Bill reviewed results of usability research and user surveys that provide insight into user behavior and preferences on the Internet. Using the results of these studies, he presented information design principles directed at writing for the Web. Bill's presentation is available online.

This was a joint meeting with the St. Louis Chapter of the Society for Technical Communication.

First Place award winners after the competition.

This gala event celebrated the best Web sites designed by St. Louis teams in 2000. Details on the awards competition and a list of winners are available.

Rick Borstein of Adobe Systems returned to fill us in on what's new with Adobe, including GoLive and LiveMotion. The XML SIG organizational meeting took place immediately before the meeting.

Alex Kwain, Solutions Consultant Area Manager (Central U.S.) for Delano Technology Corp. was our speaker. The topic was eCRM and how to manage customer relationships via the Web.

This meeting discussed practical analysis and design techniques that can help one design a better user interface. We talked about defining and measuring usability, including some examples from everyday life, and defining your users, their work conditions, and their work environment.

View the PowerPoint presentation for this meeting. Jerry referred to a usability checklist during his talk.

The Java 2 Micro Edition platform is a small footprint version of Java, designed to run on devices with limited resources such as PDAs and mobile phones. J2ME was introduced and the configurations and profiles which enable Java to run on devices with different capabilities were discussed. Recent developments in wireless programming were also covered.

This talk also marked the formation of the Wireless SIG. The Wireless SIG is planning on meeting once a month (on the fourth Tuesday) at One City Place to discuss the latest wireless technologies. The first meeting will be on July 24. At that meeting, there will be more discussion about J2ME and how it can be used to develop wireless applications for mobile devices.

A PDF of Mark's slides is available.

Scott Granneman makes a point during his presentation.

Scott talked about security and privacy in the Internet Age. Some of the topics covered included Open Standards, Open Source, Passport and Hailstorm. Audience discussion made it a lively session! A PDF of Scott's presentation is available here.

Attendees met and munched in the lobby before the meeting. There was a good turnout to hear Scott's talk.

Tom presented a new look to the stlwebdev.org Web site. We had an interactive discussion of the redesign effort. It will continue in future meetings until we have a new site to unveil!

View the Meeting Notes.

Stellent - Introduction to CMS. Discussion of Stellent's top-of-the-line commercial CMS product.

Nova Business Systems will present their approach to custom content management tools.

This is the first of our three-part series on content management systems. At this meeting, Jack Whiteside from Stellent introduced what CMS is and what types of functionality it provides for web developers. Jack showed their top of the line commercial CMS product which is a turnkey system that runs on J2EE.

Then Dan Leonard, president and founder of Nova Business Systems, an local IT consulting firm, outlined some reasons why comapnies have chosen to build a custom CMS solution. This meeting helped attendees think about whether they should build their own CMS or buy a commercial product.

Part 2 (October meeting) in this series of meetings will also focus on commercial CMS products but will feature products targeted at small business rather than high end.

Part 3 (November meeting) will focus on open source solutions to CMS and will discuss needs specific to the stlwebdev site. This session will conclude with an interactive debate as to which solution meets the needs for stlwebdev.org's new site.

View Nova's meeting notes.

Content Management Systems - part 2 of our 3-part series CMS solutions for small businesses will be the focus of this month's meeting.

Open source CMS solutions will be the focus of this month's meeting. Additionally we will discuss the specific needs of the St. Louis Web Developers and our SIGs regarding CMS. This discussion will help us select a strategy for implementing CMS in our own site.

View the slides from the meeting (PDF or Powerpoint).

Attendees enjoyed a piece of our birthday cake, as well as lots of different cookies and other goodies people brought to share.