Posted on 12.22.11

Mightycon: A Year-End Wrap-Up of Mighty Knowledge

by Gretchen Klotz

What started off as an end-of-year staff meeting evolved into a week-long string of educational sessions we have come to call ‘MightyCon.’

Our first annual MightyCon kicked off this week. The concept behind MightyCon was to use our own internal resources to knowledge share and to create stronger, more agile team members throughout each department. Mightycon 2011 featured guest speakers Pamela Meyer, Cesar Torres, Tai Palmgren and Tim Frick delivering insights and nuanced views on industry best practices.

The week-long conference covered a variety of topics, but all discussions focused on improving Mightybytes client services and processes. MightyCon was adapted from the more informal lunch-n-learns, which provided a place for team members to share niche or specialized knowledege in a casual lunchtime setting. See the evolution of the Lunch-N-Learn from our previous posts throughout the year.

Become the User

After a bittersweet farewell lunch in his honor, our very own user experience (UX) expert, Cesar Torres, delivered his usability best practices and stressed that the success of a site starts and ends with a solid user experience. In order to develop a useful and usable site, you must design sites and interfaces that serve your users. Involving all team members in the understanding of a user demographic creates a sturdy foundation on which design and development can not only function, but flourish. As Mightybytes continues to emphasize the need for user research and testing, we maintain UX best practices with thorough design sketching, prototyping, persona profiles and task analyses.

After leading the usability dialogue, Cesar sprightly shifted to a presentation on agile development methods. The Mightybytes team discussed ways to serve the needs of development, design, UX teams and customer service using agile methodologies. Check back soon for a more in depth discussion on agile development management methods.

HTML 5 Say What?

Day 3 at Mightycon had Tai Palmgren leading the team into the wonderful and eye-opening world of HTML. Tai reviewed the history of HTML and the benefits of web standards. One of the benefits is better performance, as it allows your site to act faster for users, which consumes less power.

Other considerations of proper HTML markup include proper source order to present content in the right order for RSS readers, screen readers for users with disabilities, and more. Green and user-friendly - who could ask for anything more?

Best practice standards allow site creators to develop content that is readily convertible for any screen size or browser and readable by humans and devices alike. These web standards and specifications for website coding, along with improved browser capabilities, give users more reliable access to content on the web.

Final Thoughts

Overall, the inaugural MightyCon provided the perfect setting for collaboration across teams and highlighted the best practices in web standards that will enable Mightybytes to maintain its position as a go-to shop for sustainable web design and development.

MightyCon also enabled the team to pause and reflect on past projects with the benefit of hindsight, a task which is often difficult to do throughout the year as deadlines and deliverables mount.

However, it is important to take these moments to assess previous projects as a way to make sure that our work is continuously moving forward. Those who don’t learn from history are destined to repeat it.

Only 364 more days ‘til next year’s convention…