Web Directions Government, on May 19th at the Old Parliament House. Web Directions Government examines challenges and solutions to delivering government services via the web - whether at a local, state or federal level. Speakers include the W3C’s eGovernment lead, Jose Manuel Alonso, as well as speakers from the ABC, ABS, News Digital Media, and other leading practitioners in Government and Industry.

http://gov08.webdirections.org/

Max Design presents: Website user experience and CSS workshop: designing for usability, building for the future
A hands-on workshop with user experience expert, Donna Maurer, and CSS expert, Russ Weakley.

Over two full days you will build detailed websites layouts from the ground up - starting with page layout, navigation and form design; and ending with clean markup and elegant styling using XHTML/CSS.

Day 1: Planning and designing the user experience
Donna Maurer

On day one you will plan and design a website - focusing on the user experience: designing the navigation, page layout and forms.

You will:

• learn techniques to understand your users, and prepare user scenarios
• understand your content with content analysis methods
• create an effective and usable site structure (information architecture)
• design a range of navigation methods
• create page layouts for content, home, index and special pages
• design simple forms

For each step, Donna will outline the fundamentals and show examples from small and large website projects. But most of the time will be hands-on - you work on your own project, ask questions and discuss with the group.

Day 2: Building beautiful sites using CSS
Russ Weakley

On day two you will build your website from the ground up - starting with structural markup, adding accessible markup and then styling your layout using CSS.

You will learn:

• how to create well structured, accessible markup
• the basics of CSS including rule sets, selectors, shorthand rules, inheritance and the cascade.
• how to structure efficient CSS files
• how to create a full CSS layout from a flat graphic mockup
• how to deal with browser issues including specific browsers such as IE5, IE6 and IE7.
• how to create a resolution dependent layout
• how to create CSS for printing and hand held devices

Who should attend?

Web managers, web designers, web developers and bloggers who:

• are interested in designing user-focused websites
• have a basic understanding of CSS and want to learn more