Mark DuBois Weblog

These are some of the photos taken at the WOW Web Design Contest held in Kansas City, MO June 23 – 25, 2009. We had 46 teams competing for over $190,000 in prizes. Prizes were awarded on Friday, June 26.

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Congratulation to Kathleen Quinlan and Matt Scachette on winning second place in the national SkillsUSA web design contest. The contest was held on June 25, 2009. Great work!

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I had the opportunity to coordinate the WOW (World Organization of Webmasters) national web design contest in Kansas City, MO with Bill Cullifer. Thirty secondary teams (2 individuals) and 16 post-secondary teams competed for over $190,000 in education scolarships and prizes. Winners will be announced tonight in front of 15,000 people at Kemper Arena.

Emphasis was on web standards, accessibility and teamwork. There were 12 challenges (6 - secondary; 6 - post-secondary) for the teams to complete. We had 11 judges (offsite – judging via the WWW) reviewing over 40 different aspects of the pages created by students to meet these challenges. We accumulated over 12,000 individual evaluations/ judge decisions to arrive at first, second and third place winners. I developed judging forms using LiveCycle ES (which significantly expedited the tally of results). Given the volume of information, I don’t know that we would have been able to submit the results by the deadline without the use of dynamic PDF files as well as collecting the information in the internal data store of responses. [More details...]

We have done this contest for the past 6 years (I have been a part since inception). We are now seeing the results of our efforts to improve what is covered in various curricula. Many teams are now able to apply CSS based layouts to their pages (something that was relatively rare when we began the contest). Every year, it now appears that the students have a broader knowledge base than the previous year.

Through this contest, WOW is stressing the importance of a multitude of web design skills needed to survive in the business world. We are also communicating to a number of teachers and advisors the importance and complexity of this field.

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Please join me in celebrating Web Professionals’ Day! The second annual Web Professionals’ Day is today April 29. Congratulations to all those who keep the websites up to date and functional (as well as secure, usable, accessible, and conforming to established standards and best practices).

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Congratulation to Kathleen Quinlan and Matt Scachette on winning first place in the Illinois SkillsUSA web design contest. The contest was held on Friday, April 24, 2009 in Springfield. It consisted of a series of 6 separate challenges. Many focused on the area of web standards. Some dealt with specific CSS issue and one dealt with JavaScript. By placing first, they are now eligible to compete in the national SkillsUSA web design contest in Kansas City (held the last week of June). Well done.

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The Society of Digital Agencies recently conducted a survey to determine what technical skills would be in demand this year. Details can be found in graphical form on page 20 of the report.  Although I question (and others have as well) why Java and JavaScript are lumped together, one can see a number of trends. For those who are still in school, I recommend examining this report (particularly page 20).

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I will be the first to admit that I don’t fully understand Twitter. However, I recently finished a short course on emerging technologies for education. This inspired me to obtain a Twitter account. I plan to take a different approach. Rather than posting what I consider trivial nonsense about what I am doing at the moment, I plan to try and post (hopefully once a day) what I have learned. Ok, 140 bytes doesn’t provide much room for details. However, I am learning something new every day. That is what keeps me going when it comes to web technologies (it is never boring). If anyone is really interested in my Tweets (I think that is the correct syntax) – just follow along.

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