Web Directions

Events

Information on upcoming events; Resources from past events

Since 2004, Web Directions has been organizing world leading conferences for web professionals.

Upcoming events

• February 2012 — Andy Clarke & John Allsopp — Workshop Roadshow.
• February 2012 — What Do You Know Roadshow.

Previous events

We have dozens of presentations online from previous conferences. To see slideshows and hear podcasts from leading experts in design, coding, UX, interaction design, IA, data visualization, social media and networks, and so much more explore the tags to the right and take a look at our past conferences below.

• Sydney: Web Directions South 2011
• London: Web Directions @media 2011
• Seattle: Web Directions Unplugged 2011
• Sydney: Web Directions South 2010
• Atlanta: Web Directions USA 2010
• London: Web Directions @media 2010
• Sydney: Web Directions South 2009
• Sydney: Web Directions South 2008
• Canberra: Web Directions Government 2008
• Melbourne: Web Directions User Experience 2008
• Vancouver: Web Directions North 2008
• Sydney: Web Directions South 2007
• Vancouver: Web Directions North 2007
• Sydney: Web Directions 2006

Web Directions South 2011

Web Directions South 2011 was held at the Sydney Convention and Exhibition Centre, October 13 and 14 2011. It focused on building awesome native & web apps with open web technologies.

• James Bridle — Waving at the Machines
• Mike Kuniavsky — Keynote: Design [in|for|and] the age of ubiquitous computing
• Dmitry Baranovskiy — How to be a Web Sorcerer
• John Allsopp — The Dao of Web Design revisited
• Anne Galloway — Keynote: A 21^st century bestiary
• Andrew Fisher — How the web is going physical
• Jeremy Ashkenas — A cup of CoffeeScript
• Stephan P Anderson — Keynote: Sustaining passionate users
• Nicole Sullivan — CSS Power Tools
• Rahul Sen — Interaction design Bauhaus
• Martin Tomitsch — Using the world as a canvas
• Luke Dearnley & Sebastian Chan — Culture + citizens + digital heritage
• Gian Wild — WCAG2 Accessibility: the hidden nuggets
• Christopher Giffard — HTML5, Video captioning and timed metadata
• Peter Mika — Making the web searchable
• Tom Hughes-​​Croucher — Up and running with Node.js
• Michael Honey & Tim Riley — Web or native? Smart choices for smartphone apps
• Adam Bell & David Peterson — Bringing history alive: telling stories with linked data and open-​​source tools
• Julio Cesar Ody — CSS3 and backbone.js for killer mobile apps
• Alex Young — Multi-​​device, multi-​​role
• Aaron Weyenberg — Getting real: pros and pitfalls of realistic UI design
• Robert O’Callahan — The Open Web Platform in the mobile era
• Ben Birch — HTML5, PhoneGap and what’s next
• Rob Manson — Web standards-​​based augmented reality
• Lisa Herrod — Accessibility for web teams: Recategorising WCAG 2 using a role-​​based approach
• Natalie Downe & Simon Willison — Lanyrd: from side project to startup
• Greg Rewis — Move it! CSS3 Animations and Transitions
• Scott Byrant & Simon Wright — Designing for change and disruption
• Relly Annett-​​Baker — All the small things
• Hannah Donovan — Designing without the browser
• Damon Oehlman — HTML5 API soup
• Ryan Seddon — Remote debugging landscape
• Addy Osmani — Scalable JavaScript design patterns

Web Directions @media 2011

The second Web Directions @media was held at the Southbank Centre, London, May 26 & 27 2011. The slides and podcasts are available below, with topics ranging from HTML5 and CSS3 through to designing without browsers and for mobile.

• Douglas Crockford — Server side JavaScript
• Addy Osmani — Tools for jQuery application architecture
• Tom Coates — Keynote: A new network
• Stephanie Sullivan-​​Rewis — CSS3 — the web’s Swiss Army Knife
• Sebastian Deterding — Keynote: Don’t play games with me
• Jeremy Keith — Panel: Hot Topics
• Dave Balmer — Rockstar graphics with HTML5
• Daniel Burka — Designing the first fifteen minutes
• Hannah Donovan — Designing without the browser
• Brian Fling — Six rules to designing amazing mobile apps
• Tom Hughes-​​Croucher — Lessons from a coding veteran
• Bruce Lawson — Native multimedia with HTML5
• Michael Mahemoff — HTML5 offline for fun and performance
• Jonathan Stark — The mobile frameworks landscape
• Brian Suda — Visualising Data
• Lea Verou — Mastering CSS3 Gradients

Web Directions Unplugged 2011

The very first Web Directions Unplugged was held at The Conference Center, Seattle, May 12 & 13 2011. It focused on building awesome native & web apps with open web technologies. You can find all of the sessions, slides and podcasts below.

