Have you ever added !important or added an extra selector just to get something to style properly? Have you found yourself adding more properties to override properties you already set elsewhere in your CSS? Have you ever joined an existing project and been scared to touch the CSS for fear of breaking everything?

You need not have played with the latest and greatest CSS3 and know what a vendor prefix is. You will need to know a selector from a property and have a general understanding of CSS-based layouts.

This workshop will shift how you think about writing CSS. It will simplify your code, making your project easier to manage, and allowing it to grow without creating an increasingly brittle system of dependencies. Your code will also be more portable, making it easier to use components in various contexts and in other projects.

Mobile is our immediate challenge, but it’s just the beginning of an even bigger content shakeup. To meet the needs of everything from smartphones and tablets to read-later services and web-enabled appliances, we need content that can go more places, more easily. Yet most content is still being created in fixed pages and documents, locked into just one format and designed for just one destination.

That won’t cut it. As devices get more diverse, powerful, and ubiquitous—and as our users continue to expect more—we don't need more content. We need content that does more: content that's modular enough to go wherever we need it, yet still meaningful enough to make your audiences care.

The good news is, regardless of your role—designer or developer, content strategist or UX pro—you can do something about it. In this workshop, you’ll learn how to:

• Start analyzing your existing content and breaking it into logical pieces and parts
• Consider the meaning, relationships, and priorities inherent within your content, and how that should affect the way it shifts, resizes, and reflows for different displays
• Build simple, flexible content models based on this knowledge
• Revisit writing and editing for mobile and reuse

Gone are the days when the web was contained in our desktop and laptop computers. Today it flows through a sea of unique devices each with their own opportunities and limitations. Leading this shift are mobile computers whose numbers are growing at an astonishing pace and becoming many people’s first (and sometimes only) way of getting online. Designing for this reality requires new ways of thinking and getting things done.

In this half day session, Luke Wroblewski (author of Mobile First) will walk you through detailed explanations, examples, and design best practices that will shift your thinking about website organization, layout, input, and more. You’ll learn how to:

• Organize your websites and applications to deliver immediate value on mobile devices and beyond
• Optimize navigation systems and menus for mobile devices and adapt them to a variety of screens
• Create layouts that take mobile’s unique capabilities and constraints into account without compromising large screen designs
• Understand the difference and decide between responsive web design, RESS, and device experience solutions for multi-device web design
• And much more!

After this concentrated deep dive into mobile and multi-device web design, you’ll be armed with the best practices and principles you need to deliver a great experience for your audience no matter what device(s) they’re on!

Performance optimization is all about understanding the constraints of the platform and the environment. In this workshop we'll take nothing for granted and will disassemble the browser in its entirety before putting it all back together (hopefully, with no left over parts):

• How does the network, and network type affect web performance?
• How does the mobile radio affect the performance of my application?
• How do we optimize for battery and network performance on mobile networks?
• How does the browser layout the page, and why do we have rules such as ?place CSS at the top??
• What are the HTML5 optimizations that can help us improve the user experience?
• How do we identify layout optimizations? GPU acceleration?
• How do we optimize our JavaScript code?
• What are some other tools that can assist us on our quest to build faster web apps?

We?ll tackle all of the above, and more, in detail. We?ll dive into various tools to help you diagnose and fix performance problems, explore the new W3C performance specs and what they can offer, and investigate several case studies to illustrate the common performance pitfalls.

P.S. Mobile apps don't have to be slow. Promise.