Archive for July, 2007
Director, UX Strategy, Red Square
Steve Baty joined Red Square in February 1999 and is responsible for Red Square’s eCommerce and user experience strategy. Steve’s work involves the alignment of user experience strategies with the overall business goals of the organisation, balancing brand, marketing, IT, financial, user and competitive forces in the development of a cohesive project vision. Over the past few years Steve has led Web projects for Panasonic Australia, YHA Australia, oneworld Alliance, Maersk Line, Australian Museum, Tourism Queensland, Sydney Convention & Exhibition Centre, and Fuji Xerox Australia.
Steve holds two Masters Degrees, in Electronic Commerce and Business Administration, and a Bachelor of Science Degree in Applied Statistics and Applied Physical Mathematics. He is a published author on topics as diverse as electronic commerce strategy, IT management, user experience strategy and user research theory, and has had articles translated into a variety of languages appearing on international industry sites including CNet China. Steve is an active member of the Interaction Design Association (IxDA), the Sydney IA-Peers industry network and the Web Standards Group (WSG); and is a columnist for UXMatters - the international online journal specialising in user experience design.
- Date:
- July 31st, 2007
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- admin
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User experience, Trade Me
With over 2.5 million unique visitors each month, Trade Me has a large number of users to cater for. Natasha Hall spends her days conducting usability testing, contextual enquiry and ethnographic-based research to identify and solve behavioural oddities and problems.
Natasha has had her hand in the web pie for over 7 years: a dollop of design + development, a handful of content editing and usability and accessibility analysis, and a pinch of training and project management thrown in.
- Date:
- July 27th, 2007
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- admin
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Senior Consultant, Adobe Systems
Senior Consultant with Adobe Systems, Matt Voerman has over twelve years of professional web and rich media development experience. As a long-time Flash Platform evangelist, he has worked with a multitudes of organisations both locally and internationally (specialising mainly in the enterprise finance sector).
Matt has written, or contributed to, numerous books, whitepapers, and articles on Flash and Flex and has been using both technologies since their inception. He is a regular speaker at industry events, and has been a driving force in promoting rich internet applications (RIAs) for a number of years (well before Web 2.0!).
Matt is also Master Flash and Flex Instructor who strongly believes in supporting, educating and growing the RIA development community.
- Date:
- July 25th, 2007
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- admin
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Technical Editor, SitePoint
As a technical editor for SitePoint, Matthew Magain has edited books on topics ranging from Photoshop and Web Usability to CSS, Ruby on Rails and ASP.NET. He is also the organizer for Melbourne’s Web Standards Group, and digs retro cartoon strips, crazy Japanese TV and pints of Kilkenny. He writes about all these things and more on his personal site, m-dash.
- Date:
- July 25th, 2007
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- admin
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Director, FurtherAhead
Derek Featherstone is a well known instructor, speaker and developer with expertise in web accessibility consulting.
Derek delivers technical training that is engaging, informative and immediately applicable. A high-quality instructor, he draws on his background as a former high school teacher plus seven years running his web development and accessibility consultancy Further Ahead
His experience includes hands-on development, web accessibility consulting and training. He advises many government agencies, educational institutions and private sector companies providing them with expert accessibility testing and review and recommendations for improving the accessibility of their web sites to all people.
As a member of the Web Standards Project (webstandards.org), Derek serves on two task forces: Accessibility/Assistive Devices and DOM Scripting. He is a dedicated advocate for standards that ensure simple, affordable access to web technologies for all.
- Date:
- July 25th, 2007
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- admin
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Manager Usability and Accessibility Services, Monash University
Gian Sampson-Wild has worked in the accessibility industry since 1998 and consulted on the development of the first Level AAA accessible web site in Australia. She ran the accessibility consultancy PurpleTop from 2000 to 2005 and is currently the Manager of Usability and Accessibility Services at Monash University.
Amongst other sites, Gian has worked as the accessibility consultant for the Melbourne 2006 Commonwealth Games and was responsible for training Microsoft developers in accessibility. She also wrote the original and updated version of the Victorian eGovernment Resource Centre Web Accessibility Toolkit.
Gian was a Member of the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group from May 2000 to August 2006 (with two notable absences). She remains actively involved in WCAG2, having recently served on the taskforce dedicated to addressing the cognitive disability formal objection raised by Lisa Seeman. With other members of the accessibility industry in Australia Gian also liaises with the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission on the status of WCAG2. Gian recently completed a peer review of the alternative accessibility guidelines, the WCAG Samurai Errata.
- Date:
- July 25th, 2007
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- admin
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There have been a few comments recently about the lack of an accessibility expert position on the FullCodePress teams. Have we been ignoring accessibility?
The answer is no, we wanted to surprise the teams…
The FullCodePress judging panel will comprise of two assessibility judges. Gian Sampson-Wild will be accessing the sites with the other judges at the FullCodePress event and Derek Featherstone will be assessing the sites, live from Canada.
