At Jenn’s request I agreed to help staff the Portland Bloggers/Blogathon booth at Webvisions 3 today.

Okay, half-a-booth. A half-table multi-purpose booth. Anyway.

I spent most of my day listening to a series of speakers on various web-design topics. That, and trading snarky commentary with Cat. Let’s just say there was much to snark about, and snarking’s more fun with snarky company.

And if I use a form of the word “snark” again in this entry, I’m probably going to earn some sort of Lewis Carroll Prize so I’ll knock it off now.

Let’s not forget the candy confections courtesy of the convention center and the asian market across the street. (Thank you, Jenn!) Can you say, “ongoing sugar high?” I knew you could.

Of the four speakers I heard, two were clearly comfortable with public speaking… and the other two were less so. One of the latter was an “ar-teest” who firmly believes that the designer should push boundaries and not give a damn about what anyone says, and should do everything possible to override the concerns of the client for the sake of doing something different and unique.

Bleah. In contrast, the entertaining and insightful keynote speaker who spoke last made a crack about “masturbatory design” and I couldn’t help a quick guffaw.

The other of the less-interesting speakers failed not so much because of what he said but because of a basic disconnect between his content and his audience. Let’s face it: A web-design professional either already knows about the basic history and concept behind CSS, or doesn’t care because it’s not part of their professional purvue. The poor guy was putting people to sleep in droves, which is a shame because he really meant well. Mind you, preaching standards-compliance right after an “ar-teest” has just finished preaching about throwing common sense to the winds may be a hard sell. It doesn’t help that most of his presentation was background information, and only twice did he venture into practical applications and resources.

Lest you think this a scathing review of the conference, I’ll state again that the other two speakers were engaging and interesting, and even the “CSS guy” had good things to say. Most of the good content of the day involved the concept of “finding out what your target audience really wants, and find a way to deliver exactly that.” Radical concept, no? But when you think about the range of website designs available today, the varying ways in which content and data are presented, you can see the need for driving the point home repeatedly that you can’t just slap a bunch of product icons on a web page and expect to bring in the dough.

Gee, I’m glad I don’t design websites for professional purposes. I’m happy just being a goofy little blog-building guy and a hostmaster for people who get to have the design headaches.