National Association of Government Webmasters

Presented by Joe Rotella, Chief Technology Officer, Delphia Consulting

e-Government is about government’s use of the web to exchange information and services with people. If you do it right, you can you can save your organization money while providing great service. The challenge is to understand your users, their expectations and what they are trying to accomplish. A user-centered design approach helps you produce a site that meets everyone’s needs. Are you involving your users, all of them, from stakeholders to citizens, in your project? Joe Rotella, SPHR, Creative Director for the 2008 Explore Chicago tourism site, will share ways to engage your users throughout your web project. 

Presented by David Williams, Chester County, PA

This session will be a demonstration showing how to create PDF-based forms using Adobe Acrobat. Topics covered including using Adobe Designer, form layout, field configuration, and compatibility with back-end databases.

Presented by Janet Peters, Project Coordinator of Accessible Technology, Great Lakes ADA Center

The World Wide Web has opened the world with many wonderful benefits for people with disabilities, but if the web sites are not constructed with accessibility in mind, these opportunities may be lost for people using assistive technology or interacting with the web site in a different manner. This session is an introduction to web site accessibility and the accessibility of other content posted on local government web sites and electronic information, identify the potential barriers to this medium for people with disabilities, and outline the steps to improving web site accessibility.

Presented by Sonya Pelli, Manager, Internet Services, Information Technology Services Agency, City of St. Louis, MO

The implementation of web content management solutions (CMS) is a complex process. This presentation will focus primarily on the City of St. Louis's experience developing and implementing the information architecture for its CMS initiative. The presentation will cover implementation of the Dublin Core Metadata standard in a CMS solution not suited for it; how to determine and develop the needed Controlled Vocabularies; how to test and validate the proposed information architecture; and the governance needed to support the information architecture over time. Examples of deliverables will be provided for discussion.

Presented by Brett Williamson, Johnson County, KS and Susan Christophersen, Boulder County, CO

SharePoint is a suite of products that includes server and client pieces. This will be a discussion of the process of converting a static intranet to an interactive SharePoint intranet. Focusing on working with end-users, best practices, and lessons learned.

Presented by: Jim Maivald
Creative Suite Product Specialist
Adobe

Adobe Systems did something rare in the industry today, it released the beta for Dreamweaver CS4 to the public in May. Come see the new features of the program and see why it will be the must-have application of every Web professional. Among the feature we will explore will be Dreamweaver’s improved integration with all Creative Suite applications, more powerful CSS tools and implementation of Ajax in the Adobe Spry Framework. See how Dreamweaver’s new tools:

• Improve workflow and efficiency.
• Allow for compliance to Web and government standards.
• Improve design flexibility with CSS.
• Reduce the amount of hand coding and manual operations.
• Improve the user experience with dynamic applications.

Panel Discussion Moderated by Bruce Blood, Citywide Web Manager, Seattle, Washington
Jamie Klenetsky, Morris County, NJ

Identifying the near-term trends and speculating where we might be three, five, or even (gasp!) ten years from now. What's on the work plan for 2009? What are the implications, involving technologies, skill sets, the business person, etc.? Bruce will moderate a panel discussion with selected panelists with a particular interest in divination, planning, and strategy. This panel discussion will focus on those who are responsible for developing policy, setting priorities, and making decisions regarding the future of our web sites, with the goal of identifying some of the near- and long-term trends and speculating on how and when these may become important to governmental web sites.

Presented by Adam Audette, Founder, AudetteMedia

An overview of best practices for site architecture, focusing on search engine crawling and indexing behavior. Factors covered include structure of sections and categories, internal linking, semantic page layout, and keyword use on pages. The takeaway is to understand how site architecture can improve the user experience and ability of search engines to locate and index site information.

Presented by Zoe Gillenwater, Design Services Manager, UNC Highway Safety Research Center

The objective of this session will be how to design or modify a comp to enable it to be laid out in a CSS liquid or elastic layout. Designers will learn what both liquid and elastic layouts are, what types of sites they work well on, and the benefits (and challenges) that they bring. The bulk of the session will teach designers how to design for these types of layouts by presenting numerous visual examples of both real and mocked-up web sites and showing how to transform their design conventions to be more flexible-friendly. While we won't have time to cover the technicalities of how to use CSS to actually build the flexible design elements, learning how to design with CSS and flexibility in mind from the beginning will make the later building process a lot less painful. Designers will leave the session with a list of things to watch out for while creating their next design comps, as well as ideas for how to tweak the designs of even their fixed-width layouts to adapt better to user-controlled font sizes and other flexible web conditions.

Presented by Chad Ostroff, Web Site Coordinator, Sugar Land, Texas

Want to learn about the relationship Contribute has with Dreamweaver and how it allows web professionals and content providers to work together much differently and more successfully than ever before? In this session Chad will share his knowledge of using Contribute and Dreamweaver Templates for content management. Through the use of Contribute and how to Dreamweaver templates for use with Contribute. Examples using Dreamweaver, Contribute, ASP, CSS, and other web-related techniques will be presented with live examples of various City of Sugar Land websites.

Presented by Tom Johnson, Vision Internet

As more and more cities, counties, and government agencies rely on the Internet to communicate and provide services to the people they serve, it has become increasingly important that they take advantage of the best available content delivery systems on the web. In this presentation, we will demonstrate how some forward-thinking organizations are pushing the boundaries by using web technologies such as blogs, RSS, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, and Google Maps to give their audiences an amazing array of access to their public information.

