- by Judd Lyon
- Jul 24, 2008
- Filed in: Austin news & notes
I was fortunate to attend another installment of Refresh Austin a few weeks back. If you're a web designer or developer in the Austin area, Refresh Austin's monthly meeting is a chance to hang out, learn, and debate with your peers. I meant to blog about Mark Phillip's kick-ass presentation about improving site performance last month, but a heavy client workload didn't allow. Here's a summary of this month's meeting.
It was a free-flowing affair about real-world solutions. Alex Jones got things cracking by sharing a problem he had on his personal site. The upshot of his remarks was that often we take on problems backwards; many times a simpler solution lurks around the corner. He also mentioned the upcoming AIR event this Fall and invited those interested to participate (it's an event promoting web accessibility).
A few quick notes from the meeting:
- Traffic stats - design for your audience and the browsers they use, not for the entire web.
- WordPress mobile – a nifty plugin (by WP OG Alex King) that serves up another WP theme for mobile devices was showcased on a nice site for Hoovers.
- Start-up hiring woes - a lively discussion about hiring and retaining quality hackers sprung up and seemed to strike a chord. Among the suggestions: involve the whole team in the interview process, disqualify via phone screenings, look for curious and eager talent, and set clear expectations.
- Embeddable fonts in CSS 3 – promising but face licensing issues.
- CSS frameworks - I made a quick comment about them but it didn't seem anyone was too keen to debate the merits of them.
- Evernote - the BETA of this notetaking app is getting a lot of buzz and a number of Refreshers are high on it.
Also mentioned:
After that it was time for a few cold ones.
About the author
Judd Lyon is the Principal of TRIF3CTA, a web design and Internet marketing company in Austin, Texas.
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