Last month I attended the An Event Apart web design conference in Boston. Here are my thoughts I sent in response to their follow-up survey:

I can say for sure that I probably won’t be attending in Boston again. That city rubbed me the wrong way. Half the people I interacted with were rude – these were people I was paying for their service! I was never sure where I was or where I was going. I’ll be attending in SF next year – there’s a city I like! Friendly people, lovely weather, plenty to do and see.

I did enjoy the conference however. I liked the food and snacks provided. I am always hungry so food paves a direct route to my heart. The speakers were knowledgeable and entertaining. I was looking forward to PPK’s presentation until I realized the subject matter was something I had already covered. Andy Budd’s presentation was brilliant. I appreciated Zeldman’s take on the lay of the web design land – higher education is not keeping pace with trends and technologies in web development, professional titles are all over the map, and Santa Maria’s presentation was inspirational. Zeldman’s website critique at the end was very good – clear direction on what was done well and how a site could be improved. Hard to do well. And harder to do well in front of a crowd of 1000+.

I think we need to see more on mobile development.

I would like to see how people establish corporate standards that successfully maintain a brand over time – even when the people change. Obviously, I’m speaking of the Kimberly Blessing type of standards – style guides, design review processes, etc. What doest it take to create and maintain a brand online? Are there specific examples from someone’s past that we can learn from? What rules apply to internal and external design teams? Where did I come from, why am I here and where will I go after this life? If you can answer that last, one I think you’ll have everyone’s attention. But if you can’t, at least answering the previous questions will garner the respect and admiration of this humble Web Hacker. (You can add that to the list of titles.)

Speaking of terrible titles, if someone could present on how to remove the word ‘webmaster’ from the human vocabulary forever, I would be eternally grateful.

The accommodations were lovely. I love Marriott Rewards points.

I like that the slides were available online after the event. Unfortunately, some slides varied between the book, the actual presentation and online. That made it hard to review sometimes.

So I recommend An Event Apart to all my web design friends and neighbors. Huzzah and thank you!