouraging copy on otherwise boring, but absolutely necessary error pages — 404s and/or 403s. Special care should be taken with social networking applications, where the user-generated content is very dynamic and the pages are lost more often, then anywhere else. Tara advised and I’m sharing (beware! the following is not the exact quote, it’s more what I managed to recall the morning after):

Create a portfolio of cool 404s from sites of the successful companies (Flickr, Threadless, Last.fm, Twitter and such) and also a portfolio of plain 404s of a few companies nobody ever heard of. When you do, use it as an argument when talking to the client.

Every business wants to be compared to a famous company…

Once you convince your client, go on and make the web more enjoyable place! BTW, see what Flickr says about 404s.

In the mean time here’s what I’ve found around the streets of London (that’s right – I’m a type addict). Excuse me for the low quality of the images, but the weather was far from perfect.

The main topic of the conference was Social Networking and my fellow colleague Vanja Bertalan was invited along with Mrs. Tanja Gligorović (project supervisor from Podravka d.d.) to speak about Coolinarika.com, a web site developed for Podravka in 2006.

Vanja offers his PowerPoint presentation for download (3.6MB ZIP) at web.burza site (the presentation is in Croatian – nevertheless, numbers and graphs are quite impressive).

Even though it was sometimes difficult for me to understand speakers talking in Slovenian, all presenters were quite interesting and we both went back to Zagreb with quite a few new ideas.

Net Konferenca is a regional event I could visit next year, too. And if they would invite more world-class speakers (like excellent hats-off Daniel Heaf from BBC Radio 1) in the future, I envisage this could be the relevant conference in South-East Europe.