We’re at the end of the first day (of two) at An Event Apart: Boston 2007, the massive web design / standards / accessibility conference by gurus Eric Meyer and Jeff Zeldman, and I already feel like I got my money’s worth. They said they set out to create the kind of conference they’d want to attend, and I suspect they’ve done that and more.

This isn’t an exhaustive list, a thorough description, or even a good overview of the subject matter during the six presentations given today by Zeldman, Meyers, and their guests. It’s simply the top five nuggets of knowledge (or “Duh! Why didn’t I think of that?” moments) I took away from our six speakers today. I swear I took better notes than this.

Let go of preconceptions about how XHTML elements “look.” It’s all browser defaults and habits. Rename the html.css file from your Firefox installation (thereby removing all default browser styles) and watch your online world crumble. Tell your meta tags to display:block; and realize they’re just tags like lists or paragraphs – naked semantics.

Eric Meyer took us through an example of how to turn an XHTML table into a bar graph with nothing more than CSS (better than a graphic because it retains inherent structure for screen readers). When I realized what he was doing, my mouth hung open for the better part of a minute. Hey, I’m geeking out, it’s fine.

Good text is… everything. Sure, I knew this – I’ve read Zeldman and Steve Krug’s respective books and know guide copy needs to get parsed down, that every piece of text is a branding opportunity, and that text is the most important and (generally) easiest to fix part of the design. Then, I mostly ignored it. Consider this a lesson many of us need twice. This isn’t an easy one to boil down, so I’ll just point you to the two A List Apart articles Zeldman mentioned for more reading: Your About Page is a Robot, and Attack of the Zombie Copy.

Body text doesn’t need to be black OR some other color. How about just lightening it slightly to change the feel of the site? Seems obvious in retrospect, but it wasn’t so obvious when I was redesigning this site. I’m not proud this is on my list, but so be it.

Usability testing is best done with three random people for under $100. Steve Krug talks about doing incremental usability testing in his book Don’t Make Me Think, but I sort of slinked away from testing at all – it looks good to me, right? Today, he had an audience member come up to the podium and try to buy a subscription for The New Yorker from magazines.com without using the search. (Go ahead, try doing it in less than two minutes.) I’ve already got a short list of who I’m going to ask to test my next design.

Steve is a firm believer that video cameras, one-way mirrors, “big honkin’ reports”, and test groups of a dozen or more people are a waste of time. Consider me a disciple. At the end of Steve’s presentation, a woman stood and said that her company had applied Steve’s technique of usability testing and had outstanding results – high order completions, almost non-existent abandoned shopping carts, and on and on.

Microformats. I’d never heard that word until today, but Dan Cederholm's presentation drove home their usefulness. Simply using a standard like vCard or hReview to markup your content (instead of making up your own class and id tags out of thin air) can act like a sorta-API and allow for all sorts of magnificent accidents to occur with your content. For instance, if you can figure out how to use it, sparql.org let’s you query data from microformatted public websites (like “Find all product reviews in this category with a score at least this high”). It’s one of those “why wouldn’t I do this?” techniques. It’s all upside. Check out microformats.org.

With probably 20 foreign countries represented here (I heard Canada, UK, Ireland, Finland, Latvia, Estonia, Singapore, Sweden, and Denmark among them) and at least 500 guests, this is a huge event with people from hundreds of diverse positions and organizations. I’m thoroughly enjoying myself and looking forward to tomorrow.

I think I just oversold the event so much people will get suspicious, so I should admit I’ve been bought. I just got back from the open bar.