If you are not the person(s) responsible for the t-shirts at Web Design World, please forward this to the appropriate parties. If you are, however, responsible for ordering, designing, or otherwise managing the free t-shirts given out in exchange for a Conference Evaluation Form, please note the following:

• The design of the t-shirt was nice.  Perhaps a little understated, but nice nonetheless.
• The quality of the t-shirt seems to be decent. It certainly seems to be made of a higher quality fabric than most free t-shirts.
• I will never wear this t-shirt.

Why?  Because I cannot fit into a medium or large t-shirt.  Certainly not after it has gone through a normal washing cycle.  It seems to me that a conference featuring usability and design experts would realize that not everyone wears the same size clothing.  In fact, as I look around the conference (and the greater Seattle area) I see a lot of people that would NOT fit into a medium or large t-shirt.  You did the upfront work: upon registration, we were asked for our desired t-shirt size. How this translated into only having medium and large shirts available on the last day is beyond me.

Maybe there were XL (or even XXL) shirts available at some point in time and you mearly underestimated the number of extra large attendees.   I’m not sure what happened, but I had to give the t-shirt away.

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The folks at Hinchcliffe & Company conducted an all day Ajax Bootcamp at Web Design World today. The posted pre-conference materials state:

Using a concept-to-completion format, you’ll learn how to leverage the full power of the browser to build effective RIAs in this day-long course. We’ll cover the basics of Ajax including asynchronous server communication, Dynamic HTML, and Javascript with a focus on the most popular open-source Ajax libraries and frameworks. The latest techniques and best practices for building RIAs are explored including Ajax design patterns and user interface strategies for building elegant, “user addictive” Web sites and applications.

Other than the “user addictive” nonsense, the bootcamp was quite good. It became clear the practice of hand-coding Ajax-driven web content is quickly going by the wayside. There are enough quality libraries and frameworks available in the open-source market to accomplish most tasks. Most of the discussion at the bootcamp revolved around implementing the Dojo Javascript framework. Frameworks have a tremendous amount of power and seeing this presentation has prompted me to further investigate Dreamweaver CS3 and the Spry framework.

In the end, there was a little too much emphasis on web-standards (the Dojo framework creates non-standards code anyway) and not enough time spent on best practices.

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I have finally settled into my hotel room at Web Design World 2007. The conference, and my beautiful hotel room, both reside in the lovely Seattle Marriott Waterfront Hotel. The hotel sits within spitting distance of the water and most of the rooms offer breathtaking views of the Mt. Ranier and Elliott Bay. The staff is friendly, the dining is first class, the rooms are spacious, the conference facilities seem to be adequate. The hotel seems to offer all of the amenities one would expect when attending a web design conference. EXCEPT FOR WIRELESS INTERNET IN THE ROOMS! Are you kidding me? There are motels in my small town that offer wireless internet. To make matters worse, the archaic ‘wall-tethered’ internet access costs $9.95 a day. Absurd.

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