• Jason Grigsby — Keynote: Native is Easy. Mobile Web is Freaking Hard!
• Relly Annett-​​​​Baker — Content Strategy for Apps
• Chris Wilson — Keynote: The Convergence of All Things
• Wendy Chisholm and Charles Pritchard — Universal Access: now for apps as well
• Aaron Parecki — Geolocation
• Dave Orchard — Offline Web Apps with HTML5
• Robby Ingebretsen — Get your game on: HTML5 for game building
• Ross Boucher — Quality Control: Testing and debugging your apps
• Juliette Melton — Mobile User Experience Research
• Dan Saffer — Top Ten Things to Tackle Touchscreens
• Rachel Hinman — Mobile Prototyping Essentials
• Daniels Lee™ — Designing for the 10 foot UI
• Nicholas Zakas — Web speed bumps
• Divya Manian — Creative CSS3
• Daniel Davis — Widgets in theory and in practice
• Aaron Weyenberg — Realistic UI Design
• Dave Balmer — HTML5 Graphics: Canvas Deep Dive

Web Directions South 2010

Web Directions South 2010 was held at the Sydney Convention and Exhibition Centre, October 14 and 15 2010. Below are the podcasts and slides from this event, with tips and tricks from HTML5 to typography.

• Steve Souders — Even faster web sites
• Craig Mod — How digital affects books and publishing
• James Bridle — Wrangling Time: The Form and Future of the Book
• Matt Balara — Flogging design: best practices in online shop design
• Simon Pascal Klein — Setting standards-​​friendly web type
• Max Wheeler — Location, location, geolocation
• Grant Young — Creating platforms for social innovation
• Ben Schwarz — Building a better web with HTML5
• Myles Eftos — Building mobile web apps
• Patrick Lee — JavaScript Sprachraum
• Divya Manian — Active web development
• Mark Nottingham — Browser Caching and You (A Love Story)
• Donna Spencer — Keeping your content alive from cradle to grave
• Knud Möller — rDFA everywhere
• Josh Williams — Where are we going?
• Paul Hagon — Enriching large data sets
• Tatham Oddie — Practicing web standards in the large
• Shane Morris — Interaction design school 101
• Juliette Melton — Running effective remote studies
• Michael™ Smith — HTML5 Report Card
• Dan Rubin — Creativity, design and interaction with HTML5 and CSS3
• Daniel Davis — Widgets: why should I care?

Web Directions USA 2010

The popular Web Directions USA was held at Loews Atlanta Hotel in Atlanta, on September 23 and 24 2010.

• Aarron Walter — Learning to Love Humans: Emotional Interface Design
• Hilary Mason — Machine Learning for Web Data
• Relly Annett-​​Baker — Telling Tales
• Esther Derby — Agile meets UT
• Zoe Mickley Gillenwater — Effective and Efficient Design with CSS3
• Jason Cranford Teague — 2010: The Year of Typography
• Nicholas Zakas — High Performance JavaScript
• Ryan Freitas — Balancing data-​​driven & genius design
• Juliette Melton — Remote Research: Running effective remote studies
• Michael Mahemoff — HTML5: Online and Offline

Web Directions @media 2010

The very first Web Directions @media was held at The Southbank Centre in London, on June 10 and 11 2010.

• Andy Clarke — Hardboiled Web Design
• Relly Annett-​​Baker — All the small things
• Hannah Donovan — Telling stories through design
• Steve Souders — Even faster web sites
• Mark Boulton — Designing grid systems
• John Resig — Testing mobile JavaScript
• Christian Crumlish — Designing for play
• Sandi Wassmer — Inclusive design is for everyone
• Simon Willison — Building crowdsourcing applications
• Remy Sharp — Browsers with wings: HTML5 APIs
• Patrick Lauke — Brave new world of HTML5
• Tom Hughes-​​Croucher — An introduction to server-​​side JavaScript
• Rachel Andrew — Core CSS3
• Doug Schepers — SVG Today and Tomorrow
• Jeremy Keith — Hot Topics
• Aral Balkan — The Art of Emotional Design

Web Directions South 2009

Web Directions South 2009 was held at Sydney Convention and Exhibition Centre, October 8 and 9 2009. The podcasts and slides for both days are available below, full of the latest tips, tricks and inspiration for all aspects of the web.

