Web Directions Year round learning for product, design and engineering professionals

After a very frenzied two weeks of finalising speakers and pulling all the content together for the site, Web Directions South 2009 is now open for business. And, we’re just a bit excited about what’s going to be happening on October 6 – 9 this year.

From our humble beginnings as a grass roots conference for standardistas, Web Directions has grown into Australia’s Web Industry conference – run by experts for experts like you. This year’s conference keeps true to our roots, while broadening the range of topics covered to make it genuinely an event for your whole team.

This year we’ve got 3 tracks – Design, Development, and Business – with leading international and local experts in design, development, social media, SEO, accessibility, user experience, interaction design and much more. We think there’ll be no better place for people who work on the web in any way at all to learn, connect, share and experience ideas.

The line-up

This year we are proud and excited to be featuring

• Ben Galbraith – Co-founder of Ajaxian, and co-lead of Mozilla Foundations Tools team, covering what’s new in the world of developer tools
• Elliot Jay Stocks – Famed UK web designer on CSS3 and other designer goodies, and how to use them today
• Mark Boulton – Renowned designer and typography expert on the art and technology of web typography
• Christian Crumlish – Curator of Yahoo!’s pattern library on designing social interfaces
• Deborah Schultz – Procter & Gamble’s Global Strategic Adviser for Social Media & Emerging Technology speaking on the business of social media
• Dan Hill – Co-founder of Monocle magazine, Urban Informatics expert at Arup to give our closing keynote

and the return of a long time Web Directions favourite, Kelly Goto with a special keynote and full day workshop.

But that’s only the beginning. With a full program like this, and more still to come, we think we’ve covered anything and everything you’d want to know to be up to date with what matters on the web in 2009.

Networking opportunities

As well as our opening night reception and closing night party, this year we’ve also included an optional Birds of a Feather breakfast on the Friday morning of the conference. This will be an opportunity for attendees to run their own table on the topic of their choice, and connect with other attendees who face the same challenges. Be sure to register for the breakfast when you buy your conference ticket, as the breakfast is very reasonably priced at $30, has limited numbers, and will definitely sell out.

Workshops

Once again, we feature an optional two days of intensive masterclass style workshops including

• Designing social interfaces, with Yahoo!’s Christian Crumlish
• Zero to hero with jQuery, with local Ajax and JQuery guru Earle Castledine
• Design research: the art of getting it done, with Kelly Goto
• From Photoshop to the browser, with Elliot Jay Stocks
• SEO from the get go, with local development and (real) SEO experts Scott and Cheryl Gledhill
• Ed Directions South, a full day workshop for those teaching web design and development, with Opera’s Chris Mills, Leslie Jensen-Inman and Ash Alluri

Loyalty code

If you’ve been to a Web Directions conference or workshop before, we have a very special loyalty code which takes $45 off the already heavily discounted early bird price. Watch out for my email, and see you in October.