Tips, web design book reviews, resources and observations for teaching and learning web development.
Videos of screen readers using ARIA at zomigi.com is enlightening. Watch.
The Ada Initiative is dedicated to increasing participation of women in open technology and culture, which includes open source software, Wikipedia and other open data, and open social media.
HTML as a Living Standard – For and Against is must reading at HTML5 Doctor. Taking on the two sides of the debate are Bruce Lawson and John Foliot.
She’s been in the SEO and PPC business for 16 years. Sixteen years! You don’t find that kind of longevity and expertise in many web-based businesses. She owns a company that enables her to do the thing that is closest to her heart: find young women with marketing backgrounds and train them to be both expert marketers and technically confident and authoritative, too.
Who is this woman? Terri Jenkins, the owner of W3PR.com. She and her husband, Mark run the company from Albuquerque, with a second office in Los Angeles. Their business involves internet marketing, advertising, SEO, PPC, social media marketing, website conversion, and Google Analytics.
Terri describes herself as a hybrid – both a technologist and an advertising guru. In order to do her work with PPC campaigns, SEO and marketing, she has to keep current with leading edge technology and the technological implications of new developments to her industry. She says her first love was technology and talks with fond memory of having a beta account at CompuServe and being one of the original advertisers on AOL.
Terri and her husband started their business in L.A. During the dotcom boom, they had over 25 employees. After the dotcom crash they struggled, but didn’t give up. They made their office a virtual workplace, with all remote employees. Now their work takes place in the cloud. Recently they moved to Albuquerque, where Terri’s parents live. Their business consists of Terri and her husband, three women who work remotely full time, and one man who is part time.
When we met to talk, she was delighted to share the news that she’d just hired her first new full time employee since 2008, a young woman with a marketing degree. She said the young woman is smart and eager to learn. Terri looks for employees like that. She says, “As part of their training with me, I want to make sure they a cross-trained with the technical knowledge, too.” She adds, “That gives them and me something extra other ad agencies don’t have – a well-rounded knowledge that we can offer.”
Terri said she sees a lot of insecurity and lack of confidence in young women. She enjoys nurturing them and helping them “own what they know and use it unapologetically. Young women need to value their own opinions to be effective and authoritative.”
Sixteen years on the front edge of relevance is impressive in a world of rapid change. I asked how she does it. She said, “I feel like I read for a living.” Her reading is designed to make sure she understands everything in the Internet world that’s being talked about. She uses the knowledge to improve her own business as well as that of her clients. Virtual phone service, cloud based meetings and document sharing, and online project management tools are all concepts she’s incorporated into her business.
She shared a few of her clients. W3PR works with Red Bull to implement SEO and PPC ads for sites like Shawn White and others. They work with Atari on the re-release of old video games from the 80s. They’re working with AMC Theaters on the promotion of the new dine-in theaters going in around the country. There are many other examples from their client list that testify to their success.
In 2010, the New Mexico Technology Council awarded Terri Jenkins a Women in Tech Award, recognizing her longevity and her talent for inspiring others. A perfect award for someone who says nurturing young employees brings her a great deal of satisfaction.
You can follow Terri on Twitter @TerriJenkins. She likes to share what she knows there.
Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s TED talk.
“HTML5: If You Bang Your Head Against The Keyboard You’ll Create a Valid Document!” at UK Web Focus talks about how simplified HTML5 is.
Dev Profile: Angie Byron at Port 25 is an interview with the Drupal webchick.
Why We Should Start Using HTML5 and CSS3 Today at Smashing Magazine argues for pushing the boundaries. I wonder what they think about the question of what style of syntax works as a best practice with the HTML5 DOCTYPE?
Fashionable Web Forms: Traps and Tips has UX advice from a pro on how to make forms work better.
Why Wired Loves the Ladies. That slide of the last 32 Wired covers tells the story with such impact no other comment is necessary.
Find Websites that are Copying Your Content. Great tips for tools.
An interpretation of the slides by OpenMatt is interesting, as well as the comments from students.
And, if Anna Debenham’s portrait of web education in the UK wasn’t enough to make you wonder how things ought to be done, the NY Times reported that UK math students are now getting tutored online from instructors in India. What do you think about that?
Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere report for 2010 released last week. This year the study focused on female bloggers, although the study was broad ranging and included many topics beyond a discussion of female bloggers.
Technorati issued a series of articles and interviews explaining their findings. The State of the Blogosphere covers a wide range of topics with informative graphs you can browse. Plus, as part of the focus on women bloggers for this year, there are several interesting interviews in the series you may want to investigate.
In the if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em category, Adobe announces the HTML5 Video Player widget with this message: “Adobe has released an easy-to-use, totally CSS-customizable solution that shifts gracefully from the HTML5 <video> tag to the Flash Player when the tag is not supported.” The widget works with or without Dreamweaver CS5.
Introduction to OAuth is by Lorna Jane Mitchell at Think Vitamin. It seems OAuth is the reason why Twitterific suddenly stopped working on my iPhone and also explains why you can sign in to one site with information from another. Here’s a quote.
As a user, the experience of enabling accounts to use OAuth is quite seamless, and is designed to help you feel more secure about where your credentials are being stored and used. When you want to allow another application to access your data, you will be forwarded to the site that holds that data, and prompted to allow access.
This means that you never need to type your credentials for one account into the website for something else. Once you have granted access, you will be redirected back to where you were, so you can continue whatever you were doing.
Did you see this infographic for What Kind of Geek are You? It seems only guys can be geeks. Gals are invisible once again. The infographic is clever and cute. And it reinforces the prevailing social paradigm that keeps the “where are the women in technology” meme afloat from year to year.