Your friends might call you Flash Nerd, Flash Geek, Flash Genius, or even the Grand Master of Flash, but there’s only one Flash Guru: Guy Watson, and we’re proud to have him presenting with us again at Flashforward 2005 New York.

What, you might ask, are his Guru credentials?

• In addition to providing the Flash community with insights, tutorials and source code on his own site, flashguru.co.uk, for the past five years, Watson was a moderator at actionscript.org, has been a senior moderator at Flash Kit Forums for over four years, and runs the ExtendFlash mailing list about Flash extensibility.
• Watson has written a 3-part tutorial on Flash Extensibility for internet.com; an article about the JavaScript API on Macromedia DevNet; the Foreward to Extending Flash MX 2004 (a book co-authored by Flashforward speaker Keith Peters); and his work has been featured in Create Online & Computer Arts magazines.
• He has judged the Favourite Website Awards, is a long-standing judge of our own Flash Film Festival, and won the Navigation category with us in 2001 for www.relevare.com.
• And of course, he has done all this while also being a Macromedia Certified Flash MX 2004 Developer and successful independent consultant.

Since so many of us are still making a mess of our menus despite his years of patient tutelage, Watson will be presenting on the simple but critical topic of Effective Flash Navigation:

A well-planned and designed navigation system is essential to the success of a website. Otherwise, users get frustrated and eventually leave. In this session, Watson shows examples of good, bad and ugly navigation systems and discusses the pros and cons of each. Watson explains the fundamentals of designing a website navigation system and conducting live usability testing. Finally, he shows how a developer can simply integrate the browser “back” button with Flash websites and make them infinitely more usable.

Yes, that’s one of the session descriptions you paste into the reimbursement proposal for your boss — they’re paying you to listen to Guy Watson. Such a deal.

He will also be participating in a panel discussion on the Flash community along with Aral Balkan, Mike Chambers, Branden Hall, Peter Hall and Grant Skinner — we should have probably booked more than an hour for this, but it should be an amazing meeting-of-the-minds.

And on top of all that, his avatar can raise one eyebrow too! Must be a British thing…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 8th, 2005 at 12:43 pm and is filed under Culture, Flashforward News, Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.