I’m happy to say that the first Refresh Cleveland gathering was a success. We met up for dinner and beers at the Winking Lizard in Lakewood, and topics of conversation included:

• We have a lot of talented folks in this town. Why are they not speaking to each other?
• The Cleveland Web Standards Association is a Good Thing. Go. Attend. Support.
• Cleveland Day of .NET and the Worthiness of Rails.
• The pitfalls of freelancing.
• General frustration with the tech-lag at agencies in town. Anyone just discovering that RSS is a Good Idea really needs to get out more.
• Never let marketers drive design or development decisions.
• Cleveland Web Association lunches were discussed. Snarky blog post to follow.
• Oregon Trail
• The keys to a good presentation.

I’d like to thank the following folks for coming out to share their experiences (and some fine, fine boneless wings):

• Bridget Stewart
• Brad Dielman
• Brad Colbow
• Kris Johnson
• Adam Hutcheson
• Joe Fiorini

We have some big plans coming up…a Barcamp over the summer (probably in cooperation with the CWSA), more gathers, and hosting some panel discussions. If you’d like to be in the loop, please subscribe to the Refresh Cleveland mailing list.

And, as promised, here is the the excellent presentation video I brought up at dinner. Watch to the end. It’s worth it:

Here are the presentation slides, for the curious.

We’re having a little Refresh gathering tonight at the Winking Lizard in Lakewood at 7:30pm. There’s no set topic, other than tech in Cleveland and how we can improve it. Come join us!

Winking Lizard 14018 Detroit Ave. Lakewood, OH 44107-4522 Phone: 216.226.6693

View on Upcoming.com.

You have to learn why things work on a starship.
- James T. Kirk to Savik in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn

I attended Notacon 2008 this weekend. I’d like to tell you about it.

I learned a lot. See…I’m not much of a hacker. I’ve never played with Ham Radio for my own wifi, I’ve never attended a demoparty, and I know just enough about networking to get by. Notacon was an educational experience, one of the sort I don’t get often in day-to-day life. I don’t have much occasion to reflect on the necessity of editing information, but thank goodness Jason Scott does. I have not mulled over the current state of election technologies, but Smoke and Phreak had. Bruce Potter taught me more about the challenges of router monitoring than I’d learn in a year of working at my desk.

I attended Notacon the first year it ran and I felt like a stranger in a stranger land. I felt the same way this year. This is not the staff’s fault in any way, mind you. When I go to a developer convention, I know I’m going to have a lot in common with the folks there. This is a world where I’m a babe in the woods. Believe it or not, this is a very good thing. I have a lot to learn, and thankfully, the staff and speakers this year had a lot to teach.

This is not a “web development” conference, but web developers should attend it. Notacon will introduce you to new concepts and new ways of looking at problems. It will remind you of the complexity of the systems that you take for granted every day. It may even rekindle an interest, as it did with my friend Sean, who is unpacking his old sampling and mixing equipment as we speak.

Looking at the Notacon media archive, it seems like it gets more eclectic each year. Admittedly I’d love to see a web development track develop in the coming years. But even if one did not, I’d definitely go back, and I’d encourage friends to go with me. Too often there’s a wall between the folks who handle the nuts and bolts of servers/networking and those who upload their work to those servers/networks. Next year…instead of worrying about what “Web 3.0″ might hold, step back and dig into what Notacon is offering. You won’t be sorry.

I’m lucky enough to be attending SXSW again this year and I’ve found there are quite a few other attendees from various Refresh cities going to.

One event that, I think, we’ll be congregating at is the PhizzPop Design Challenge highlighted on Refresh Austin.  Hopefully I’ll be able to meet up with a few of them and bounce some ideas of whats worked and what hasn’t in other cities.

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Tags: sxsw, sxswi2008, refresh

Tonight I did a search (using Google) for the term web design cleveland ohio just to see how many of the top organically ranked sites were standards compliant.

I made sure I was logged out of Google, ignored the paid links and didn’t count the local business results offered.  I also tried to check that all the companies were actually in the Cleveland area too.

So how many passed the mustard?

One - Emit Design.  They were the only one that passed validation out of the 9 listed (one firm came up twice using two different URL’s).

Now I don’t know anyone at Emit (as far as I know) and I can’t say I’m a big fan of the design but the code is a joy to behold next to some of their page one companions including this one that has 85 errors after I had to suggest HTML4 Trans (they hadn’t specified a DOCTYPE) and changed the encoding to iso-8859-1 because the validator choked using the UTF-8 they had specified as they were using non-UTF-8 characters.

So what was the point of my search?

Well, I wanted to look at a few of things:

1. does using standards guarantee high organic rankings?
2. how many Cleveland companies are actually coming close to validation?
3. what are the types of things that are tripping people up?

No is obviously the answer to question number one judging by the nine I got back.  But then I’ve never thought it would.  I believe using standards does help in getting your pages crawled more easily & thoroughly but SEO is more than just getting crawled nowadays.  It’s relvancy, history, meta data, links and a whole lot of other arcane things.  By the same token this shouldn’t be used as an excuse not to code with standards.

Answer to question two, I’m happy to report, is quite a few.  Four out of the nine had under 10 errors.  Mainly around the 3-5 range:

• http://validator.w3.org/check?verbose=1&uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.thundertech.com%2Fflash.asp%23home
• http://validator.w3.org/check?verbose=1&uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ohioconnect.net%2F
• http://validator.w3.org/check?verbose=1&uri=http%3A%2F%2Faetomic.com%2F
• http://validator.w3.org/check?verbose=1&uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.carousel30.com%2Fweb-design-pettit-paint.asp

The others fell in the OMG! range.  31, 43 and 11 as well as the aforementioned 85.

Question three’s answer is STUPID SHIT THAT IS EASY TO FIX!  Now there a few things that I let slip when validating sites such as the .NET’s viewstate and some of the crap when you drop FLASH in a page.  These are accommodation’s made because of time constraints in business.   But not closing tags or missing alt attributes - c’mon people!  Even Dreamweaver and Visual Studio can catch these things for you.

And then there’s using <font> tags along with on-page CSS and tables for layout - yes I’m looking at you MJM Design.

So apart from winding me up and making me seem like a zealot, will this post bother these companies? Probably not.  I mean, they are on the first page of Google for that search term and probably get some business from it, but I think it should (my freelance web design site is on page two for the same term and I get none) .  I know a couple of people that work for some of these firms and they do good work.  The look and feel of a lot of these sites are good too.  But this isn’t a blog about how pretty a site is.

Using the W3C standards and being aware of the general web development practices that are used now is what makes you a professional in this arena.  And this blog is all about promoting that in Cleveland.  That’s why I wrote this.  Fix the small stuff, step up and say that it matters to your bosses and to your clients.

Then again, if it did bother them enough to fix it, I may not have much to write about.

Sites looked at were:

• Thundertech
• Ohio Connect
• Aetomic
• Website Solutions
• Mango Bay
• IdeaStar
• Emit Design
• Carousel 30
• MJM Design

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Tags: standards, failure, cleveland, firms