John McKenna

Christopher Kramer

Are you prepared if an emergency happened in your city/county? Attend this session where John will give his insights as to what was done when the Virginia Tech campus shootings took place. Christopher will enlighten you on ways to prepare your site BEFORE an emergency hits as well as what tools are available to you during an actual emergency.

Presented by Steve Fisher, Washoe County District Health Department

A micro format consists of HTML additions to a web page that makes data readable by machines and humans. The goal of the presentation is to teach what a micro format is, how micro formats can improve a visitor's experience of your web site, show micro formats in action, introduce some of the micro formats out there, and how to create them.

Presented by Steve Moore, Web Administrator, Larimer County, CO

Adobe Flex is a collection of technologies for the development and deployment of cross platform, rich Internet applications based on the Flash platform. This presentation will demonstrate what Flex is and how to create a simple application.

Presented by Robin Hastings, Information Technology Manager, Missouri River Regional Library, Jefferson City, Missouri

Web 3.0 will be coming soon! It will feature sites that are marked up so that others can easily find and consume information on the site. We will discuss using semantic XHTML, microformats, and standards-based markup to make your information easily reusable. We will also talk about getting information from local service organizations onto your site - without constant updating - and how to make the information you provide usable to others. By the end of the session, participants will be able to use semantic markup and scripting to provide their website's visitors with information from throughout their service area.

Presented by Benjamin Wood, MySQL Systems Engineer, Sun Microsystems Database Group, Sterling, VA

- How the MySQL architecture is designed for Web 2.0
- Intro to MySQL Load Balancer (and Proxy).
- Use of replication, application partitioning for read scalability
- Use of DRBD, OS Clustering, MySQL Cluster for protecting master copy of data
- Other technologies for high scalability
- A couple of case studies

Presented by Bill Brown

There's a new mayor in Anytowne.com: Alex Q. Public.

Mayor Public wants a new CSS-driven website that's printable, can be viewed on handheld devices (like the Blackberry and iPhone) and which will support users with special needs (like those who use screen readers). Well, don't tell the mayor...but this is actually a lot easier than it sounds.

In this session, we'll cover the real-time transfer of a fictional city's website into a CSS-driven format, including:

• The HTML Foundation
  • - Tables to CSS: Corresponding Elements
  • - Linearization of Data
  • - Separation of Content and Presentation
  • - Images: Style or Content?
• The CSS Foundation
  • - Global Resets
  • - Media Types
  • - Layout
  • - Formatting
  • - Font
  • - Text Size
  • - Theme
  • - Styling Javascripted Elements
• Trials and Tribulations
  • - Common Issues
  • - When things go horribly wrong
  • - Supporting Browsers (without hacks)
  • - Why we can't discount ANY browsers
  • - The peaceful demise of the spacer.gif
  • - The end of javascript:print() links!

Presented by: Jim Maivald
Creative Suite Product Specialist
Adobe

Photoshop has a warm spot in the heart of every print designer. On the other hand, Web designers have always had a love/hate relationship with this powerful tool. With the release of CS3 there’s more to love in Photoshop than ever before. In this session we’ll explore the features, new and old, that every Web master needs to know:

• Learn how to get the highest quality out of every image at the smallest file size
• Learn how to use slices to reduce download speeds while maintain image details
• Learn how to use Smart Objects to improve efficiency and cut down on time wasted.
• Learn how to use Smart Filters to make non-destructive adjustments to your images
• Learn how to use Photoshop’s built-in Animation features to create banners and interactive elements.
• Learn how to create instant photo galleries and interactive displays without hand coding.

Presented by Mike Scott, MSF&W Information Technology Solutions, Illinois Department of Human Services

Learn from the successes and challenges that Illinois faced in implementing its new IT accessibility act, including how we incorporated new and pending requirements from Section 508 and the W3C, how we are addressing the increasing use of technologies such as AJAX, PDF, and Flash, and how we agreed upon appropriate compromises to make accessibility achievable.

Presented by Keith Krieger

Facebook grows up, leaves school, and gets a real job

The use of social software is beginning to make itself known outside the colleges and universities where it began.  The potential of social software such as Facebook and MySpace is in its ability to help groups collaborate, find expertise, and share knowledge across the boundaries dictated by organization charts.

The 90-minute session will introduce social software in its various forms, illustrate its uses in the public, private, and non-profit sectors. We'll explore the manner in which social software usage differs greatly among age groups and generations. The session will also discuss the gap between new employees coming to the workplace with social software expertise, and the response of those of us new to the social software environment. Using social software in a work environment raises ethical, legal, privacy, and security issues, and we'll discuss how to plan for social software use in your network.

Presented by Liz Rainey, City of Killeen, TX

This session is a compilation of free tools Liz has used on her web sites to enhance functionality and content presentation. Subjects that will be covered include: Son of Suckerfish drop down menu; Highslide JavaScript thumbnail viewer - free image presentation; Exponent CMS - a brief highlight of features; How to learn about accessibility for free; CSS templates from free sources; When Adobe Photoshop is too expensive - using Gimp; and more.

Presented by: Matt Lapsen
Microsoft
Director, Windows Internet Explorer Product Management