Back from REMIX’07 Budapest

There is no better start of the week than being an attendee in the REMIX'07 conference in Budapest. It was my first time attending Microsoft conference and it was really great to be a part of this event.

I'll try to point out the most interesting moments from both the developer and the designer sessions.

UPDATE
Pictures from Budapest

The event began with the Scott Guthrie's keynote about the new technologies that had recently come out from Microsoft and of course more specially Silverlight. It was quite cool to listen to such an experienced speaker even when you were already well grounded in Silverlight.

After the keynote I went to the designer session room where Pete LePage talked about Search Engine Optimization with Rich Media. I was totally impressed from Pete as he is also a very experienced speaker. He showed some good practices how to get our rich applications ranked up by the search engines. Unfortunately I can't find this session online. Here are the most important things he mentioned:

• Use semantic HTML – H1, H2 … tags, paragraphs, lists, etc. Also mind that you put no more than two H1 tags, three H2 tags, etc.
• Put an HTML equivalent content in the <div> tag where your rich media is placed. Search engine crawlers can't read the rich media (Flash, Silverlight, etc.) so if you put a description or fully created HTML equivalent of the rich media (better!) the crawler will read the HTML and index your page as expected. The browser ignores any HTML written in the <div> where the rich media is placed so you don't have to worry about the regular user. For an example Pete referred to http://miniusa.com/ which is pretty well optimized for search engines as it is completely developed in Flash.
• HTML Meta keywords – there were questions about whether the Meta keywords were useful for the search engines and whether they had taken them in 'mind'. Pete was well prepared as he had consulted the Live.com team about that but they hadn't uncovered such secrets ;) The wisest thing you can do is to put them regardless what search engines thinks about ;)

       

       

Thinking in CSS: How to build great looking sites

Molly Holzschlag had a great session about CSS, how to and how not to use it. I strongly recommend you to watch the video if you are interested in building stunning standard based sites. She also talked about the usage of the new Expression Web.

The conference continued in the evening when all attendees were invited to join the evening party aboard on Europa Boat on the Danube River. It was quite an amazing trip – I'd never travelled on a boat. Great cocktail party indeed ;) Cheers Billy ;)

The second day began with a session about WPF and Silverlight. It was presented by Paul Dawson from Conchango – one of the Europe's leading web design agencies. I'd never heard about Conchango or about Paul Dawson before REMIX'07. He also talked about Killer Digital Reading Experiences.

Molly also presented a session about Web Standards and IE7. If you have no experience with CSS 3.0 this session is right for you. Molly talked about cool new features in CSS 3 like child selectors

(#content > p, #content > p > a
			

), sibling selectors(

th + td, tr + tr + tr
			

), attribute selectors(

a[title], a[id = "cart"], img[alt ~= "offer"]
			

), alpha transparency, conditional comments etc. It was nice to hear that in CSS 3 we have 'hover' everywhere. In previous versions of CSS we have only hover functionality on anchors but it is not valid for all tags. That is really cool! No more java script hover functions ;)

Inspired by Molly and Pete I'll definitely write more on search engine optimization and web standards and CSS. Check out soon.