Getting ready for presentations

I guess at University life moves forward I end up doing more and more presentations showing off what the group I’m part of have done and will do. They are great and all but nothing really prepares you for speaking in front of a room full of strangers unless you’ve done it before.

I guess some thing I’ve learnt from presenting to class mates at University are:

Not great advice and I’m sure most people out there who speak at big events know most of this already, but let me expand a bit.

Prepare it
Getting a presentation right is all about preperation. If you’ve looked in to the subject matter and know what you’re talking about then you’ll cover almost every thing you need to in the presentation. Putting it together with Google searches the night before tends not to work to well.

Know what you’re saying
If you don’t ‘um’ know what ‘um’ you’re ‘um’ meant to be saying it can be a bit tough getting the message across to your audience. They’ll loose track of you and get bored quickly which is never a good thing. If you’re passionate about what you’re speaking about you should know what you’re saying. If you are covering a topic you are unfamilar with then research and find common terms people will know about.

Expect the idiot
There will be at least one person who wasn’t listening and ask a really obvious question, sometimes the information will be right there in front of them but don’t just point them to it, repeat the point you’ve made and make sure they understand. If they do everyone else in the room already does.

Linked data, what the internet is really about

What’s in a good presentation?

So at some point sooner or later you may need to do a presentation, it could be to your class at University, it could be to a team you’re working in or maybe you’ll be speaking at a conference just like WDC.

But what makes your presentation good? What makes people remember it? and how do you make sure people go away learning something new?
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Web site reviews

An interesting topic if every there was one and that is reviewing at web site. Now you can go off looks or how well it functions for you as users but you can do a lot more than just first up your browser have a look at make a judgment.

So this weeks task was to find an application, web site or similar to help with web site evaluation and I picked up on WAVE. WAVE is a great site to check over any accessibility errors on your site.
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