About Web Directions | Web Directions South 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 and Web Direc­tions North, are held annually in Sydney, Australia and Vancouver, Canada, and 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.

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 meetweaver

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 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 these fields. John lives in Sydney.

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