Day two began with Mike Kus taking us through the process of the Carsonified re-design and also general design tips and philosophies that he believes in. He took us through the recent Carsonified re-design and showed us some of the designs that he rejected and didn’t make it to the live version, and some of them were truly stunning. It was great to get an insight into his working process and it was re-assuring to hear that he suffered from design blocks and doubts from time to time which I think we all do from time to time but it was re-assuring to hear that someone with as much skill as Mike suffers from the same problems as we all do.
After Mike, Gillian Carson took us through how to get noticed in the media and tips for getting coverage within publications such as .net magazine as well as some of the big websites such as TechCrunch. This was a session that that I found really interesting as obviously the coverage that someone gains in the press can be a great boost to their career but it can be quiet hard to gain this coverage and knowing who to contact in order to gain exposure. Some of the essential tips that were covered included doing lots of research and what to research and how to go about that. As well as research tips, she also covered things like who to contact at the publication and how to help them as much as possible in order to gain the coverage in the publication.
After a short discussion with Ryan about various aspects of the day so far and the topics covered, where he showed us some A/B testing that he had implemented on his own blog after discussing it on day one, and he also gave us all a sneak peek of Typekit which he had been given an invite to before we had lunch and then went out to have a game of Ultimate Frisbee, which is really hard work!
A respectable 1-1 draw was achieved in the second game of the day (we’ll gloss over the first game!) before we all headed back to the office to listen to Joe Keenan Joe Leech give a really good presentation on UX design and the prinicples of these.
The main point that came out of the talk was that all good websites are cupcakes! The point being that a cupcake is small, simple and easy to maintain and websites should be the same. Websites should start off small with a clear plan of where they are going and build up slowly, and as someone famously said: It’s better to build half a website than build a half-assed website.
There were a number of user testing techniques discussed and explained each of these in turn, as he had been working in the industry for a good number of years and worked for some of the biggest firms in the country doing this sort of work. It is important to user test any website or web app with the actual people who will be using it, as they are the audience and it is imperative to impress them. Also, it is a great help to have another pair of eyes look at the site as they may spot things that you as a developer may have missed.
That was the end of the presentations for summer camp and overall they were all great, and I certainly learned a lot from each of the sessions. I will certainly be implementing some of the techniques into future projects and I’d just like to say a huge thanks to Ryan Carson and the rest of the Carsonified team for putting on a great event, including @tristamyers who organised the whole thing and made sure all us geeks were kept in check and on time throughout the days (plus the smores were good too!). A really good event and am looking forward to FOWD Glasgow in September, will definitely lookout for the Carsonified crew.
it was Jason Fried of 37Signals who ‘famously’ said “Build half a product – not a half-assed product” in case you’re interested!