Having read a blog post by Emma Sax on The Future of Web Design, I felt I had to put my own two pence in through a full blog post rather than just a small reply.

I think Emma is bang on with the attitude towards Web conferences at the moment. There hasn’t really been any significant developments in the last few years apart from additional tweaks to practises we’re already aware of. It also seems like the majority of conferences now are opportunities for “Web Celebs” to promote what they’ve covered in recently published books or to plug a newly released Web 2.0 product. Admittedly, there are a lot of things to be learned from both these topics. But at the same time, it also seems slightly cheeky for conferences to ask delegates to fork out in excess of £100 to listen to what really is a day of sales pitches.

Don’t get me wrong - events such as @media and FOWD are certainly moving people in the right direction, continuously drumming in to developers Best Practises, possibly provoking the developers to discover new solutions to popular problems. At the same time, it always seems to be the same topics covered over and over.

I won’t be travelling to @media this year. I’ve been to the previous two events and realised last year that things hadn’t changed much in the world of Web design. In reality, it was just a very expensive networking opportunity in the Capital. I travelled up to Edinburgh earlier this month for The Highland Fling and must say that the more focussed topic certainly made the event more desirable. It allowed for all the talks to interlock with each other, giving speakers the chance to cross compare with previous talks. I think this is the route Web conferences need to take now we’re getting to a stage whereby developers are a lot more aware. By focussing on a particular topic, delegates will have a good idea of what to expect, making it easy for them to justify to bosses/accountants the reason for attending.

While it seems Web developers are now expected to have a know-it-all approach to Web design, I’ve realised from experience it doesn’t actually happen this way. It’s only through The Multipack that I’ve realised developers tend to be more specialised in one or two topics rather than the grand scheme of things. One person will have awesome capabilities when it comes to application development and server maintenance whereas another person is the dogs at user interface design and CSS. With this in mind, it would seem inappropriate for a predominantly front end architect to attend an event on Ruby on Rails - they would get a lot more out of a workshop which focussed on usability and accessibility.

There’s no denying the fact that the Social Web is moving away from the Internet, into Web conferences and the after-parties. There is nothing against that. I just think the approach to conferences should become a lot more focussed. Does anyone else agree?