Web Directions South 09

[Gruden]

October is going to be a huge month for the web in Australia with both the Web Directions South conference and the inaugural Web Week.

Web Directions brings together the many disciplines that shape the web – web design, front-end and back-end development, information architecture, interaction design, accessibility, data visualization and much more – and gives delegates four tracks of presentations to choose from. It is truly a huge event, quite likely the largest web related gathering in the southern hemisphere.

Web Week is a week long celebration of the Australian web industry with events ranging from Webjam, to art exhibitions, to meet ups, to indoor rock climbing.

A very nervous Mark, speaking at the first Web Directions in 2004


I’m enormously proud to have been invited to speak at Web Directions South 09. My first large-scale public speaking gig was at this event in 2004, back when it was held in one big room with one big audience. Since then the conference has gone from strength to strength, increasing in size each year and so I’m equally daunted about speaking this time.

My talk this year is called “Speed matters”; here is the description from the conference proceedings:

As we build richer, more complex web applications it’s easy to forget that speed is the cornerstone of user experience. Bing have found that a 2 second delay reduces revenue by 4%. Google know that half a second delay drops traffic by 20%. AOL have shown that users with a speedy experience stay 50% longer than users who have to wait. The evidence is clear – speed matters.

What’s more, most latency comes from the front-end, not the backend so the fixes are not specific to a particular platform. This session will examine a range of techniques from DOM & CSS tricks to web server and HTTP tweaks that can help improve front-end performance by 25-50%.

Whether you’re looking to save bandwidth, increase your conversion rate, retain visitors, save time or just make your users happy – the speed of your site matters.

The conference is on October 8 & 9 with two days for workshops on the 6th & 7th. Tickets are still available so get along if you can.



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