How to Rank Highly in Google

By admin

During Voices That Matter Web Design Conference in Nashville last year, I sat down with Nikki McDonald, a senior acquisitions editor for PeachPit. One of the questions she asked me, well, she asked of everyone she interviewed at the conference: how to best rank highly in search engines for this very podcast. And by search engines she meant Google.

Nikki McDonald: Okay now to move to the very last question. It’s kind of complicated, but there could be a prize involved. 

Christopher Schmitt: Okay.

McDonald: There will be a prize involved. We are asking everyone. Okay. Think about this: I want to know what is the best way readers, you know, designers can ensure, whoever is listening, can you show that the website where rank highly in Google. But in your response I need you to optimize your answer to make a search engine friendly.

And, if your podcast, right now, ranks the highest, you could win a prize to be determined later. 

Schmitt: To Be Determined Later? That is a great prize! 

McDonald: That’s the best contest. 

Schmitt: I haven’t won To Be Determined Later yet, so that’s great. Something to look forward to put–

McDonald: I know.

Schmitt: –on the resume: “To Be Determined Later Winner”…

McDonald: Contest prize later. Who doesn’t want to enter?

Schmitt: I would say that who ever make the title for this podcast should be–

McDonald: Then what should be the title be?

Schmitt: Should be… Just put a lot of buzzwords CSS, Ajax, you know. “Christopher talks about these things.” 

McDonald: Give me some best words. Come on. Spit them out.

Schmitt: Put them all in there: CSS, Ajax, PHP, Microformats–

McDonald: Microformats?

Schmitt: Yeah, we haven’t really talked about, but we should put that in there, too.

McDonald: Just in case.

Schmitt: Yeah, just in case. Also, put a transcript of what we are talking on the video, too, so Google can index that, too. 

So, if you do that I should definitely be walking away with Prize To Be Determined Later. 

McDonald: Because it’s yours?

Schmitt: And I will raise it above my head and just like, “Hey!” and everyone else is jealous. 

McDonald: Thank you, Christopher Schmitt, for sitting down and talking with me here in Voices That Matter Conference and enjoy the rest of you stay in Nashville and have a good conference and hopefully we see at the next one. 

Schmitt: Thank you so much.

Ed Directions North

By admin

The Web Directions North descends upon Denver this upcoming February. As usual, it looks to be filled with some of the best people in the field covering the latest and greatest in Web design and development. (Oh, yeah, and the ski trip!)

Also, this year is something new: a new, one- day workshop geared for those who teach Web design and development for others and want to learn from the very best called Ed Directions North.

So, if you are an educator in this field finding yourself challenged by keeping up with latest technologies and how to best relay them to your students, you might want to check this out. 

Below is information about the workshop from the Web Directions North site:

Developing curricula and training for the next generation of web designers and developers often feels like shooting at a moving target. Best practices are constantly evolving, and difficult to keep track of, while standards emerge and are refined.

As a consequence, all too often, education and training does not adequately prepare students for the needs of industry by equipping them with the proper foundational knowledge of current best practices and standards.

Ed Directions, a highly focussed, in depth whole day symposium aims to address this challenge, by helping teachers, trainers, course and curriculum developers, and others in the education field keep abreast with the latest developments in standards and best practice, and to develop and deliver the best possible curricula and courses. 

Who is the day for?

If you are involved in developing or delivering education for web designers and developers, whether in the secondary, post secondary, vocational or the commercial sector, this day is for you. As this is not a day for learning the technologies and techniques themselves, a general knowledge of technologies such as HTML, JavaScript and CSS, and subject areas such as Accessibility will be assumed. There will however be no requirement to put this knowledge into practical application on the day.

What will you cover?

Divided into 4 sessions, each session will cover one significant area of web design and development and feature:

  • a renowned domain expert giving an overview of current best practice, standards, as well as commonly used and taught, but outmoded, technologies and techniques
  • experts in the education sector, covering the resources available (commercial, free, and open) to develop curricula and training courses
  • experienced teachers and trainers with a track record of success in developing and delivering training in this area, sharing their real world experience
  • interactive sessions to put these all this knowledge into practice, and share experiences with professionals facing the same challenges as you

The day is divided into the following four sessions

  • Session 1: HTML semantic markup and web content technologies
  • Session 2: Cascading style sheets and web presentation
  • Session 3: JavaScript and Ajax
  • Session 4: Accessibility and usability

Ed Directions North is facilitated by Chris Mills, Steph Troeth, Aarron Walter, and Bill Cullifer and feature domain experts such as Dave Shea (CSS), Derek Featherstone (Accessibility/Usability), and Christian Heilmann (Ajax/Javascript).