• Kelly Goto — WorkFLOW
• Cameron Adams — Making waves
• Dan Hill — 15 years in
• Matt Webb — Escalante
• Rob Mitchell & Mike Williams – Test your JavaScript
• Donna Spencer — Information seeking behaviours
• Christian Crumlish — Designing social interfaces
• Andrew Fisher — Cloud computing
• Suze Ingram – Would you like service design with that?
• Mark Stanton – Best practices for speeding up your site
• Luke Stevens — Data driven design
• Dmitry Baranovskiy – Canvas
• Cheryl Gledhill & Scott Gledhill – Beyond SEO
• Grant Robinson – Visualising the user experience
• Jeremy Yuille – The social life of visualization
• Damien McCormack – Accessibility means business
• Deborah Schultz – It’s the people, stupid
• Fergus Pitt & David Peterson – The mashed up playlist
• Elliot Jay Stocks — Progressive enhancement
• Tania Lang — Using AJAX to enhance UX
• Lachlan Hardy — The open web
• Silvia Pfeiffer – Taking HTML5 <video> a step further
• Doug Schepers – W3C and web standards big picture
• Pete Ottery – Designing for suits
• Kerry Taylor – Semantics & sensors
• Renato Iannella – Opening up social networks
• Scott Hollier – Boosting new media accessibility
• Rob Manson — Pervasive computing
• Mark Birbeck – Marking up content with RDFa
• Kevin Yank — CSS frameworks
• Gian Wila — WCAG2
• Ben Galbraith — The state of developer tools

Web Directions South 2008

Web Directions South 2008 was held at Sydney Convention and Exhibition Centre, September 25 and 26 2008. Find below all the podcasts and slides from this event, two great days of inspiration and education covering off all aspects of web design and development.

• Jeffrey Veen — Designing our way through data
• Douglas Crockford — Ajax security
• Jina Bolton — Creating sexy stylesheets
• Lynne D Johnson — New media, new business
• Jeff Croft — Elegant web typography
• Daniel Burka — Changing successfully: adapting your interface over time
• August de los Reyes — Predicting the past
• Gabriel White — Context in mobile design
• Mark Pesce — This, that and the other thing
• Michael™ Smith — A jungle cruise through the wild regions of HTML5 and surrounding territories
• Ruth Ellison — Integrating accessibility into design
• Myles Eftos — OAuth and OpenID, a developer’s guide
• Dmitry Baranovskiy — Start using web vector graphics today
• Kay Smoljak — Starting a successful web development business
• Diana Mounter — Custom vs CMS: don’t take sides
• Pete Ottery and Tim Lucas — Developing for iPhone
• Laurel Papworth — Monetising your online community
• David Peterson — Semantic web for distributed social networks
• Grant Young — Strategies for social media engagement
• Hurol Inan — Informing experience architecture with quantitative insights
• Myles Byrne — Internationalisation
• Nick Bolton — The evolution and commercialisation of online video

Web Directions Government 2008

Our first Web Directions Government was held on May 19, 2008 in Canberra: a full day of in depth presentations across two tracks, from international and local experts with a broad range of real world experience inside and outside government.

• José Manuel Alonso — Improving Government through better use of the Web
• Robert Hoekman Jr — The essential elements of great web applications
• Lisa Herrod — Usability: more than skin deep
• Jason Ryan — Govt 2.0: the public management challenge
• David Hayward — Mapping
• Scott Gledhill — Real world web standards
• Ralph Douglas — GovDex: Collaborating online in a secure environment
• Patrick Lee — One paper clip, a box of matches, and some JavaScript
• Matthew Hodgson — Social computing for knowledge management
• Jenny Telford — Opening up government data
• Andrew Kesper — ABC’s election site: making the most of dry data

Web Directions User Experience 2008

Web Directions User Experience (another first) was held on May 16, 2008 in Melbourne: a full day of in depth presentations across two tracks, from international and local experts with a broad range of real world user experience expertise.

• Andy Budd — Designing the experience curve
• Robert Hoekman Jr — The essential elements of great web applications
• Lisa Herrod — User testing for the rest of us
• Donna (Maurer) Spencer — Getting content right
• Oliver Weidlich — The mobile web user experience
• Jackie Moyes — Converting research findings into business speak
• Steve Baty — Analysing user research data
• Andrew Kesper — ABC’s election site: making the most of dry data
• Mathew Patterson — Designing for email
• Jeremy Yuille — Web visualisation: do you see what I see?

Web Directions North 2008

The second Web Directions North was held in Vancouver on January 30 and 31. An incredible couple of days of web design and development enlightenment — some say “the best conference ever” — followed up with two action packed days of skiing and snow boarding up at Whistler.

