First up, on Friday May 16th, in Melbourne will be Web Directions UX, a one day, two track user experience focussed conference, featuring renowned web design and usability expert, and influential author and blogger Andy Budd, along with Robert Hoekman Jr, an interaction designer for companies like Adobe, Automattic, United Airlines, DoTheRightThing.com, Go Daddy Software, and many more, as well as author of the influential Designing the Obvious, and upcoming Designing the Moment along with local usability experts including Remember The Milk’s Emily Boyd, Mat Patterson from Campaign Monitor, and Dr Jackie Moyes from News Digital Media.

The conference is preceded on Thursday May 15th by a day of workshops, including a full day workshop on “guerilla” user testing techniques from Andy Budd, and a full day designing with Ajax workshop with young Aussie superstar Cameron Adams.

Then we move to Canberra, where on Monday May 19th, we’ll be presenting Web Directions Government, a one day, two track conference focussing on the concepts, technologies and techniques for meeting the challenges of eGovernment. With an opening keynote by the head of the W3C’s eGovernment initiative, José Manuel Alonso, the day also features a keynote by Robert Hoekman Jr, as well as local experts from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the ABC, AGIMO, and private industry, addressing the key technical and policy issues in web and eGovernment. Whatever your role with government and the web — be it management, policy or technical, there’ll be great, relevant content for you.

The Canberra conference is followed on the 20th by two one day workshops — with Cameron Adams again presenting his fantastic Ajax workshop, and Sebastian Chan presenting a day long workshop on Social Media and Government

We hope you’ll get excited about such wonderful speakers coming to your town, or think about making the trip to either of these great cities for the events. We know we really are excited to be putting these shows on, and can’t wait for May!

john and maxine

Far beyond the appearance of the site, it was important for us to tame what was becoming a large number of event specific sites and resources. What we’ve done is brought all events under the Web Directions site, particularly the presentation slides and podcasts from past conferences (by the time we get them all up there we’ll top 100 podcasts from many of the web’s best known international experts, and many local experts as well). If you are looking for a presenter, you can simply search for their name — but we’ve also tried to encourage “exploring” the content at the site by tagging each of the presentations, and presenting a tagcloud on every page of the site to help you find presentations on subjects of interest to you.

The site is very news driven — and we are hoping to bring you even more news from the Australian web industry and beyond, as well as interviews with speakers, and of course news about our conferences. If you have news, or something you want to publicize to the web industry, drop us a line, and we’ll do our best to get the word out.

We hope you like the new design of the site — please leave a comment to let us know!

And stay tuned for news on upcoming conferences — there’ll be a big announcement very very soon.

So, if you felt like Australia was just too far to come, think about Vancouver in late January, with workshops by the likes of Jared Spool, Andy Clarke and Cameron Adams, and an amazing lineup of speakers, starting with a keynote by Jeffrey Zeldman himself, all followed up by an optional day or two at Whistler, wth dozens (if not hundreds) of your fellow attendees and the speakers (we do the organizing, you come along for the ride).

Places are just $795CDN until December 1st, and hotel rooms at the Hyatt Regency just $149 CDN, while a day at Whistler (luxury coach to and from Vancouver, lift tickets, and very likely a fantastic all day party put on by one of our sponsors, as Microsoft was so generous to do last year) is just $120CDN.

So put it in your diary, and hopefully we’ll see you in Vancouver in early 2008.

(BTW keep your eye out for news of our affiliate program coming shortly — which will be very much worth being part of — no matter where on earth you live)

Builder.au has a strong commitment to local content, industry news, video interviews and more, and we are really proud that they are working with Web Directions to do speaker interviews, and covering the event for their site as our online partner.

Take a look at their excellent developer resources, some of their recent video interviews, and to keep abreast of industry development, you can subscribe to their news feeds.

Plus keep an eye on their site, as they’ll have conference tickets to give away over the next few weeks, and keep an eye out at the conference, as you might just get voxpopped.

Registrations have been absolutely fantastic so far, for both the conference and the workshops. Speaking of workshops, if you are interested in Andy Clarke’s Transcending CSS then don’t wait too long. It’s selling like hotcakes, as well it should — Andy is one rare combination — an inspiring designer, a very smart developer, and a great communicator. His workshops for Web Directions South 06 and Web Directions North earlier this year were very very well received.

http://www.webdirections.org/pricing/

Registrations this year are way up on the same time last year, which is really exciting for us.

It’s going to be the best conference we’ve done and then some.

See you in September

john

But, most importantly for now, the end of our $200 discount period is fast drawing to a close. So, to get your place for just $795, including GST, you’ll have to book by Saturday June 30 — that’s tomorrow week. Now, we know that this is also the end of the financial year, so if you would like the discount, but want to have it as part of your next year’s budget, you can register by June 30, then pay in the new financial year.

Remember too, if you’ve been to one of our previous conferences, there’s a further discount, which we’ll also extend to your colleagues, and even your friends. If you’ve not received an email from us telling you how to get that discount, then get in touch with us, and we’ll let you know right away.

Thanks so much to all of those who have signed up already, and we are counting down the days until September 25th.

So, it’s exciting to see them get some great coverage in Slate magazine, an online magazine owned by the Washington Post, in a story about Google Gears (which RTM uses for offline storage).

Well done guys.

Entries will like last year be at no cost.

We look forward to seeing what the Australian web industry has been up to this year.

[tags]mcfarlane prize, web design, web development[/tags]