Education experts include Jeffrey Brown from Damascus High School, Glenda Sims from UT, and Leslie Jensen-Inman from the University of Tennessee.

Head Conference, The Virtual Conference

By admin

Over the weekend about 100 people were hanging out in my apartment. 

They weren’t there for a Halloween party or to give me tips on interior decorating (I’m keeping the Coolio poster no matter what anyone says). 

The crowd was viewing me through my webcam on my laptop while I was presenting in my apartment as part of the Head Conference, a virtual conference.

Think of it as a string of webinars (if you can stomach such a term) set to the schedule and diversity like any other Web conference. It was billed mostly as a green conference since attendees and speakers didn’t have to burn jet fuel to reach a singular location.

I viewed it as a nice, geek-filled weekend at home logging onto the Internet and getting quality content without the burden of sifting to find the good stuff.

Dodging into the different virtual rooms reminded me of an actual conference just as if I was leaving one room to go to hear another speaker in another room at “real” conference. 

Sessions ranged from web standards, accessibility, web application development, Flash, Flex, to scalability. So the chances were high you would learn something new rather than being shown Web design presentation cliches that seem to crop up in conferences these days.

Designing Around CSS presentation at Head Conference

For my presentation, I covered the topic of Designing Around CSS. Specifically how common, everyday CSS techniques can be used to build something relatively complex if and when used appropriately. I had great time interacting with the crowd by telling my stories, answering questions, giving away books and hopefully instilling some inspiration to the one hundred in my apartment.

IZEAFest Keynote: Merlin Mann

By admin

Merlin Mann’s How to Blog keynote presentation in Orlando, FL at IZEAFest covered material he learned over the last four years related to blogging.

  • Just cause it’s easy to post, doesn’t mean you should. 
  • What’s a blog? Topic multiplied by voice. 
    • It’s hard to have a blog that’s all voice. 
    • And it’s hard a blog about all about a topic. 
  • You have to find the axis where you find a voice and your topic. 
    • Find out what place the blog has in your life. 
  • You want to have a blog to genereate a huge amount of traffic and/or money. 
    • It’s not the only reason. 
    • It means a lot to say things that are meaningful. 
    • If a blog is to get traffic, this talk isn’t for you. 
  • My concern:
    • I was worried that I wasn’t good fit for the conference. 
    • I can’t abuse my blog. 
    • It’s good idea to make money to blogs, but it’s not a high success rate 
  • We all wanna get better. 
    • Speak an authentic manner. 
  • Here’s you.
    • There is something you are obsessed about. 
    • Think of the first axis is your passion. 
    • A blog is can be a set of links or you can bring original content to the Web.
    • Let’s say you want money, success, recognition. 
    • One of the greatest honors is to have readers say “I wonder what you think about?” 
    • You don’t want to be liked, but you want to be known. 
  • Trying:
    • Share Passion.
    • Build Participation.
    • Generate Money.
    • Earn Respect.
    • Encourage Opinion.
    • Get Better.
  • When you try a lot, it means a lot. 
    • Trying also has business value. 
    • I don’t link to sites that are dumb. 
    • If you over-serve the right audience, and you are bound to do well.
  • What I know about blogging: 
    • “Find your obsession. Every day, explain it to one person you respect. Edit everything, skip shortcuts, and try not to be a dick. Get better.”
    • “Find your obsession.” 
      • Hit them from where there ain’t. 
      • Is there room for another site that reviews Social Media 2.0? Probably not.
    • “Every day,”
      • I didn’t say post everyday. 
      • If you want to be good everyday, you need to do it everyday. 
      • I don’t think you need to post everything that occurs to you. 
      • It’s okay to sit on posts on a while. 
      • Have about five posts going at once. 
      • When you give your brain permission to get better, you want to do it better. 
    • “explain it”
      • What is it that you have to say about that topic? 
      • Ann Coulter can be talking about anything, people will seek her out cause they love being angry at Ann Coulter. 
      • There is tons of content out there with ads around it, but why should people be excited about it. 
      • If you were going to start a new blog, then write the fifth blog post. 
    • “to one person” 
      • Recommends Stephen King book’s On Writing. It’s the second best book on creative writing. (The Creative Habit is the other book.)
      • Think of one person you are writing to that you really admire and write to that person. 
      • Imagine that person be really busy. 
    • “you respect.”
      • It helps that the person you are writing for is someone you respect. 
    • “Edit everything,”
      • At some point editing fell out of style. 
      • Getting rid of things that sucked become a waste of time at some point.
      • You should be throwing away a lot of what you make.
      • If the people are you reaching don’t care that you edit, are they people you want in your audience? 
    • “skip shortcuts,”
      • The Internet is a thing that works because it’s open. Openness makes it good. 
      • You need to show people where you were initially interested in what you are talking about. 
      • The Internet is good. 
    • “and try not to be a dick.” 
      • There’s a very short link between cognition and action. 
      • If you are constantly reacting to your emotions, you might regret a lot of things in your life. 
      • If you use your platform to spit on it, it’s not very respectful. 
    • “Get better.”
      • I try a little bit harder each time I do something. 
      • Low quality work is like a potato chip. it tastes good, but it’s short term benefits hurts people who work out. 
      • You only get so many years on the marble. 
    • Things Not to Sweat: 
      • Don’t worry about SEO. 
      • Traffic. It will come if you are good.
      • Ads.
      • Design.
      • Fame.
    • Things to Sweat. Now. 
      • Figure out what the Why am I doing this? Who do I want to overserve? When do you know when you are doing well? How? 
      • Good idea: to write, read, obsess and own your voice. 
      • What is the single most important thing that you and no one else can do, but you? 
    • It took me four years to figure out. 

