About Web Directions

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, Web Direc­tions USA, Web Direc­tions @media and Web Direc­tions Unplugged are held annu­ally in Syd­ney, Aus­tralia, Atlanta, Geor­gia, Lon­don UK, and Seat­tle WA 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.

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 web field. John lives in Sydney.

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