Another PD - Webinar: Creating a standard-compliant site

Webinar notes

On Tuesday, December 07, 2010 during my planning I attended a Webinar titled “Creating a standard-compliant site: Tips, tricks and traps”.  I also signed up to attend another one the next day.  The presenter was James PhD.  and organizer was Lisa Harnish.

I liked having audio and visual on the screen.  The webinar was easy to access and it started promptly.  The first 15 minutes was like an advertisement about their sites, upcoming conferences and things they’re doing which I didn’t care for much.  If they want to do this I think at the end would be more appropriate so people who didn’t want to listen could leave.  The screen shots were PowerPoint slides with the main points from the discussion.  After the webinar they sent a PDF file of the presentation which was useful.

Meat of the discussion wasn’t as long as I thought it would be but it was interesting.  They discussed how things become starndards . . . and how things start as an ides – some group tries something and it works and later it catches on.  18 months from the first idea to it being a standard would be considered very fast movement.  This was interesting but doesn’t really help with my immediate needs.

The majority of topics they touched on helped reinforce concepts I thought to be true.  Such as HTML 5 has new elements, CSS has limitations, can’t stress enough about the importance of communication with the client, mobile platforms and why standards are important, keep code consistent throughout the site (pick a standard and stick to it html 4.0 or 5.0),  test multiple browsers, importance of proofreading, and so on.   Some of the topics were interesting but beyond what I have time to do in my class, such as sites with searchable databases and the topics of Pay per click (ppc).

Two walk away’s

1. http://validator.w3.org – good web site for developers to check code
2. http://browsershot.org where it can take a look for you …. On several platforms.

At the end there was 5 minutes for questions before more commercials.  Overall – there was 20 minutes of MEAT.

I liked this form of Professional Development and would do it again.

The next day I was really excited about hearing what they had to say but was disappointed.  Our network had some problems when I clicked the link.  It took about 10 minutes before it finally connected.  When it connected my sound wasn’t working.  I used the same computer, mic, and headphones as the day before so I don’t know what the problem was.  I tried to reconnect after 10 minutes and had to go through all the sign up stuff again.  Then when I was finally connected I found again my sound wouldn’t work.  I double checked all my connections.  After 30 minutes I gave up.  This was frustrating especially since all worked 100% fine the day before.