IZEAFest: Big Money Bloggers

By admin

Drew Bennett moderated the Big Money Bloggers Panel at IZEAFest in Orlando, FL. The panel consisted of financially successful bloggers including Stephanie Agresta, John Chow, Neil Patel, and Jeremy Schoemaker.

  • Question: “Why did you get into blogging?” 
    • Stephanie Agresta: It was a natural evolution in terms of marketing and the fundamental shift of making publishing easier. 
    • Jeremy Schoemaker: I didn’t mean my blog to be commercial. Along the course of time, people started connecting the dots and found the sites I did have from my blog. 
    • Neil Patel: I didn’t think about money. I just thought about spreading the information. If I get enough people to spread this to, I essentially create a platform. 
    • John Chow: The reason I started blogging was to get the top of Google for “John Chow”. I talk about whatever interests me. I keep on posting and built a readership. One of the things I talk about is how to make money online. So, people told me to prove it. So I started to monetize it. 
  • Question: “What’s the craziest thing that’s happened?” 
    • JS: When a guy tattooed my logo and my face on his arm pretty prominently. My wife said that night it’s time to get a security system. The craziest thing is the power that you get for being famous, popular online. like getting credentialed for Presidential debates. 
    • SA: We took a bus tour from NYC to Boston with people to connect with. 
    • NP: Most of my followers are Indian people and a woman wrote to me and wanted to marry me. 
  • Question: “What’s the biggest pitfall?” 
    • JS: The scalability of time. I get to spend more time on my family and my businesses. 
    • NP: I post once a week. Now what ends up happening is that you become passionate… and then it stops becoming fun and I stopped posting. Then people would ask when are you going to post and it becomes a chore, a job. 
    • JC: I don’t have a job to go to. 
  • Question: “I have a decent enough traffic, but not enough clicks on the ads. How do I get people to click on ads?” 
    • JS: I place ads outside of the content as much as possible. It’s up to the company on what ad copy has worked for their companies. 
    • NP: Work with your advertisers to find out how best to get your message. 
    • SA: Stick with things that you have affinity towards and then your audience should as well. 
    • JC: For a general ad, above the fold. 
  • Question: “Supposed you had to start from scratch, how would you get back on top?” 
    • JC: Start the blog and just write. I blog about 2.8 posts per day. It’s the consistency that really matters. 
    • SA: It’s about people and I recommend going to conferences and meet people offline, not online.
    • NP: Find bloggers and get them to blog about you and get them to subscribe to the RSS feed. 
    • JS: If I could start over, I could say some things a little bit more aggressively. There’s just so much low-hanging fruit out there. 
  • Question: “What did you use for your blog? How did you design them?” 
    • SA: I use WordPress. Content Robot runs my blog. 
    • JC: WordPress
    • NP: I use WordPress. 
    • JS: I use WordPress, as well. 
  • Question: “What bloggers do you read?” 
    • JS: I enjoy reading TechCrunch. 
    • SA: I read TechCrunch and TechMeme. I use Twitter as a filter mechanism and look at articles they are linking to. Chris Brogan.
    • NP: I don’t use RSS, I know that sounds weird. Shoe’s, John’s… they interact a lot with their commentators so there’s lots of good information there. 
  • Question: “What is something you wish you knew earlier?” 
    • JS: One is a mailing list. In my photo gallery, I’ve made it easy for people to embed photos into their own sites. 
    • JC: I wish I knew what RSS was when I started. 
    • NP: I wish I knew Digg.com. My traffic and readership went through the roof. 
    • SA: I wish I could track of tools to manage productivity. 
  • Question: “What is the one thing bloggers need to know?” 
    • JS: Write quality content from the heart. Write it with passion. 
    • SA: Patience, Hustle, Community and Content. 
    • JC: Be consistent and enjoy what you are writing. 
  • Question: “How do you differentiate yourself from someone who blogs like you?” 
    • JS: I blog when I can and I try to do one post a day. 
    • NP: Besides the brand, it’s really listening to your readers. 
    • SA: I wouldn’t just focus on your blog. My brand focuses on Twitter. 
  • Question: “What was your biggest mistake ever made as a blogger?” 
    • JS: One time I would post a story that was more breaking news, instead of blog post about me. It told me that I’m not a journalist. 
    • SA: I blew a contest for tickets to Bill Mahr. Fell asleep when I should have been at the event.
  • Question: “How is Twitter impacting blogging?” 
    • SA: I find people blogging less. Robert Scoble is blogging less. 
    • JS: Twitter is awesome. People can instantly send you a message. 
    • NP: I use twitter as a marketing tool for my blog. 
    • JC: I thought it was a big chat room. Once you get enough followers, it becomes a great marketing tool. 

