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Web Directions: The 10th Anniversary edition

Ten years ago, Maxine and I put on our first Web Directions event (having twice helped organise Web Essentials, one of the very earliest conferences of the Web industry anywhere in the world).

Ten years is a long time in a person’s life, let alone in a career, and it’s nearly half of the life of the Web itself.

So, as we approached that milestone, we took a long look at everything about what we do. As many will know, Maxine stepped back from the day-to-day of Web Directions at the end of 2014, though she remains an important part of what we do. Over the last 18 months, we’ve grown the more professional development-focused aspects of the company, the conferences Respond, (focusing on Web design, in the broadest sense), and Code (front end engineering and JavaScript), and we started a brand new Government digital service-focused event, Transform this year, to great success.

In keeping with that spirit of Transformation, we’ve thought about the event we’ve always called “Web Directions”, and how we can continue to keep it relevant in a world that changes constantly.

As you might have noticed, we’ve renamed the event Direction, which maintains a strong connection to its origins, but also reflects its forward looking nature. We ask directions when we want to get to a specific location. But we ask for direction when we look for the way forward in our lives, careers and work, in places where there are no simple right and wrong answers.

We’ve also taken on board so many conversations over the years to help shape the event. One thing that has come up time and again is that with a multi-track event, people often express a “fear of missing out”, a concern they’ll choose one session, and miss out on an amazing one. As a single track conference, where in essence every session is a keynote, there’s no more “FOMO”.

And what a lineup of speakers. We’ve invited back four of our most popular speakers over the last decade – Mark Pesce, Josh Clark, Pasquale D’Silva, and Maciej Cieglowski – as well as an amazing array of speakers from around the world, including the editorial director at Slack, Anna Pickard; Head of Community for the wildly popular indie card game Cards Against Humanity, Jenn Bane; UX/IxD on IBM’s Watson Artificial Intelligence team, Caroline Sinders; Design Manager at AirBNB, Amber Cartwright; and many more.

And we’ve also thought a great deal about creating an atmosphere of excitement, inclusion and engagement. It’s why we pay so much attention to such details as coffee, the food we serve, and the social events.

For this year, we’ve gone all out to create a festival atmosphere. So not only is Direction two full days of amazing world leading speakers, there’s also:

And it’s time to launch now.

If you’ve been before, make sure you check your inbox for the very special pricing offer we always extend to past attendees. If you’re contemplating coming for the first time, we’d love to see you there. Use the code “firsttimer” to get a Silver ticket for the price of a classic, saving $200 to really make the most of the experience.

We hope you might be as excited as we are about this significant milestone, and our refresh for next decade of the Web, and everything it touches.

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Thoroughly enjoyed Web Directions — met some great people, heard some inspiring presenters and added a whole bunch of things to my to-do list.

Joel Roberts Web Developer