So I just got back from An Event Apart, which was held at Turner Field in Atlanta. All round, it was a good focused session on web development and reaffirmed many things I already “sorta” knew, but never really quite formed into solid ideas. I think it was kind of like going to church and listening to a sunday sermon. Yeah, everything makes sense and the speaker wasn’t really telling me anything I shouldn’t already have known, but hearing it spoken from someone with authority helped all the various topics I sorta already knew really sink in.

Some take aways I found helpful:

On IE 7: Don’t panic. Most sites will work fine with IE7. The parsing hacks (like * html) used to fix rendering bugs shouldn’t be too much of a problem, since those two classes of bugs (parsing and rendering) are fixed for the most part. IE 7 is also layout complete, which means no more CSS layout features. Thankfully, both min-height and min-width are now supported.

On client relations: Either giving in too much (doing whatever the client wants), and not giving enough (don’t listen to the client) will hurt you. This is so true.

On design: Design is about solving a problem, not always about being innovative.

On implementation: Nice to see that I generally follow the same path from design to implementation

On textism: Don’t use a dump truck full of words for copy. Try to be concise and get to the point. Don’t waste bandwidth, especially your user’s brain bandwidth.

On starting something: Build something you find useful, don’t re-invent the wheel.

All in all, a great seminar at a pretty sweet location, and it was quite fun to take a quick trip to Atlanta for a nite. I’m not really much of a baseball person, but it was pretty cool nonetheless to eat lunch outside overlooking the baseball field. Except the Coca-Cola from the bar didn’t taste quite right, go figure. And the Wi-Fi was basically non-existant.

Check out some pics of the event at the Flickr group pool.

Some other write-ups about the event apart:

CSS Insider
CDHarrison.com
and some others (including past seminars).