On Monday, I attended MinneWebCon ’08 at my alma mater, the University of Minnesota. While I will admit to not being one that really goes out of my way to attend conferences, this one didn’t disappoint.

For once I didn’t feel like I spent the entire day attending college lectures and resisting falling asleep by filling in the Sudoku and crossword puzzle in the Minnesota Daily. I'll take a moment to highlight favorite presentations throughout: Eric Meyer’s crafty morning keynote, Jason Sack’s touching points on user experience strategy, and Phil Kragnes’ ear-bending demonstration of accessible web design.

Eric Meyer’s morning keynote addressed how we are craftsmen: like any craft, web design and development requires a certain skill-set and bucket of knowledge in order to really be a professional. It’s not the tools that make us, be it Dreamweaver, Microsoft Expression, Visual Studio, Textmate, or good old Notepad; it’s how we use our tools that makes us good at what we do. It was a great way to start the morning.

I know Jason Sack from my day job at space150, but after his presentation, I finally understand why some people call him “The Professor”. He was a very engaging speaker and had some great examples on creating better user flows that really got me thinking about a few personal projects and how to overcome some of the difficulties in some user tasks.

At the end of the day, Phil Kragnes stepped up to the podium, seeing-eye dog at his side, and proceeded to compare how inaccessible and accessible user forms and page layouts can affect how people with disabilities interact with every day websites. Using his demos, he had the audience listen to how he hears web pages read back to him with a screen reader. If you ever have a chance to attend a session like this, I urge you to not pass it by—even if you think that you are using accessible HTML.

I wish that I could have attended more of the sessions, but you can’t make every session in a day when they’re scheduled on top of each other. All of the speakers did a great job and I would like to say congratulations to my friends at the University who put the whole day together.