Mid September 2010
February 19th, 2010 • Posted in Events
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On Wednesday night I attended Speak The Web in Manchester – the last in a series of evening pub-based web conferences around the North West which have also taken in Sheffield, Leeds and Liverpool. I also went to the Liverpool event on Monday evening - my review of Speak The Web Liverpool is here.
The Manchester event took place at NoHo – a bar nestled in the Northern Quarter – making it an ideal location for a lot of Manchester-based web people. The venue itself was a good size for the event though the lack of seating for all was a minor downside albeit in keeping with the pub-style of the conferences. That said, it would have been nice if a few more of the attendees had paid attention to the organisers request to move around a bit and let other people have a seat now and again too…
In general I thought the Manchester event had a different atmosphere to Liverpool on Monday night. It was clear whereas on Monday a lot of people attended in ones and twos, there were a few bigger groups at NoHo perhaps attending from the same agencies which made networking and general mingling more of a challenge. Also the lack of name badges compared to Monday meant it was tough to identify people you might only know from Twitter or email conversations.
On the plus side, there was good O2 reception compared to the total lack in Liverpool meaning that a lively back channel developed on #speaktheweb on Twitter.
These are of course very minor gripes – Rich and Dan have done an amazing job in putting on these events and getting the kind of high calibre speakers who are usually reserved for events like FOWD. You could attend all 4 Speak The Web events for around £65 and see the likes of Andy Clarke, Remy Sharp, Simon Collison, Patrick H Lauke and more.
FOWD London (admittedly 2 full days but with similar calibre speakers) is now running at £595+vat – admittedly there were a limited number of early bird tickets but if you weren’t able to get one of those or couldn’t commit to the spend directly after Christmas (a classic quiet time for freelancers) then you are pretty much priced out of the game.
In this light, Speak The Web is an even better deal. And so on to the speakers…
In keeping with the other events, Speak The Web has also introduced some new faces to the speaker list which in my opinion is a great thing. You can’t fail to notice that the speaker lists at a lot of conferences are starting to look increasingly similar.
Ben talked about his experiences working in mobile both as head of design at Orange and then with major mobile clients through Common Agency.
I found the talk very interesting as mobile is an area that I am increasingly interested in and I’m part way through developing an iPhone app at the moment. Ben was keen to remind the legions of iPhone users present that the mobile web is about much more than just the iPhone experience but of course he also noted the fact that WebKit is now powering many of the leading smartphone devices.
Ben was pretty confident for a first-time speaker and definitely knew his stuff.
What can you say about Dom Hodgson? I hadn’t met him prior to this event although I’d seen his various blog and Twitter activities. The Hodge talked about SEO, Startups, Search, Twitter and seemingly anything else that came to mind. It was a real stream of consciousness talk not helped by a few technical difficulties with his operation of Keynote…
He’s a very nice guy and definitely injected some humour in to the evening!
Following on from The Hodge’s talk there was a break for networking and some prize-giving. Sadly I didn’t win anything – I was holding out for the DIBI Conference ticket – so it looks like I’ll have to buy one of those but more of that later. As I mentioned above, I thought the networking was more difficult than at Liverpool as people who came together tended to stay in their groups and talk amongst themselves.
Remy Sharp was next up after the break talking about HTML5 APIs. Remy had travelled up from Brighton for the event so it was great to see speakers from across the country as well as those based more locally.
From the moment he started talking it was clear that Remy knows his stuff. Like seriously knows his stuff. I’ve been a follower of Remy’s jQuery writing for quite a while now so I was expecting a high standard and he didn’t disappoint.
HTML5 APIs basically equals javascript and so Remy took us through a number of the key HTML5 APIs including how to easily incorporate video or geolocation in to a web site or web app. Of course HTML5 is still in it’s infancy and has the disadvantage that there is currently no support for it in any Microsoft browser however it is supported to a greater extent in WebKit and by extension MobileSafari.
For me this is the most interesting point – HTML5 APIs like geolocation can be used right now in iPhone-based websites and Remy showed us a number of examples of how these can be used.
