What It Is:
Build is a conference which has been constructed for designers and digital ninjas, it will take place on Thursday November 5th at the Waterfront Studio in Belfast.
Build has been fully organised by Andy McMillan (@goodonpaper).
Who Is Speaking:
The lineup of speakers are of the highest caliber in the business and this will be a great opportunity to learn from the best:
Eric Meyer
Tim Van Damme
Mark Boulton
Wilson Miner
Andy Budd
Ryan Sims
A full list of the topics which will be covered can be found in the speakers section of the Build site.
Surrounding Events:
Unlike most conferences Build has a full week of events which will surround the main conference. These are not your typical events and include a showing of the popular documentary Objectified, a lecture by Airside, a BarCamp unconference and of course the Build after party. Complete listings for the events and registration details can be found over at the Build schedule.
Workshops:
Build also gives you the opportunity to register for a range of workshops on Wednesday November 4th. The workshops include Accessibility 2.0 with Philip Strain from Ecliptic, HTML 5 and CSS 3 with Chris Murphy and Nik Persson (Web Standardistas) and Guerrilla Usability Testing with Andy Budd from Clearleft.
Tickets:
If you are interested in attending Build it is still not to late, so grab a ticket while you can.
Roundup:
With only a week to go before the conference gets underway, the buzz is beginning to hit the streets and I, for one can’t wait.
Hope to see you there!
Lookaly is a new service that has been developed in order to act as a gateway for people based in Belfast and Northern Ireland to share their experiences of goods and services provided by local businesses.
When you first visit Lookaly the first thing that will standout is the design, this has clearly been taken very seriously and a lot of thought placed on making the user experience as smooth as possible through a clean and well structured interface.
The businesses that are available for browsing have been placed into a range of categories which include:
Automotive
Eating, Drinking and Nightlife
Financial and Legal
Leisure and Sports
Public Services, Education and Careers
Travel and Transportation
Once you have located the business you are interested in you can simply view all the reviews, photos and contact details that are associated with it. If you own a business or have an experience you want to share I would highly recommend adding it to their directory, so far it has helped me several times on choosing where to go for lunch in Belfast.
Lookaly also provides a blog which covers topics such as local events, products and of course businesses.
Another nice feature from Lookaly comes from utilising the social networking platform Twitter, they will often tweet a summary of reviews that have been posted, so it is a good idea to follow @Lookaly if you are a Twitter user.
Overall I think Lookaly is an extremely useful service and I am looking forward to seeing it grow as more businesses are added to the directory.
The cause for this years Twestival Local in Belfast was Camphill NI and in an effort to raise as much money as possible, local Twitter users took over the Bunatee Bar in the Queen’s University Students Union. With quite possibly the best pub quiz ever thrown (well it was pretty good), pint glasses for donations and raffle tickets an enjoyable evening was had by all.
Everyone was very generous with all their donations and it was great to see some familiar faces in addition to meeting some new Tweeters. I am looking forward to catching up with everyone again soon.
For some excellent photos from the night be sure and check out the Lookaly blog.
Yesterday I was fortunate to attend the first leg of the FOWD (Future of Web Design) Tour which started in Belfast.
A great line up to speakers who are all experts in their respective fields included:
Andy Clarke who opened the event with with an excellent lesson on design and gave a makeover to the NI Direct website which looked great and can be seen over at his blog. Andy also ended the day by giving a talk on how to design for the browser, this was fantastic and got an interesting reaction from the crowd when discussing designing on the browser as an alternative to Photoshop. I agree with his approach…although I would being a developer.
Martha Rotter gave the second talk of the event which was an overview of a new Microsoft product called SketchFlow, SketchFlow is designed in order to help prototype user interfaces quickly and efficiently. In terms of designing UI SketchFlow looks top class especially when obtaining feedback from clients as they have the ability to add notes and sketches to anything that is produced.
Drew McLellan introduced us to Microformats which I was previously unfamiliar with until now and also provided an insight into cost effective web development which has given me a good perspective on how to avoid some potential issues that could otherwise arise with clients.
Chris Murphy and Niklas Persson gave us an excellent overview of web standards and they also have a whole book on the subject which is available now – HTML and CSS Web Standards Solutions: A Web Standardistas’ Approach
Lee Munroe was the local speaker at the event, he did a great job with his talk ‘Rounding the Edges of your Website’.
Morgan McKeagney showed us how we could effectively marry creativity and logic just like Steve Jobs!
During the day there was also time for 25 minutes of ‘Speed Networking’ where you could quickly hand out business cards and meet people working in the same fields.
Overall it was a great day and I hope FOWD makes an appearance in Belfast again next year.
