We were treated well by our Rethink vendor Four Kitchens in their home town, and we really valued the informal conversations throughout the conference, in addition to a couple of formal meetings.
Of the presentations, we split our time between case studies, user experience and development. Here were some of our favorites:
Case Studies
Time Inc.'s Big Move to Drupal - Time Inc. has made a tremendous investment in Drupal. Over the last 18 months, they have created a Drupal Center of Excellence, hired Drupal experts and consultants and trained many of their in house developers to work in Drupal. They have developed a large infrastructure around managing editorial Drupal sites and integrated Drupal into their legacy systems. They have built a world class editorial tool for managing online publishing with Drupal. In 2014 Time Inc. plans to move all of their 24 magazine titles to the Drupal platform they have built.Scaling Drupal for Higher Ed Institutions - It no secret that Drupal has enjoyed a strong growth trend in higher education. That's the good news. The bad news is that it's still hard to do, especially when the horizon is no longer building a single website or application, but to scale up successfully to provide a platform for an entire university.
Here's Drupal - Tonight on the Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon - The world tuned in when Jay Leno handed the Tonight Show legacy over to new host, Jimmy Fallon. Behind the scenes, away from the cameras, an entirely different transition was taking place, led by CP+B, Four Kitchens, Lullabot, and NBC Digital. A new website for the Tonight Show was being launched.
User Experience
Don't Let Crappy Content Ruin Your Site - "Nothing is worse than delivering a sparkling new site full of promise and seeing it ruined with crappy content...In this session, I’ll cover factors that contribute to crappy content implementation and the steps we can take to avoid them."How to Design Impactful User Research - "This session will walk through a complete user research project from the initial understand phase of what kind of research question the client is seeking to answer to the actual implementation of the findings."
Development
From Proposal to Thank-you note: Documentation - A facilitated discussion on the best practices of project communication and documentation.Local Dev for the Masses (Kalabox) - Developing on your local machine can be a really smart choice. Local development is much faster for most developers and more reliable in many situations where internet connectivity can be an issue.
My Brain is Full: Keeping pace with front-end/UX innovations - UX considerations have greatly expanded beyond simply 'styling markup'. We now have to consider user context, device capabilities, physical interfaces, performance, personalization... where does it stop? And how can we stay on top of things, even as they rapidly evolve?
Thank you! Don't Let Crappy Content Ruin Your Site is gold. I joined SlideShare (finally) just to get the slides. Wish she had posted the notes version (instead of the just the slides PDF) but whatever. I'll just return to the video when I need a refresher.
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