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

• Atlanta: September 21 – 25 2010
• Sydney: October 12 – 15 2010
• Tokyo: November 2010

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.

• 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 @media 2010

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

• 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”