1 October 2008
FOWA Miami is live with a brand new design
Update: The first lot of seats sold out in two hours. We will release 100 more at $200 on Friday Oct 3rd at 1pm Miami time.We’ve just launched FOWA Miami! Mike has been working hard on the new design and we think it’s absolutely gorgeous.
We’re only releasing 100 conference passes at $100 ($395 normally). We’ll release more later, but they’ll be more expensive. The lineup is killer, so I hope you can join us:
* Jason Fried of 37signals
* Mike Arrington of TechCrunch
* Joel Spolsky of Joel on Software and Fog Creek
* Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine Library TV
* 280 North makers of Cappuccino and 280 Slides
* Cali Lewis of Geek Brief TV
* Dion Almear of Ajaxian & Google
* Freshbooks
Here’s Mike on the design …
The idea for FOWA 2009 was to make it beautiful and accessible. I tried my best to lay off the imagery in order to make the site faster, more accessible and easier to update. I’m pretty pleased with the result as I don’t think the design looks compromised. From a pure design point of view I’m really into the hand drawn thing at the moment. I love it… it just make a design so individual. It helps to create a story behind the canvas of the screen.
We’ve really made a big effort to make this site accessible and easy to use with hand crafted semantic markup. We’re also sporting our new For a Better Web badge for the first time. This means we’ve done our best to make our sites as accessible and easy to use as possible.
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Michael Grinstead
# October 1, 2008 - 4:27 pm
I like very much, loving that footer!! Congrats Mike.
Richard
# October 1, 2008 - 4:42 pm
Nice site, and loads a lot faster than previous FO* sites.
Davide Di Cillo @ Fowatcher
# October 1, 2008 - 4:45 pm
Congrats!
Benjamin D.C.
# October 1, 2008 - 4:47 pm
Pretty cool, while a bit “big” imho.
On accessibility: consider using HTML images with a proper alt attribute instead of those tricky image replacement. For eample, try to view your page with CSS enabled and images disabled… ;)
Good job overall, congrats!
Ryan
# October 1, 2008 - 5:01 pm
@Benjamin – Thanks for the heads up. We’re looking into it now.
James Begera
# October 1, 2008 - 5:35 pm
Fresh looking pixels.
Matt Branthwaite
# October 2, 2008 - 7:19 am
Very bold design, absolutely love the colour pallette and the background texture.
However, for me, the header gets abit tedious being sooo big – maybe you could make it smaller on the content pages so users dont have to continually scroll down to see the start of the actual page content – it’s not totally obvious that anything had actually changed when i clicked a different section
might be worth sticking an accesskey=”c” on the “skip to content” button
Matt Hamm
# October 2, 2008 - 7:58 am
Looks lovely! Loving the pinking shears effect, I’m using that ‘new trend’ in a design I’m half way through.
Although the navigation is all messed up in ie6, are you choosing to to support it anymore?
Matt Hamm
# October 2, 2008 - 8:02 am
I meant to say “are you choosing not to support ie6 anymore?”
Harry
# October 2, 2008 - 9:47 am
Uh, just fyi, the top navigation doesn’t display properly in IE7.
Love the desing of the site, the boldness of the text is great! Congrats!
Mohamed
# October 2, 2008 - 10:21 am
Hope you get diggonation there ,
and also hope to offer some help to outside us attendees
Thanks
Ryan
# October 2, 2008 - 12:58 pm
Thanks everyone! We’re aware of the issues with the nav on IE7 and are working on it. Regarding IE6, we don’t support it.
Josh Russell
# October 2, 2008 - 4:01 pm
what paul said:
http://twitter.com/nicepaul/statuses/943011765
johnnyh
# October 3, 2008 - 8:17 am
I like the design but am not sure why it’s so big! It’s wider than my 1024 screen and also requires more scrolling to get to the contact. In my opinion neither of these things are positive to my experience. The design makes up for those short comings but my question would be “why” when it could have fitted within 1024 and it needn’t scroll quite so much. I’m not sure I see the reason for those decisions.
Did you really sit down and say we want a site that makes the user scroll a lot and anyone with a resolution of 1024px width will have to live with a horizontal scroll bar. If so, what was the reasoning.
I accept the IE6 position, based on your potential audience. Although I feel you may be wrong not to support a browser which is still used by a reasonable percentage of people (although as said not your audience so I can see the argument)!
It’s another step forward on the other FO websites which is really positive. Nice to see things evolving.
Mike Kus
# October 3, 2008 - 1:05 pm
@michael Grinstead – thanks man – I’m liking the super big footer too – lots of fun :)
@johnnyh it wasn’t a conscious decision to make it bigger than 1024 wide – it was supposed to be 1018 but there was a padding issue that pushed it over – we’ve corrected it now. Thanks for pointing it out though :)
johnnyh
# October 3, 2008 - 3:37 pm
hey Mike, that’s cool – I thought it was a new trend in website width I’d missed!
Matt
# October 4, 2008 - 6:48 pm
hey mike – you might want to reduce the width abit more to support 1024 screens – 1018 wide still gets the horizontal scroll bar which is ugly because of the 20px vertical sidebar on the side
Ryan
# October 6, 2008 - 9:21 am
The site looks awesome. I love the big fonts and the hand drawn illustration style. Good work.
Sam Marks
# October 8, 2008 - 11:35 am
Really impressive design, great colour pallete, cool useage of fonts. Top top stuff.
Steed
# October 9, 2008 - 11:07 am
Good work. I love the grungey type face and the hand drawn graphics work well along side this. I may have been inspired to add in a little beach and sun seeing as it’s in MIAMI. Well done ;)
f6
# October 10, 2008 - 3:50 pm
The design is totally awesome!!! Good job!
Snaipper
# October 14, 2008 - 3:35 pm
Awesome design, especially because of adherance to new trends but i noticed that the ‘newsletter’ link on the navigation (header) misbehaves when i mouse over it, you might wana check it out.
Overall, this is a great work.
Barry
# October 31, 2008 - 7:35 pm
I like it, very fun and I love the use of typography, texture and hand-drawn elements.
My only criticism is how each section of the homepage has varying width columns. It might have looked more organised had the whole page been designed to a grid, but I guess you were going for a more organic design anyway.