IZEAFest: Improving Your Content

By admin

Susie Gardner’s Improving Your Content presentation as a part of IZEAFest in Orlando, FL dealt with the elements of a successful blog.

  • Content is king, obligatory slide (with gold crown).
  • Your content needs to inform, attract, deliver, entertain,
    inspire, and convey. 
  • Assuming you goal is to have an audience: 
    • You want to keep the audience. 
    • You want to attract new people. 
  • Speaking of goals, you should have one. 
    • The goals should be in line with what your audience is
      expecting. 
    • Make yourself a mission statement to define what your
      goals are with your content. 
    • Having an audience of “everyone” isn’t to cut it. 
  • Niche
    • By finding a niche, you get to be specific with your
      content. 
    • If you are not passionate about what you are writing
      about, then it’s going to get boring. 
    • You don’t have to be an expert about what you are writing
      about.
    • Examples of niche: 
      • Online journalism
      • Candy
      • Logo design
  • Frequency
    • There’s a magic formula: 
      • Step 1: First out how much time it takes you to
        create a post (x)
      • Step 2: Find out how much time you have in a day (y)
      • Step 3: y/x equals you are able to write 
  • Comments
    • They are free content.
    • Comments come to you as a reward for the hard work
      in putting in quality content. 
    • Comments get to grow your content, unless you get to
      that success bracket where you literally cannot handle
      the load. 
    • They are some downfalls, people don’t want to deal with: 
      • Spam
      • Flamewars, etc.
    • You can work on worst case scenarios, 
    • Create a policy in case stuff shows up that you don’t
      want.
      • By having a policy others will know how you will
        determine to deal with it. 
    • You need to respond to comments to show that you are
      encouraging 
    • Ways to encouraging comments: 
      • Blog posts with ancedotes are good. Stories about your day are things
        people respond to. 
      • Asking a leading question at the end of the posts,
        asking for input. 
  • Food for Thought 
    • Experimentation is okay. You have a moving target with your blog.
    • Carry a notebook with you to capture ideas for blog posts. 
    • Everyone loves a good a tangent.
    • Spelling, grammar, and editing count.
    • Contests and polls.
    • Guest bloggers.
    • Rants/unpopular opinions.
  • Cool blogs:

IZEAFest Keynote: Jeremy Schoemaker

By admin

Jeremy Schoemaker’s Show Me the Money! Keynote covered how he got to where he was to where he is today. Major themes included hard work, prioritization, diligence, and some more hard work.

