by Tiki East

Many may expect Webstock 2008 to be a massive geekfest of new toys, bells and whistles - catchphrases, techery and geekspeak. They wouldn’t be entirely right .

I won’t recap too much of what actually happened. There will be others who do a good rundown of events. The whole thing has also been captured for easy web access which should be available here soon.

The key messages coming out of conference were far from technical goobledegook. On the contrary, these are all pretty sound principles for anyone communicating with the public. They particularly ring true for cultural sector organisations looking at how to build or renovate their online presence.

• Simplify. Simplify design, simplify choices, and simplify the way people can start using your site.
  
• Don’t make users work for their information.
  
• Test your product. Often.
  
• Your website is not your product. Your content or data is your product and your website is one channel to communicate that product.
  
• Play with others. Design your website and your content so that it can interact with others.
  
• Don’t build artifacts, those big monolithic unchanging websites. Try to create spaces that people can work/play/learn with. Interaction is really important.
  
• Find out how people are using your information and work with them.
  
• Be creative. Innovation takes time but it’s worth pushing through.
  
• Collaborate. The team is smarter than the individual.
  
• Win audiences with consistency. Have constant quality standards across all your media and with your end product.
  
• It’s ok to fail. You need to try things out – get fearless.
  

I’ve found the best thing about going to these sorts of conferences is that it gives you time to think constructively about your projects. It also gives you the vision and vocabulary to go back to the office and convince your managers/team/stakeholders that changes are needed.

It also gets you all inspired and excited to get back to the office, work hard and do great things. That in itself should justify the spend to your manager!

For more on the wonders of Webstock check out the commentary on the following websites and blogs, at:

Read Write Web

Library Tech NZ

Scoop

Rowan Simpson

Miramar Mike

Site Pro News

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 19th, 2008 at 7:51 pm and is filed under Culture online, Events, Technology, Professional development, Guest blogger - Tiki East. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.