• Jeffrey Zeldman – Return of the King of Web Standards
• Jared Spool – What Makes a Design Seem Intuitive?
• Daniel Burka — The why and how: UI case studies
• Douglas Crockford — Ajax security
• Cameron Adams — The future of web interfaces
• Derek Featherstone – Real World Accessibility For Real World People
• Indi Young — Innovation With Mental Models
• Matt Webb — Movement
• Eric Rodenbeck — Information visualization as a medium
• John Allsopp & Dave Shea – Designing for the Web Beyond the Desktop
• Anil Dash — Serious business: Putting social media to work
• Kimberly Elam — Five Essential Composition Tools for Web Typography
• Josh Williams — Bedroom to Boardroom
• Gina Trapani — Better Gmail
• Tara Hunt — Government 2.0: Architecting for collaboration
• Brian Fling — Mobile web design and development
• Brian Oberkirch – Simple Things to Make the Social Parts of your Service More Social
• Jonathan Snook – Working with Ajax Frameworks
• Andre Charland & Walter Smith – Developing With Adobe AIR and Microsoft Silverlight
• Boris Mann — The 3 stages of dynamic systems

Web Directions South 2007

Web Directions South 2007 was held in Sydney on September 27 and 28. This was the year we made the big move from our humble beginnings at UTS to the bright and shiny and much much bigger Sydney Convention and Exhibition Centre. We also introduced the Web Directions Expo, as well as a third track, Management/​Strategy.

• Mark Pesce — Mob Rules
• Rashmi Sinha — The perils of popularity
• Scott Berkun — The myths of innovation
• George Oates — Human traffic
• Scott Gledhill — Is SEO evil?
• Andy Clarke — Think like a mountain
• Cameron Adams — The future of web interfaces
• John Allsopp — Trends and predictions in web technology
• Brian Fling — Web 2.0 + Mobile 2.0 = ?
• Bert Bos — A new life for old standards
• Ben Winter-​​Giles — Managing agile projects within large organisations
• Angela Beesley — Wikis and community collaboration
• Andrew Downie and Grant Focas — Javascript and other coding for good or evil
• Rob Manson and Alex Young — E is for everywhere
• Aaron Gustafson — Learning to love forms
• Stephen Cox — Building ethnography into the design process
• Raul Vera — Mashups, web apps and APIs
• Paul McCarthy - Which open source tools are fuelling today’s leading sites?
• Chris Wilson — Moving the web forward
• Adrian Holovaty — Being smart about your data
• Mike Cannon-​​Brookes — Organisational wiki adoption
• Mark Mansour — RedBubble: Building a site for people with big imaginations
• Lisa Herrod — Usability: more than skin deep
• Laurel Papworth — Social networks and mobiles
• Justin French — Pushing beyond design
• Jonathan Boutelle — Ajax or Flash: what’s right for you?

Web Directions North 2007

Web Directions North 2007 was held in Vancouver on February 7 and 8. Our first event outside Australia was a tremendous couple of days, followed by two more days of awesomeness skiing and snowboarding up at Whistler

• Jared Spool — The Dawning of the Age of Experience
• Kelly Goto — Designing for Lifestyle
• George Oates & Paul Hammond — Web Apps: Developer to Designer
• John Allsopp & Dan Cederholm — Microformats
• Aaron Gustafson & Andy Clarke — Transcendent Design with Javascript & CSS
• Jeremy Keith & Derek Featherstone — Ajax Kung Fu Meets Accessibility Feng Shui
• Cameron Moll & Tantek Çelik — Design and Coding at the Cutting Edge
• Molly E. Holzschlag — Crimes Against Web Standards
• Kaitlin Sherwood & Steffen Meschkat — The Business & Technology of Mashups
• Veerle Pieters & Dave Shea — Finding Creativity in the Design Process
• Craig Saila & Adrian Holovaty — Old Media, New Technology
• Joe Clark — Accessibility in the Design Process

Web Directions 2006

The first Web Directions, which grew out of an older event, Web Essentials, which we had been involved in for two years previously, was held at UTS on September 28 and 29.

• Kelly Goto — The Iterative App
• Jeremy Keith — Explaining Ajax
• Derek Featherstone — Accessibility 2.0
• John Allsopp — Microformats
• Andy Clarke — Creating Inspired Design
• Mark Pesce — Youbiquity
• Derek Featherstone — Designing for Accessibility
• Kelly Goto — Designing for Lifestyle
• Jeremy Keith — Hijax
• Thomas Vander Wal — IA for the “Come to Me Web”
• Ben Barren — RSS will change everything
• Dave Greiner & Ben Richardson — The Campaign Monitor Story
• Gian Sampson-​​Wild — Managing Accessibility Compliance for the Commonwealth Games
• Thomas Vander Wal — IA for Web Developers
• Cameron Adams & Kevin Yank — JavaScript, APIs & Mashups
• Laurel Papworth — The Business of Online Communities
• Cheryl Lead & Ben Buchanan — Moving your organisation to web standards
• Donna Maurer — IA: a “how to”