About the MIX10 Conference Site

This morning folks are waking up to the new MIX10 Conference Site.

In addition to my day job as owner of the MIX Online community site (more about that in a moment), I also am  a member of the MIX and PDC core teams. I work on a variety of things for our major events and have the privilege of working with good people on our event websites. There are probably many things you may not know (or want to know) about how our event websites come together. I actually enjoy talking to people about it even when the feedback is…er, how do I say it…critical. I thought I might spend a little time talking about how it all comes together (and sometimes doesn’t) and some things folks may not know.

Hey! Wait a minute, this site IA looks familiar. Yep. Take a look at the PDC site. Notice any similarities? After MIX09, we made the decision that we would begin building our own event website. Before then, we had always used vendors and basically rebuilt the site, year after year. We decided to stabilize on a code base so that we could begin with a fresh slate, put some design thinking into it, and have something we could reuse. In fact, the new site is based off the same codebase as the PDC site. Talk about true code reuse! As you can imagine, our dev time went way down and everything we fixed for PDC now works for MIX.

The website team is a virtual team. That’s right, the team building the website is virtual. There is no one on the team who’s full day job it is to manage our event websites. Development is actually done by the development team for Channel 9. Also, much of the streaming work and session videos you saw at PDC is driven from the same team as well. We do have an event team and they keep very, very busy with the site. We have someone responsible for the registration vendor we use, we have someone who’s sole responsibility is session management, we have someone responsible for the overall marketing, and more. In fact, I once tried to figure out how many people are directly involved in the site by working on it or providing content and I stopped counting at 200+.

This website sucks, I could have done it better over a weekend. I am sure you could. The beauty of building websites (which I really enjoy) is that everyone has an opinion. I have to admit at times our audience is a tough, tough crowd and can have a very critical eye. Especially with the immediacy of Twitter, we get plenty of feedback. We take all feedback seriously, especially if it is constructive. If you say “I would like to have session times and locations available via the RSS feed for sessions because I want to do x.”, we tend to jump on it and try to make the magic happen. If your feedback is “The #MIX10 site suxz, thoze guys are dopes. #EPICFAIL”, then you can imagine what I think about that.

Wait, I went to http://visitmix.com and http://live.visitmix.com and they are not the same. Although the same domain, they are different. Its a long, long story. But I will cut to the chase, http://visitmix.com is our community site which I have the honor as my day job to run with an amazing group of brutal designers and developers. We are the community site for the MIX brand. We:

• Offer insightful articles that are relevant to the scenarios you want to design and develop for the web.
• Provide freely downloadable, open source, and immediately useable prototypes with no strings attached.

You should check out what we are about. We are not your average Microsoft website (usually the Mushroom man, Lavender frog, and the baby gorilla tip folks off), but we embody the original spirit of MIX (which I will do another blog post of what the driving pillars are behind the MIX brand). You will see us a lot at MIX this year and we will have some cool labs to talk about at the event. Also, make sure you keep an eye out next week on our site and be sure to follow us on Twitter. The http://live.visitmix.com is the site of the conference.

The myth of infinite resources. One of the things I had to learn as a new Microsoftie is dealing with many who think Microsoft is the land of infinite wealth. As if there are rooms in each building on the Redmond Campus which look like a Dragon’s Lair full of golden goblets and money just laying around to be scooped up. I wish; I have been looking for these rooms for 11 years and still have yet to find it (but I have found the room of infinite network cables). Like you, each team here has to deal with the time/resources/features conundrum. We honestly wish we could add every feature suggested for our event sites and dogfood every cool technology Microsoft has and will show at the event.

Is this all of the sessions? Does this mean you are not going to talk about X? Unlike other event sites, we do rolling session announcements. I would love to say this is some ingenious plan of ours, but the reality is that it takes time when you have tons of announced and unannounced products, technologies, designs and have to fit them in the allotted amount of sessions (which can be constrained by hotel space and a variety of other things). Also, we will always have unannounced sessions right up until to conference because we will announce them at the keynotes, so always give yourself a little wiggle room for those sessions.

Hey, I went to the site and I don’t see this or that. We will be updating the site based on feedback we have received as well as kicking in some things later on as we get closer to the event like the mobile experience. For example, a lot of folks want to print out their schedule and sessions after picking them out instead of exporting them to Outlook or cutting and pasting. We are looking into adding something like that. Be sure to follow the MIX event on Twitter to get updates on changes we make to the site.

Well, we are just beginning the countdown to MIX in Vegas. I am excited and look forward to meeting all of you. If you want to keep tabs on what I am up to regarding the event, follow me on Twitter.

Also, feel free to comment and let me know your thoughts, what you would like to see, and what you look forward to this year at MIX.