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Making the Web Fireproof: A Building Code for Websites

Session scheduled at 3:30-4:20 in Room 2 (Swain)

The moment we start creating a website, we’re setting ourselves up for failure later. Bad code creates middle of the night fire drills. Lack of thinking about accessibility gets our employer sued. Not thinking ahead on mobile generates rework. We accept this as the normal course of business – but is there any way we could prevent (or lower) this cost? Is there anything we can learn from the building codes that dictate how our built environment is constructed?

We will talk about the lessons of building codes and what we can do today to build more robust web applications and sites, including:

  • The need for design patterns in websites
  • The need for patterns in user stories so that we build websites consistently
  • Baking accessibility into websites comes from putting accessibility into user stories
  • Planning a web application is different from planning a building, but it does share similar aspects of work
  • The better we can becoming at creating best practices (building codes) the better we will get at building sites, and the closer we will come to Berners-Lee’s “one web for all” dream

View Slides

Presented By

Dylan Wilbanks

Dylan Wilbanks is a web roustabout, raconteur, and curmudgeon currently practicing as a user experience designer in Seattle. He has been designing, building, and maintaining experiences for public and private sector organizations for 15 years. He has presented on user experience and accessibility at conferences such as SXSW and Webvisions. He created one of the first Twitter accounts used in higher education, but that was an accident, and he’s really sorry about that.

Follow @dylanw on Twitter