It's been a busy few weeks, to say the least. The end of the year crunch is always the worst. It's been nearly 2 weeks since I attended An Event Apart in San Francisco. An Event Apart is headed up by Eric Meyer, CSS Guru and King, and Jeffrey Zeldman, Founder of A List Apart and Happy Cog.

Alcatraz Island, nothing to do with the conference, I know, but still cool to see.

The conference was a great experience, and I gained a lot out of it. So I thought I'd put together this list of 10 things I learned, will carry with me, implement and [attempt to] teach others. I could easily come up with more than 10, but if I gave away more information it would be like revealing the ending to a good movie that you haven't seen yet. An Event Apart is just something you have to see/experience for yourself. Most of the items pertain to "An Event Apart" and some just to being in San Francisco, and the people we met.

Without further ado, and in no particular order: 10 Things I Learned While At 'An Event Apart' in San Francisco.

1. If you have ever seen Michael Moore's 'Bowling for Columbine', you'll recall a scene in which Michael Moore randomly visits a few homes in Canada. He walks right into the front doors, which are unlocked, and is greeted by friendly people. He also shows clips from the evening news which appear to be positive and upbeat (I believe the story was about a local town installing speed bumps). Dave Lockhart, a .NET developer that Nick and I met from Desire2Learn says that this is true - which I found just completely fascinating.

2. A way to make vertical/horizontal bar graphs strictly using CSS. No flash with XML fed into it. As a developer, I seldom have to worry about the CSS aspect of a project - but this is definitely a useful trick to have on the tool belt.

3. Jeffrey Zeldman gave a great talk about 'copy'. The different types of copy - 'guide' and 'copy' copy. Guide copy can be things like directions to sign up for a service, or instructions to guide you through navigating the site, or completing a task while browsing a site. 'Copy' copy is the content that can be found on pages, like an "About Our Company" page.

One of my favorite quotes "Design helps people read less, and when people read less, every word counts". Brevity and clarity are paramount, but slightly less enforced when talking about 'copy' copy. Web users are most often in "find" mode, and thus scan the page for information. No one wants to scan a sea of content that is not relevant to the company or what the user may be on the site trying to locate in the first place.

Consider the audience. If you're writing content for a site about an a hotel, chances are no one browsing the site is going to read the full 1,200 word essay you wrote about the history of the area the hotel is in.

4. Other firms, teams, and individuals have the same triumphs and pitfalls we do. I could take up this whole page and list some of what those are here, but suffice it to say that it's nice to see we're not the only ones with some of these troubles. Not that I doubted it, but it's easy to get wrapped up in the microcosm that is our office and our work-load and forget about what's going on out there.

5. During one of the breaks, I met Zack Schneider of Schneider Digital based out of my birthplace; Buffalo NY. We shared a lot of ideas, horror stories, and talks of "cool" things to do in Buffalo. Then he told me something that is so simple and easy that it makes me wonder why I didn't think of it earlier. So it's going to be a new policy here at cnp_studio.

We will not begin design until we receive all the copy to be placed on the site.

Wow. Simple. Beautiful. It has happened all too often. Projects where we plan, design, receive approval on that design, cut up, implement, stage, and then boom - nothing. The staged site will sit there - plenty of blank pages, but no content. My own little Duke Nukem Forever projects. Months, and yes sometimes even a year later things are finally ready to get started on that project again. You're knee deep in other projects now, and of course it's needed yesterday because hey, it's time to go NOW. Then I pull the project out of the dusty subversion archives and re-familiarize myself with it. Frustrating.

Facebook head-quarters in downtown Palo Alto.

6. Unfortunately, people still use Internet Explorer. I'm a developer first, and someone who needs to work with CSS second, but Eric Meyer's talk about IE7 and CSS was very insightful. In addition to learning about visual link typing, selectors, and a little bit of form styling, Eric also shared a JavaScript library that makes IE 6 behave more like standards compliant browsers, (yes, I know Nick also mentioned this!).

7. Forms. I hate forms, styling forms, and testing the styling of forms across the different browsers. Aaron Gustafson gave a great talk with a more "hands-on" approach to quickly creating a great looking form that will definitely alleviate some of my troubles. Aaron also provided screen shots of how the various browsers treat elements like buttons and select drop-downs.

8. Jeffrey Zeldman wrapped up the conference on the 2nd day with a great talk on "Selling Design". A lot of what he said sounded great. "Avoid bad clients", "Learn to smell trouble". If a client doesn't have time to complete a simple questionnaire because they are in a hurry, or "need a proposal ASAP", then you should probably steer clear of them. They end up being nothing but trouble. This all sounds well and good, but it's not as easy for a smaller firm like us to turn away work - no matter how much trouble we smell.

He also made a lot of great points about how to sell your design to the client, and not just hand it over to them and say "So, what do you think?". This will leave you with a lot of room for them to tear the concept apart, instead of providing insight as to why things are placed where they are, the color they are, etc.

9. "Your emergency is not my problem." Enough said. But, it's also in the delivery. Lets say a client calls me and says "Listen, I screwed up, I need this up on the site as soon as you reasonably can. Whatever you can do to help me, I would more than appreciate it." A little self-deprecating humor wouldn't hurt either - "I know I screwed up and I'm an idiot!" - but it's not necessary. I digress, what I'm trying to say is that I would bend over backwards for that client to get them what they needed.

If you call me and say "I need this up there now, I know I e-mailed you about this last week (lie)" and they use words like "ASAP" or send you "high-priority" e-mails, or doctor up their e-mails to their bosses to make it LOOK like they e-mailed you last week - guess what? I just moved you to the bottom of my priority list somewhere below "alphabetize Firefox bookmarks".

I understand clients make our world go round. I do. They pay the bills. They make it all possible. Doesn't mean I'm your doormat.

10. Joyent is awesome. We use Joyent Accelerators to host any of the Rails apps I do here at cnp_studio. While Nick and I were out in California, we met up with Kristie Wells and Jason Hoffman from Joyent and had a good time over tacos and beers [If you're ever in San Francisco check out Nick's Crispy Tacos]. It's nice to see the faces and personalities behind the support tickets and forum postings.

If you ever get the chance to go to An Event Apart, definitely take it. Whether you design, develop, both or neither (and just want to learn about what's going on in the industry, best practices, ideas, etc.) there is a lot that can be gained by going.