So two weeks ago I commented saying I would post about key things I took away from An Event Apart Chicago 2007. Here we are more than two weeks later and nothing.

Fortunately I love my clients. This is why I have had no time for writing about AEA. Currently working with a local clothing shop on a splendid little web presence. Pretty standard site, Xhtml/Css a dash of flash and done! Well sort of.

Apparently in this industry, manufactures do not understand what an API is. That is to say that the manufactures do not offer any API of any sort. Which in an industry like clothing were fashion is changing constantly, this can be an issue for retailers that do not have huge budgets to spend constantly updating their web sites. Retail outlets have little to no recourse for posting online what their manufactures offer but through linking to the manufactures’ website. This seems to unload the burden of smaller retail outlet of having to constantly update their websites with the new seasons fashions.

Great….right? Well not exactly. We (you and I) are in the business of Online marketing, and if there is one thing we know it is that we do not send visitors to some other site where they may loose interest in our clients products/offerings. Heck, they could go to one of these manufactures’ sites and find another retailer to purchase from!

Solution, frames. Yes, I know what I just said….I feel dirty just saying it. BUT it give me the ability to work with the lack of an API and still hopefully not completely sending people off my client’s site. Create a nice banner which includes contact information in plain text along with navigation to contact or break out of the frame. This banner will be a frame at the top of the page when a visitor clicks to view a manufacturer’s website from our clients site. Now we have hopefully retained a potential client. As they browse the manufacturer’s site, our client’s information & branding is still at the top of the page reminding the user who they want to call or visit for their purchase. We have helped the user find what they are looking for along with a retailer to buy it from plus we have helped our client retain a client that may have gotten lost on the manufacturer’s site.

I am sure many readers(yes I mean the two people that read this) are very curious to see exactly what I am talking about along with what I perceive to be a beautiful solution to a real problem. Once the project has been finalized and goes live I will post an update on how this solution worked along with a link to see for yourself.

…yes I am going to post…eventually. All of the great information is floating around in my head but I have not been able to capture it all on paper. I am currently working on turning my notes from the event into useful information for all of my reads. Which I believe is about two people. I hope to get my notes posted within the next two weeks.

Shortly after returning from An Event Apart a friend told be about the Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association. While researching who they were and what they were about I realized they had a large even coming up, their annual Summit. After reading about many of the topics covered I was fairly interested. Then I saw the founder of 37signals.com , Jason Fried, was going to be their…and I knew I had to go. 37signals is the company who brings the industry such great products as Basecamp and Campfire.  Based off what I heard from Jim Coudal and knowing that these two have collaborated, I cannot wait to hear the insight Jason Fried will bring.

Well day two of An Event Apart was as great if not better than day one. With such notable speakers as Jeremy Keith , Luke Wroblewski, Derek Featherstone, Eric Meyer, Jeffrey Zeldman, and Jim Coudal. In my opinion Jim Coudal is one of the speakers that truly stood out. His presentation “Dealing with the Both of You” addressed how you should handle the creative side of yourself that chased after may passions that you may not see through to dealing with the business side that needs to pay the bills. Since AEA (An Event Apart) I have read and watched a lot more on Jim Coudal and his company Coudal Partners. Jim has built Coudal Partners from the ground up living and learning through mistakes, and he is happy to share the things he has learned. His remarks and life experiences that he shares will truly shape the way I approach my career and entrepreneurial goals.

Of the six presentations I heard today the best thing I have taken in at the moment is simple this….Microformats. Yes Microformats. I will not go into details about them at this point but to say using Microformats is a way you can give your site an API. Very little coding will result in others being able to write scripts that traverse you site grabbing the content and re purposing it. All of this through simple tagging and adding classes to elements at the html level. Then of course you can use these classes to style the elements contents also….it is a win-win situation. I will post a tutorial on how to use Microformats in the future.

For more information on Microformats see Microformats.org