  • Jeremy Schoemaker met Ted Murphy at SXSW08 and was asked to keynote IZEAFest
  • Path to Online Success 
    • 420lbs
    • Over 50k in credit card debt
    • Smoked 2 packs of cigarettes a day
    • Could not get up before noon
  • Met wife through an online script that he wrote which sent out an email to women on
    dating sites
    • She wrote back saying that a simple, copy-and-pasted email wasn’t going to work and that he needs to try harder.
    • Taught him the definition of work ethic, which is hard work.
  • Tim Ferris’s book The 4‑Hour Workweek is essentially “hard work and time management”, but that doesn’t sell. 
    • Jeremy put together a book a called “Shoemoney playbook”
    • But the publisher’s didn’t like the title.
  • People get excited about thinking about doing stuff than doing stuff 
    • But “beyond Hard Work” is
    • Work ethic, work habits 
      • Set to a routine
    • Make progress every day!
    • By making some progress on a project 
      • Geting the ball rolling
      • Then you realize you are done in a couple of hours
    • Prioritize the potentially profitable projects 
      • A tip from his wife
    • Doing what others are not willing to
    • No fear, no excuses 
      • People can come up with excuses all day as to why things aren’t going to work
  • Building a site 
    • Building a site for people, not search engines 
      • A lot of people get worked up over SEO
      • You want to have viral marketing (not necessarily high search engine rankings)
    • Build a strong brand 
      • It’s important for people to be able to pronounce your brand
      • Good content outranks SEO
    • Survive without Google
  • Never Settle
    • Never settle. period!
    • 2004 started wih Google AdSense couple bucks a day
    • By spring of 2005 with google AdSense, started to make 1–2k per day, 30–50k/month
    • in August 2005, got the biggest check ever
    • In 2006, NextPimp.com had 
      • 70,000 paying customers
      • Drove 114,00 commercial ring tone leads
      • Generated over $800,000 in contextual revenue
      • Sold over 80k in hardware (mostly data cables)
      • Over 15k in donations
    • Mobile income in 2006 was over $5million
    • in 2007, rings tones on a decline 
      • Created AuctionsAds, LLC
      • Launched March 6, 2007
      • Within 4 months, over $2 million per month in revenue
      • Over 25k publishers
      • Sold AuctionsAds LLC on July 27, 2007
    • In 2008, formed ShoeMoney capital LLC 
      • Invested in new startups with marketing, technology and money
      • Purchased fighters.com
      • Sold out Elite Retreat Conference in San Francsico
      • Lots of new projects on the horizon
    • Pitfalls of Success 
      • Scalability
      • Growing too quickly
      • People change what they are doing when they grow to large.
      • Twitter isn’t changing the secret sauce. (It’s good but it’s not changing)
    • How do we know something will work? 
      • Is it a needed service?
      • Virility
      • Revenue model
    • Leverage your position 
      • NextPimp
      • Showmoney.com blog
      • AuctionAds Advertising network
      • ShoeMoney Captial LLC
      • Fighters.com
      • Keynoting IZEA
    • Looking for Help 
      • Basic Internet Skills
      • I want people who want to do cool stuff, but will still do the hard work of taking
        out the trash
      • 50/50 tests
      • Doing work others won’t
    • Things You Can’t Teach 
      • Trust
      • Work Ethic
      • Confidence
    • Remember this:
      • Never settle
      • Always be leveraging
      • Don’t be afraid
      • Screw Google

Panel Picking Ends for SXSW09

By admin

I’ve always thought of SXSW Interactive festival as our conference. This step-child of the Music and Movie fesitivals taking place each March in Austin, TX is our industry’s spring break, high school reunion, booze cruise and product showcase rolled into one. 

It also doesn’t hurt that that the barbeque in Austin is awesome, too.

Another aspect of this conference being ours is that the powers that be at SXSW open up the panel and solo presentation submissions up for voting by the public. 

Yes, you read that right. 

You can log in, rate the panel’s concept as well as lodge a comment to go with it. 

How many other conferences do that? 

