Web Strategy in Sydney

Earlier this month I presented at the Ark Web Strategy conference in Sydney.

It was quite a mixed event, about 40 attendees across a spread of government and industry, although a few less people from the business world than I would have expected.

Having been around for awhile I did know or know of about half of the speakers, and as usual people like Donna Maurer from Maadmob and Rebecca Rodgers from Step Two Designs were both entertaining and provided valuable insights.

In particular Rebecca's presentation made me rethink aspects of our website's search approach, leading my team to make some adjustments to further simplify our search results for a more relevant experience. Less is more!

Some of the less known speakers also did an excellent job, with Josh Borg from AGL providing a very frank and open presentation on his experiences redeveloping the AGL website and Gian Wild from Monash University providing a passionate view of accessibility. I'm reusing some of her examples to help communicate the accessibility message to staff at my agency.

As for myself, as the first speaker I chose to take a big picture look at the purpose and process of online strategy to 'keynote' the event.