Tomorrow marks the first day of the inaugural Irish Web Technology Conference. The conference is being held at the Cineworld Complex on Parnell Street in Dublin and runs for 4 days, featuring over 50 lectures covering a diverse range of topics.

It should be a pretty interesting event for any web designer in Ireland and will have sessions on accessibility, usability, the psychology of web design, standards based coding and much more.

Due to some looming deadlines we aren’t able to attend, but will definitely be listening out for reports of how the whole conference pans out and hopefully it will be worth setting aside some time for next years conference.

Not just web design

For those with a fear of all things code, rest assured it’s not just about web design and coding.

Paul Lynch from Hosting 365 will be presenting a lecture on Cloud Appliances versus Dedicated Servers and Colocation; Krishna De, who we’ve worked with before creating the Alba Logistics web site, will be discussing how to create a loyal website community; Russ Nelson, a founding board member of the Open Source Initiative, will provide an insight to the Open Source Licensing world; and there are many other lectures regarding entrepreneurship on the web, how to attract venture capital, branding discussion, and marketing.

Each day is split into 3 tracks, each track designed to attract a specific interest. Each track has about 4-5 lectures in a day and will run from about 9 through to 6. A fairly hectic schedule of lectures with, undoubtedly, a substantial amount of information to process.

The conference is managed by the Irish Developer Network and is 100% community driven, supported by registration fee and industry sponsorship.

If you book on-line the price is €189 which includes a registration and finale drinks reception, access to all the lectures and events, and lunch and refreshments. Paying at the door is €245 – so book on-line today if you’re interested in going along.

More information is available on the IWTC website at: http://iwtc.firstport.ie/

Poor usability by promoters of good web design

I can’t help but mention that, for a web site promoting a conference which includes topics such as usability, accessibility, and standards based web site design, the actual IWTC website is a leading by a pretty poor example. Their site produces hundreds of coding errors based on their usage of the XHTML Transitional Doctype, including missing “alt” attributes on images, poor javascript coding, deprecated table attributes and many more.

Beyond that, the design basics of the site strikes me as very poor, with a badly positioned navigation using a clashing colour scheme which would make usability and accessibility experts shudder.

I often use examples of poorly designed websites to illustrate a point to our clients, and if I were presenting a lecture on usability and accessibility in web design, the IWTC website would make for a good reference on what to avoid.