This year’s SXSW Interactive Panel Picker is released, which has led to of-all-things: hotel rooms getting booked faster than people can bemoan SXSW as having jumped the shark or nuked the fridge.

I know I was part of the chorus last year that stated that since SXSW Interactive has grown so massive that meeting friends by happenstance is almost impossible. 

For example, thanks only to a string of last minute emails and text messages, I was able to coordinate a quick meetup with co-author Kevin Lawver right before the end of this past year’s festival.

The previous years? He and I took our time by hanging out going to nearby restaurants and burning rubber on a couple of treks to Salt Lick.

So, while the size has exploded—which is a good thing in the grand scheme of things—it means that the festival planners need all the help they can to put on the conference. Our conference.

If you have a few minutes, head on over to the Panel Picker and put in your two cents as to what kind of conference you want to see this March. 

And while you are at the Panel Picker, I would appreciate your vote for my panel submissions:

JavaScript for CSS Ninjas
You move with ease in Photoshop. You can cut down designs into pieces and then reconstruct it into valid XHTML+CSS, but JavaScript stops you in your tracks. In this session, we look at how the JavaScript frameworks like jQuery let CSS ninjas control the interaction layer without losing your workflow momentum.
Designing Our Way Through Web Forms
Although forms make the Web go around, they are often ugly due the generic way in which browsers display them, not to mention irritating to our site’s visitors when they don’t work as expected. In this session, panelists will provide specific details on ways to successfully create compelling forms for your users.

Voting ends this Friday night. 

Christopher Schmitt Voices That Matter Interview at SXSW 2008

By admin

Along with fellow co-authors Kevin Lawver and Kimberly Blessing, your hero was also interviewed at the recent SXSW for Voices That Matter podcast.

Below is the video the publisher made of the interview along with the transcript I’ve recently produced to go along with it.

Micahel Nolan: Hi, I am Michael Nolan, senior acquisitions editor for New Riders and we are here at South by South West at Austin, Texas and I am with Christopher Schmitt, the author of Adapting to Web Standards, which is a book about CSS and ajax for big sites. 

And, Chris, what inspired you to write this?  This is your third or fourth book isn’t it?

Christopher Schmitt: This is my eighth book. 

MN: Your eighth book. 

CS: I think it’s my eighth book, but I am not sure.  I lost count.

What inspired me was that I was at previous South by South West and I came across the panel that talked about how to deal with Web Standards in a large corporate structure (slides, mp3, transcript) and I was just kind of floored. We need this type of information—expanded upon, of course. It was only an hour panel, but expand it to talk about the technologies, the processes and the team workflow.

MN: What are the challenges a big sites faces?  I mean, give me an example of a big site you might be talking about.

CS: Well, in the book Kevin Lawver talks about—he works for AOL—he talks about all the stuff he went through to deal with the front page of AOL.com, which is sort of a portal page. And he actually did a lot of analysis upfront with other sites to discuss, you know, what was the text ratio to the graphics of the document. 

He talked a lot about—at that point when you talk about a large site like AOL.com you are dealing with a lot of traffic that a single web developer working for a small website like me, a small local bank site if you say or a small local business that wouldn’t get the necessarily the same traffic that AOL.com does.  So, the books that you find alot or the tutorials you find online are great tutorials on how to develop sites for a single, small case scenario where there will be one developer, one designer or one designer and one developer build the whole thing or maybe there’s two people. And the code that goes into it or the graphics, the hosting, you know, works great in that area, but when you deal with a large scale company when you have various specialists—not everyone is a generalist—you have to deal with lots of technologies that you have to deal with lots of bandwidth you have to force down to people and not having a lot of code that is compressed. Basically, you are wasting a lot of bandwidth to deliver it and deal with JavaScript all these technologies. It doesn’t scale very well between a small site—

MN: So, in this book propose methods for scalability.

CS: No, we don’t propose methods.  We actually talk about methods that people are using. 

We talk about—you know, HTML is pretty much always going to be HTML. We talk about HTML basics for semantic markup, which is always great. We also talk about CSS, but also talk about CSS in terms of how to manage CSS files for large Web sites. 

If you do a small website maybe we will have one CSS file that control everything for a max of 100 pages or if you are very lucky like, maybe, 1,000 pages or so. But when you are talking about 10,000 pages and you have various hands in the pot as well,  it’s kind of tricky because how do you manage who has control of what CSS file.  And then you have various subsites or intranet sites, then you have to determine which CSS rules dictate which designs. 

