About Web Directions East
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 East (in Tokyo, Japan), Web Directions South (in Sydney, Australia), Web Directions North (North America) and now Web Directions @media (in London, England) 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.
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
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.
