It’s only 11 am on my second day at the Voices That Matter: Web Design conference and already my brain is threatening to revolt. The Advanced Design Techniques: JavaScript to the Rescue session by Peter-Paul Koch was intense (especially for a JavaScript amateur like me) and I’m afraid my notes are woefully inadequate. (He’ll have the slides up on his website in the next couple of days, thankfully.) Coming next: Kelly Goto on Web to Mobile: Designing for the iPhone. And here I thought my iPhone envy was already bad enough.

For those in the U.S. and especially those in the Seattle area you may have heard of a site called Judy’s Book. Judy’s Book started out from a small book of personal notes on local restaurants, plumbers, landscapers and more was shared with a large circle of friends over the years. The book grew beyond it’s original single source format and eventually Andy and Chris brought the book to the web.

If you ask either of them they will tell you that local is not easy. After all they were in a market filled with companies like CitySearch, Yahoo, Google, and eventually sites like Yelp. Having see the site succeed in some areas and struggle in others Judy’s Book changed its focus from local community contributed content to online and offline deals. This was by no means an easy transition for the company or for it’s loyal users, including myself.

The company announced yesterday that it will be closing it’s doors, most of it’s staff was let go sometime yesterday. It’s really sad to see such a great site with such passionate users close it’s doors.

This should serve as a reminder for everyone out there who is creating local sites, it’s not easy. Special detail needs to be paid to the design and IA of these sites and most importantly to the user’s needs. Having consulted on IA for Judy’s Book and having architected sites like Tipped I can only say that major changes to the site’s focus that impacts the users needs to be done ever so subtle and over a long period of time to allow for those users to adjust. Remember, it’s users we serve, not the investors, not the profits, not the technology and not the competition.

Having a fabulous time here in unseasonably warm San Francisco (seriously, tee-shirt weather in late October?) at the Voices That Matter: Web Design conference. Just got through sitting in on a Conversation with Steve Krug, which hit on some of the points from his groundbreaking book, Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability. I’m feeling all charged up about usability testing – not something I thought I’d ever say!

Updates will continue as the conference goes on. The only real question is which session to choose next…

This week, Digital Web columnist Jonathan Snook reveals his latest accomplishment (followed quickly by Snitter)?an excerpt from his new book Accelerated DOM Scripting with Ajax, APIs and Libraries. In this excerpt, Jonathan tackles the wide variety of scripting libraries to bring some clarity to the available choices. Take a moment to read an excerpt of this well-received book excerpt, and congratulations to Jonathan!

Also, Jonathan’s been kind enough to share a discount for the eBook edition. Enter DOMDIGWEB for 25% off the cover price! (Use the coupon field after ?Purchase as eBook? button on Apress.com.)

Ian Landsman has an awesome blog about running his little ISV. It’s fallen into a bit of disuse of late, but now we know why. He just released version 2 of his most excellent help desk software, HelpSpot.

This week, Digital Web’s own Matthew Pennell steps forward to offer concrete, safe PHP for website contact forms. In “Building a Bulletproof Contact Form with PHP“, Matthew covers the basics of simple code and smart security.

Yahooligans Ed Eliot and Stuart Colville recently launched the supporting site for their forthcoming Apress book, High Performance Web Site Techniques, together with the first of several tools that they plan to release over the coming months: a CSS Sprite Generator.

Yahoo! as a whole have been rather interested in the question of site performance of late, a process which has given us the YSlow Firebug plugin, which “…analyzes web pages and tells you why they’re slow based on the rules for high performance web sites”. These rules, which veer from straightforward advice (“Make fewer HTTP requests”) to unfamiliar terms (“Use a CDN and configure ETags” – whuh?), will speed up your site or application and (presumably) reduce your bandwidth bills.

So, informal survey time – how concerned are you about your site’s performance? And what are you doing to improve it? Comments are open!

For those of you who are going to be in the Seattle area this weekend, I will be doing the keynote presentation for InfoCamp. InfoCamp is a BarCamp conference for information architecture, libraries, user experience design, interaction design, usability, user-centered design, and information science research. My talk is going to be an expanded version of my Contextual Web presentation, but instead of getting into technical details and code I am going to expand the talk to encompass how we interact with technology as a whole and how we acquire information using that technology. The conference is this Saturday and Sunday and Digital Web Magazine is a proud sponsor of the event. Meals will be provided and it looks like it’s going to have a pretty good turnout. Hope to see you there!

Hello Wii fans! Opera have just put out an update for their Wii Internet Channel, which introduces downloadable Opera widgets. Yes, now you can run standards-based mini web apps, right on your telly, or build your own! They also boast improvements in usability and functionality. Read more about the Internet Channel over at the official Opera site.

The only mystery is why nobody is referring to them as ‘Wiidgets’ yet…