About Web Directions | @media 2010

About Web Directions

Founded in Australia in 2004, by long time web industry figures Maxine Sherrin and John Allsopp, Web Directions conferences bring together the web industry's leading experts from around the world to educate and inspire our attendees.

Our major conferences, Web Directions South (Sydney, Australia), Web Directions North, (North America), Web Directions East and now Web Directions @media in London cover the full range of interests for web professionals - web design, front-end and and back-end development, information architecture, interaction design, accessibility, data visualization and much more. We have also produced the groundbreaking GovHack for the Australian Federal Government's Government 2.0 taskforce.

The @media story

In 2005, not long after WE04, the first conference we helped organise, well known UK web industry expert Patrick Griffiths, of HTML Dog fame, launched @media. An instant success, @media and Web Directions have always shared very similar DNA - a passion for the web, standards, accessibility and best practice, coupled with practical, real world content delivered by genuine experts (and much more) - and both have become focal points for the web design and development communities in their respective parts of the world.

After five very successful years, at @media09 in London, Patrick announced that he had decided to move on to a new industry, and new challenges, and Web Directions was honoured to be able to take over the reins to continue the fine tradition of these events.

Our aim is to maintain the integrity, relevance, and quality of one of the world’s longest running and most highly respected conferences for web professionals, while bringing new life to the event. With our years of experience, and close ties with the web profession in the UK and beyond, we’re very confident of achieving that.

The Web Directions approach

Unlike many conferences, rather than calling for papers and speakers, we have a editorial approach - we put together programs based on current trends in the industry, and seek out speakers who are working in those areas to give inspiring, entertaining, but most importantly practical presentations. Take a look at our blog and resources site to see slides and hear podcasts from our previous events.

But as important as the content is, conferences are also about connecting with your peers - making new connections, and strengthening existing ones, sharing know-how and expertise, finding an expert, or new clients. At Web Directions events we pay careful attention to this side of things with social events, and innovative use of social software to help build and strengthen those relationships.

With all our conferences and events our commitment is to

• bring together the best possible speakers - knowledgeable, entertaining, inspiring real world experts
• cover the issues, technologies, concepts and techniques web professionals need right now
• keep a clear separation between conference content and commercial communication - we have a clear no "pay to speak" policy
• provide the best possible value for our attendees - we try to deliver as much as possible, for as little as possible.
• help attendees connect with their peers through social events, and our own online networks like tweeps

In short - we put together the events we'd want to attend, and we trust you'll want to as well.

About the founders

Maxine Sherrin

Maxine has developed and maintained the large collection of web development resources at Westciv from the early days of web standards. Since this time, she has been involved in the development of Westciv’s long standing cross platform CSS Editor, Style Master, which these resources support. In 2004 Maxine was one of the co-founders of the Web Directions series of conferences and workshops.

John Allsopp

John is a co-founder of the Web Directions conference series, and author of one of the earliest books on Microformats, as well as Developing with Web Standards. As a software developer, long standing web development speaker, writer, evangelist and self proclaimed expert, he’s spent the last 15 years working with and developing for the web.

As the head developer of the leading cross platform CSS development tool Style Master, and developer and publisher of renowned training courses and learning resources on CSS and standards based development, and author of the highly regarded “Dao of Web Design” he has been widely recognized as a leader in the fields of web design and development. John lives in Sydney.

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