It gets more interesting…
Derek will be assessing the sites against Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0, and Gian will be assessing the sites against the recently produced Web Content Accessibility Guidelines - Samurai Errata. This means both teams will really have to be on their toes!
Stay tuned as we announce the full judging panel over the coming days.
- Date:
- July 25th, 2007
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- admin
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A subcommittee from Webstock and WIPA have been busily assessing the non-profit organisation registrations. The winning organisations cannot be revealed until Saturday 18 August, when our two teams meet. However, there is one thing we can tell you…
There will now be two non-profit organisation websites built instead of one!
At 9am on 18 August, the teams will each be given a different non-profit organisation website to build. Although this will make judging slightly harder, it gives us the opportunity to hand over two full and complete websites at the end of the 24 hour periods.
Mort Bay Communications have kindly offered to host both organisation websites for 12 months free of charge.
- Date:
- July 23rd, 2007
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- admin
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Alison Green - Captain’s choice
Ali Green has been designing and building websites for the past 11 years, and still loves her job as much today as she did when she started. She’s worked on over 120 websites - covering all aspects of the web design process, including design, information architecture, scoping, HTML development, image creation and manipulation, client liaison and project management.
These days she works at Shift in Wellington and specialises in building pure CSS websites that are usable, accessible and e-government compliant (even those that aren’t e-govt sites!). She’s a bit of a perfectionist, never assumes anything, and always checks everything at least twice.
In her spare time she plays on her computer, does a bit of blogging, reads a lot, hangs out with her friends and discusses politics with anyone who will listen. In a past life she was one of the organisers of New Zealand’s biggest and best annual dance party - The Gathering.
Jeffrey Wegesin - HTML/CSS
Jeffrey began his career in Chicago working as a designer for a data-mining corporation. Misled into believing he would receive a yellow helmet to protect his noggin, he departed, digging a hole through the Earth, and finding his way to Xero where he works as a production designer.
At Xero Jeffrey cuts the fat from markup while he endeavours to make everything look and work the same in every browser imaginable. He also has experience building accessible and usable websites for other businesses and government agencies in New Zealand and in the U.S.
Jeffrey enjoys feeding his Xero colleagues cakes, learning New Zealand colloquialisms like “bikkie,” and exploiting his American accent. In his spare time he plays with cameras, stares at fonts, and reads deep and introspective books about peanut butter. He also writes poetry. His latest poem is about his toe:
I’m missing a toe, you know, you know,
You know I’m missing a toe, a toe,
So why laugh at me, I just want to know,
Why laugh at my missing toe?
Peter Johnston - Writer
I’ve been working with web content for ten years now, and been working with words for over 20 years - in advertising, communications and web development roles.
More recently I worked as a freelance web content specialist from 2003-2006, before taking up my current role as Editor for the Retirement Commission on the award-winning Sorted website and other online/offline projects.
Other organisations I have worked for in the web space include Helios Communications, Wellington City Council and The Web Limited.
My mantra for developing good web content (and indeed any content!) is that it should be compelling, concise, consistent, current, correct and credible. Outside work my biggest passions are music - particularly from the post-punk era - and my two sons (10 and 13 years old). I also love eating chocolate, drinking coffee and watching cricket, though rarely all at the same time…
Mark Rickerby - Programmer
From more than eight years working in Wellington’s entertainment and design industries, Mark has subsumed more web project chaos than most people have had hot dinners. After chasing the English language all the way from the heights of poetry to the depths of relational databases, he should have been looking where he was going when he ran straight smack into the wall of computer science. After a crash course in programming language analysis for the infamous Lego Hypothesis (published at OOPSLA 2006), he came to the shocking conclusion that there was more to coding than getting Javascript to play nicely with browsers, yet for some reason he promptly returned to the web industry.
Mark is currently writing and directing an online adventure game and contributing to several open source PHP projects.
Website: http://maetl.coretxt.net.nz
Steve Dennis - Designer
Since almost the dawn of time (2001) Steve has worked at Enlighten Designs in Hamilton. Steve enjoys the mega important title of ‘Lead Designer’ though the complete lack of business cards means everyone just has to take his word for it. His strengths lie in clean effective design, elegant and reusable markup, and an almost silly attention to detail.
When he’s not working, designing things, rock climbing, or playing guitar, or he can usually be found eating, or much more likely, sleeping.
Zef Fugaz - UX/IA
Being an introvert with two layers of speech impediments, Zef was perhaps destined to dedicate his career to anything that avoided verbal communication.
His career was launched at Tearaway Magazine in `88 as Music Editor. He then moved to television production in `92 and broke new ground by producing New Zealand’s first TVC fully-animated in 3D (featuring a toilet-roll rock-band).
