Print is here to stay! …But increasingly it has become easier, faster, and cheaper to create a presence online without producing any printed materials at first. Then, when your web-based venture is wildly successful—congratulations!—you’ll likely need to gracefully navigate into the printed world, and thoughtful design consideration from the outset will ensure a smooth transition. From color and typeface choices, to vector-based-graphics, to visual arrangements and stylistic elements, the identity you present online can (and should) be crafted to be ready for the switch to print.

About the Sponsor

Empirical Paths web analytics, split testing, and market research consultants focus only on measuring your marketing and your markets.

Their web analytics practice tells the story behind your numbers by fixing web analytics software implementations, creating custom reports, running A/B tests, and translating data into business insights. Whether you’ve installed Google Analytics, Webtrends, or SiteCatalyst, Empirical Path will make your metrics more trusted, complete, and actionable.

Peter Howley from Empirical Path presented last month, you can see his presentation notes on his website.

About the Presenter
Beth has been spreading her bike-centric, tree-hugging, greenie-weenie design ethos across Burque under the not-at-all-secret alias Mixed Greens Design since 2009. She was trained in Industrial Design, but her focus for the past several years has shifted to include primarily logo and identity design. She has delivered projects ranging in scope from mom-&-pop-shop event flyers to an award winning family history book, and has found her close working relationships with small, local businesses to be deeply rewarding.  More recently, Beth has begun venturing into the wild world of web design and finding that it, like print design, is full of frustrating challenges (dangit!) and triumphant successes (yay!).

You create a cool web experience using cutting-edge tools and techniques.  Then some green-eyeshade-wearing bean-counter — who admittedly paid for it — inevitably wants to know if anyone’s using your site/app/feature, and how it can do more for his bottom line.  That’s where web analytics and conversion optimization come in.  Peter Howley from the ABQ office of Google Analytics Certified Partner Empirical Path will present techniques to track visitor interactions with rich user experiences that don’t follow the traditional URL-to-URL path. He’ll review how to roll up, segment, and deliver that tracking as reports that a marketer and accountant can understand.  And he’ll show techniques to get more widgets/signups/donations/shares from key pages on sites and apps via split testing.

Registration is now open HERE

About our Sponsor:

We are currently looking for a sponsor for this event. If you would like to sponsor please send us an email at contact@httq.org

About the presenter

Peter Howley, a seasoned consultant, strategist, and manager.  Howley has advised diverse organizations — from household names to startups — in media, finance, retail, not-for-profit, and government.

Howley developed Empirical Path’s data-driven approach while at strategy consultancy Bain & Company and in the MBA Program at Harvard Business School.  He started the Business Research and Analysis practice at social marketing firm Noral Group International.

Veteran marketer/designer Allison Rae will present a simple, step-by-step approach for web developers and designers to create stunning, message-driven content that rivals your brilliant code. Allison incorporates marketing strategy into every aspect of her design work and will share tips and tools you can adapt to your own projects right away.

About the speaker

Allison Rae’s career in marketing communications spans nearly three decades. Her clients have included well-known Fortune and Inc. companies as well as private firms and public-sector agencies. She’s passionate about empowering entrepreneurs, executives, professionals and emerging leaders with the services and training needed to create a vibrant, effective presence across all media. You can find her work at http://AllisonRae.com

About the sponsor

Petroglyph Creative is an independent website developer working in ExpressionEngine and Open Source CMS, right here in Albuquerque.
For more info check out their website, http://petroglyphcreative.com/

REGISTER HERE FOR THIS EVENT

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If you’re still writing Plain Old CSS, you’re behind the times and slowing yourself down. In recent years, “CSS Preprocessors” like LESS, Stylus and SASS have emerged that make writing and maintaining CSS — particularly fancy CSS3 stuff — faster and easier than ever before.

In this session, Ben will introduce you to his favorite CSS preprocessor, SASS, and the accompanying Compass library that makes writing sophisticated, optimized cross-browser CSS a breeze. After briefly covering how to get SASS+Compass set up in a development environment (e.g. a Mac or Linux server), we’ll go over the basics of SASS syntax and the language structure before diving in to highlight a few of the more convenient and awesome parts of the Compass library.

You’ll be blown away at how easy SASS+Compass make it to keep your CSS organized, write responsive styles, generate easy-to-manage sprites, and output compiled CSS that’s compressed for production. You’ll never want to go back to writing plain old CSS ever again!

About the speaker

Ben Byrne is one of the c0-managers of HTTQ and has presented locally at Webuquerque (HTTQ’s predecessor) and WordCamp. Co-founder of Cornershop Creative, Ben does everything from UX planning to PHP programming, but his sweet spot is really in design and front-end development. SASS has changed his life and he hopes it’ll change yours too.

About the sponsor

The Graphics Station has been in the creative design business before the onslaught of the .com or even the exsistence of Google. Of course with changing technologies comes the adaptatation of business. What once was creative design by hand with traditional tools like acrylic and airbrush, is now typically done with photoshop and other mainstream desktop applications. The good news is you get the best of both worlds at The Graphics Station. Our designers have experience in old school design methodologies as well as the cutting edge design techniques and the tools of today.
For more info check out their website, http://thegraphicsstation.com/

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Apache HTTP server powers the vast majority of websites in the world, quite probably including yours. It’s a powerful, complex, and extremely configurable piece of software. Apache’s architecture includes several layers of configuration, including the ability for ‘normal’ users (non-system administrators) to configure Apache to do some very cool things; these features are available through ‘.htaccess’ files.

Greg and Elliot will give a basic overview of the Hyptertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), how Apache interacts with HTTP, and how you can configure Apache to do some pretty nifty things like load-balancing using the superpowered magic of regular expressions and mod_rewrite. Continue reading →

As with any new web development, responsive design provides as many headaches as opportunities. For the past year, Aryon Hopkins has been building responsive websites and will share his successes with small scale sites and tools that can be used on any size project.

Aryon’s Responsive Design Process:

1. Start over with an existing framework or WordPress theme.
2. Skin the theme simply for desktop, tablet and mobile.
3. Profit by providing a universal, future proofed, device independent experience.

Continue reading →