Looking around during the talk it was clear that quite a few people were not able to follow the high level of technical detail in Remy’s talk however I felt his presentational style made it easy to follow even if at times it went past my level of understanding. I would definitely pay to hear Remy do another talk in the future.
As soon as Andy Clarke appeared it was obvious that a lot of people had come primarily to hear his talk. Andy had spent some time during the day on Twitter encouraging hecklers during his talk and he certainly wasn’t disappointed.
Andy presented the first part of his Hardboiled Web Design talk which I believe he will be taking around the world throughout 2010. The main thrust of the talk is that there is plenty of CSS3-based code that you can use right now on client websites.
The talk itself was expertly presented – I was genuinely impressed by the high level of the presentation and the quality of the accompanying slides. It was by far the most polished performance of the evening and worth the ticket price alone.
Andy’s talk travels through controversial territory with his determination to stamp out IE6 by simply not serving it any graphic styles at all. This approach drew some enthusiastic feedback from the audience (OK, heckling) at various points in the talk as people queried whether it was realistic to simply not tell your clients how their site would look in IE6.
I can see both sides of the coin. I serve Andy’s IE6 CSS file to visitors on my site with IE6 but then very few of my visitors use it anyway. I wouldn’t serve it to visitors of an ecommerce site – even if they only have 2 or 3% of IE6 usage. I’m pretty sure it would turn off potential buyers so it’s ultimately lost revenue for your client.
Andy responded well to the spirited heckling and refused to be knocked off his stride, maintaining that it was possible to follow his top-down techniques (in essence graceful degradation) with corporate clients. Some of the examples Andy showed included those used on his own ‘For A Beautiful Web‘ site and they definitely add an extra level of interest to the user experience.
I’ve seen Andy a couple of times in the past and kind of felt he was a bit ‘marmite’ and it was clear from both the verbal feedback during the talk and the Twitter stream that some were keen to disagree with his views but like he said – that’s OK – it’s for each designer to find their own way to start using advanced techniques in their every day work.
I definitely warmed to Andy and his style of presentation and his message throughout the talk and I’ll also be making the journey up to see him talk at DIBI in April when hopefully he’ll be presented additional ideas to those he presented at Speak The Web. Of course my journey on the train will take significantly longer than his trip up in his spaceship…
As with the Liverpool event, it did run over a little bit and so unfortunately most people (myself included) had to make tracks as soon as the last talk was over but I guess this is always going to be the nature of an event that finishes later in the evening.
Overall I thought both the Liverpool and Manchester events were great and I learnt quite a bit of new stuff. I really hope Dan and Rich put on similar events in the future – I’ll definitely be there if they do.
Dom Hodgson
February 20, 2010 at 11:50 pm
Thanks for the comments, I bloody hate macs… seriously.. I’m going back to doing talks on a chalkboard..
Rich Clark
February 21, 2010 at 7:40 pm
Thanks for the write up Simon & nice to meet you too. We’re glad you enjoyed both evenings, it’s always good to get feedback so we can plan for the future.
Sorry you didn’t manage to get a seat, some people told us they offered seats but maybe we should have pushed that a bit more. I think the britishness in us doesn’t like to make a fuss. Regarding name badges there were a few around but as they were scattered over tables I don’t think people saw them.
All in all it was a great learning experience for us and we hope to improve for any future events we do.
Cheers
Rich
Simon Young
February 21, 2010 at 8:42 pm
Thanks for the reply Rich.
Like I say they were really minor gripes – it was a great event over all and really hoping you do something similar in the future.
Great as well that you are giving any profits earned to charity but I don’t think anybody would begrudge you the profit next time round!
Simon
Jintski
February 21, 2010 at 8:56 pm
Hi,
Interesting post. Could you tell us which other sites, apart from his own in-house ones, did Andy Clark give as examples of his work?
Thanks
Simon Young | Freelance Web Designer, Web Developer in Manchester, Chester
May 1, 2010 at 11:15 pm
[...] before although I did attend a couple of Speak The Web events earlier in the year (see my reviews here and here) and so I had mixed views of what to expect. I shouldn’t have had any concerns [...]