Then back when ‘gopher’ was not a squirrel-like creature and ‘mosaic’ not something you glue to crockery, Zef discovered The Web. He dived in and has been working there ever since.
In 1994 he launched ‘Global Groove - the Website’ - featuring music articles, record reviews, animation and snippets of original music downloads. This has since evolved into zef[a]media - a blog which focuses on ‘The User Experience in New Zealand’.
Somewhere in between all this he produced a radio show, made an award winning documentary, raised two children and been strapped to the side of a helicopter.
At FullCodePress Zef is looking forward to an intense time collaborating with some of New Zealand’s top web talent and consuming vast amounts of dark chocolate and fresh coffee.
Thomas Scovell - Project Manager
Thomas has spent 14 years “working the web”, for the past several years as a project manager. He currently works for Webby award winning agency Shift in Wellington, New Zealand as senior project and account manager for international and national brands and government sector clients. Thomas’ formal qualifications are in psychology and philosophy - enabling him to bring a rigorous understanding of human drives, tempered with an analytical process, to the process of website creation - as well as fueling his passion in project management methodologies, web standards and the semantic web. When not online - Thomas can be found indulging in a little whiskey, a lot of music, quite a bit of film, some photography and as much vegan cuisine as he possibly can.
- Date:
- July 16th, 2007
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- admin
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Marla Mitelman - Project manager
Marla got interested in the Web approximately 10 years ago in her native London. When her boss of the time let her loose on the company web site it was an the start of an addiction that’s still going strong today!
With over 9 years commercial experience project managing and producing for the web, her addiction has now become her vocation. Clients and projects include; Microsoft, Optus, Commonwealth Bank, Channel [V] and Toyota.
Marla’s other addictions/interests include watching live music and really cheesy TV.
Ruth Ellison - User experience /IA
Ruth is an interaction designer living in Canberra. She has been working with the web for nine years, specialising in the user experience field since early 2003. She is very passionate about thinking and creating great user experiences for people, and is absolutely fascinated by how people interact with each other and with systems. Ruth is also very passionate about web standards and accessible design.
Ruth is currently the Design Manager at the Department of Immigration and Citizenship. When she’s not doing Information Architecture, user centred design and usability work, she can be found behind a camera, flickring, or singing in her mostly-acapella group ‘Raw Honey‘.
Sarah Peeke - Designer
Sarah Peeke first became interested in the web in 1999 when she published her creative writing at XERT - Inspirational Works.
Since 2002 Sarah has been self employed as a web designer and developer at XERT Communications, with a specialisation in the alternative health and holistic industries.
Sarah is a long-standing member of the Web Standards Group, and is experienced in web design, XHTML, CSS, PHP & MySQL. Her primary focus is on the design of usable, accessible, standards compliant websites.
Early in 2007 Sarah co-founded Geofeat International, a global undertaking to provide individuals with the opportunity to source products, share resources and participate in projects that are green, eco-friendly and organic. Sarah is responsible for the site’s design, development and ongoing maintenance.
David McDonald - HTML/CSS coder
Based in Melbourne, Australia, David is a freelance web consultant. He specialises in creating clean, usable websites using web standards.
David’s clients have included BHP Billiton, The Hiser Group, Melbourne IT, Sensis, Victoria Online, Eclipse Group, Vision Australia and many other businesses and design agencies.
When not working, David continues to tinker around on the web, amusing himself by playing with and reading about technology.
Rex Chung - Programmer
Rex Chung is a web entrepreneur with extensive experience in many aspects of web development. He built his first website in notepad and has since worked with a variety of projects from startups to large corporates. RoRCraft is the Internet consultancy firm he started last year focusing on Web2.0 application development for startups and small companies.
When he’s not coding on his macbook he enjoys exploring his artistic side with photography. You can usually find him at many industry events and conferences such as WSG and Rails Oceania.
Melissa Cater - Writer
For the past 10 years I have been a writer, manager, and designer of online content. I am really interested in making sure that content is accessible, usable and findable and have found my place working where web content, information architecture, design and technologies intersect.
I run my own small business in Melbourne and work with clients ranging from small to medium companies, not-for-profits and government departments. I try to come up with solutions that help them to reach their audiences in an effective, appropriate and sustainable manner. This involves being business analyst, information architect, content designer, writer and producer, tester, project manager and more.
When not sitting at a computer, I can be found making things at my sewing machine, wandering around a gallery or escaping the city to have an adventure with friends on two wheels or on foot.
Jeff Lowder - Captains Choice
Jeff kicked off his career in freelance web development 8 years ago. Since then he has worked on many exciting websites in a range of capacities, including front-end specialist, back-end developer and information architect. He is passionate about developing with web standards, and as an adjunct to this has also specialised in accessible web development and accessibility audits.
- Date:
- July 12th, 2007
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- admin
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