Then we move on to the JavaScript. JavaScripts is great, but if you just dealing with some simple validations on a small site you can get away with mutiple. separate scripts.  But when you are dealing with large Web sites you have to deal with JavaScript libraries, you have to deal with compression of libraries since they are large files and then we move on to JavaScript frameworks and how to deal with those.

And then we have a great chapter by Kimberly Blessing, who talks alot about Web standards and how to actually get that into a work flow for a dynamic, large group. Because when you are working, you just want to get the work done because you always have a pile of it on your plate. You have to go through it

But a lot of times there is poor documentation. if there is any documentation, people might not know the best way of doing things. And so Kimberly’s chapter is great for explaining the purposes of Web standards and a large scale environment and how to do it. It’s a great way to cap the first part of the book.

In the second part we have a lot of examples like the AOL one that Kevin Lawver wrote. We also have one for Tori Amos’ site. 

MN: Tori Amos?

CS: Yeah, we actually have it. We decided, you know, to mix it up a little bit in there. We talk about something a little bit more creative, but also high-profile.

MN: A large, large scale site.

CS: We talk about that a lot. And then we also have an interview that Mark Trammell did with the people that personally developed Yahoo!‘s front page and all the stuff they went through.

MN: So, you had this book actually started of works the way a big. large scale site does in that this was a team effort. It wasn’t just you. 

CS: Oh, yeah, definitely. I mean, we had the idea of the book and, I know, that just with a the team, I don’t have every skill set. There are other more people that know lot more details about it. It was really great because the panel I went to Kevin Lawver was on it. Kimberly Blessing was on it. They were really great friends of mine—

MN: And the panel became a book.

CS: Yeah, the panel became a book and I was so grateful. I was, like, “hey, you have this great idea, we just need to expand upon it. Would you be in on it?” And they all said, “yes,” which is really great. 

And I am also missing two other people on the panel, but I totally forgot their names. I’m sure they are going to hunt me down.

MN: They might not. 

South by South West is always good source for us find books, the right authors. How long you have been coming to South by South West?

CS: This is my fifth year. And it was like 2,400 people, five years ago. Now I think I heard the number was like seven thousand or so.

MN: It’s tripled in size, yeah.

CS: Yes, it’s tripled in size. You know, it’s kinda hard to find lunch.

MN: It is hard to find lunch. What else do you miss about the old days of South by South West?

CS: I miss if you want to talk to someone, you could actually track them down. Now it’s more like surfing or like fishing, I guess, in a way—not that people are fish—, but if you see someone, that’s great, you know, just don’t plan on it.

MN: It wouldn’t be surprising if you came and you miss seeing—

CS: Yeah. Actually, people were talking about. They realize now that we are like a bit more than half-way done, if not more. They realize they are not going to se people because we are missing them in all this flow.

MN: But, on the other hand, there is flip side, of course. In the fact that it’s so huge to me, it has more richness, more texture, more things going on.

CS: But you can get more people coming from different point of views, different histories. There is a vibe in South by South West that you don’t get at any other conference. 

MN: What is vibe for listeners? Can you describe that?

CS: Well, I think it comes from our industry being so different than other industries. I don’t know a lot of other industries, but from talking to my brothers, my family members and my friends who don’t work in this industry. Other industries are very closed. They keep their secrets close to their hearts, chests. 

This one, you know, if education is so—people are blogging what they’ve learned, you know, some Web design tricks or techniques. It’s very open and sharing. You don’t really get that type, of you know, talking about other places. And, I think, South by South West with the components of film and music, where it’s creative expression, it’s a natural tie-in, too.

MN: And then it is Austin which is such a wonderful city. It’s so fun to hang out in for few days.

CS: Yeah, I think South by South West Interactive is definitely helping keeping Austin weird—er.

MN: Oh, that’s good. 

So, speaking of conferences, you are going to be at our Voices That Matter Web Design conference.

CS: I’m totally stoked about that one.

MN: Yeah, we are, too. It promises to be quite exciting. That is going to be in early June in Nashville, Tennesse, which is a similar to Austin, not quit as weeird, perhaps. But a great city full of creativity and music and all the rest of it. We look forward to see you in there. 

Thanks, Chris.

CS: Oh, thank you!