Conference Speakers

Jim Heid: Conference Chair

Your host at Web Design World, Jim Heid is one of the most experienced technology writers and instructors in the world. His 24-year career began at the dawn of the personal computer revolution, when he quit his job as a typographer to become technical editor of Kilobaud, one of the first computer magazines. He's been online since 1980, when he fired up a 300-baud modem and logged onto The Source, an early online service.

Since 1998, Jim has served as Conference Chair for over a dozen Thunder Lizard conferences, and has spoken to thousands of Web professionals on subjects ranging from typography to streaming media. As Conference Chair, he is responsible for planning the editorial scope of each event, recruiting speakers, and planning session content.

Jim has been a Contributing Editor and columnist for Macworld magazine since 1984, specializing in digital media topics ranging from Web design to DVD authoring. He has also written for the Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, PC World, and Internet World, and has taught at the University of Hawaii, the Center for Creative Imaging in Camden, Maine, and at dozens of conferences and industry events in between.

DL Byron

Byron is the Principal of Textura Design, Inc. He first stole Zeldman’s code in 1997, then lived dotcoms, dotcom crashes, Clip-n-Seal, and now he is evangelizing Standards-based design, writing a New Riders book about blogging, and speaking at conferences. With more than eleven years of experience, Byron is an expert blogger, web designer and developer. An entrepreneur and an inventor, he also consults with clients, co-founded the Blog Business Summit, and publishes a network of successful blogs, including one of the first business blogs.

Dan Cederholm

Dan Cederholm is a Web designer and author living in Massachusetts. He¹s the founder of SimpleBits, LLC,  a tiny design studio.

A recognized expert in the field of standards-based web design, Dan co-founded the wine community site, Cork¹d and has worked with Google, MTV, ESPN, Fast Company, Blogger, Odeo (and others), as well as collaborating with Happy Cog on selected projects. He embraces flexible, adaptable design using web standards through his client work, writing, and speaking.

Dan is the author of two best-selling books, Web Standards Solutions (Friends of Ed) and Bulletproof Web Design, Second Edition (New Riders). Dan also runs the popular weblog SimpleBits, where he writes articles and commentary on the Web, technology, and life. He also plays a mean ukulele and occasionally wears a baseball cap.

Brian Fling

Brian has worked in the web for over 10 years. He began his web career producing the first animated series distributed through the Internet. Over the years he has worked in every facet of interactive design and development, managing both enterprise web projects as well as small web teams. It has been this experience and insight that has compelled Brian to focus on providing Blue Flavor clients with developing their interactive and web publishing strategies.

Brian has also been a leader in the field of mobile experience for over five years. He has worked with several Fortune 500 companies to help design and develop their mobile experiences. Brian is a frequent speaker and author on the issues of mobile design, the mobile web and mobile user experience.

He has recently authored the dotMobi Mobile Web Developers Guide, the first free publication to cover mobile web design and development from start to finish. Brian also runs mobiledesign.org one of the largest online communities focused on mobile design.

Dion Hinchcliffe

Dion Hinchcliffe is Founder and Chief Technology Officer for the Enterprise Web 2.0 advisory and consulting firm Hinchcliffe & Company, based in Alexandria, Virginia. A veteran of software development, Dion has been working for two decades with leading-edge methods to accelerate project schedules and raise the bar for software quality. He has extensive practical experience with enterprise technologies and he consults, speaks and writes prolifically on IT and software architecture. Dion still works in the trenches with enterprise IT clients in the federal government and Fortune 1000. He also is the creator of and instructor for Web 2.0 University, which provides Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 and Ajax premier training events for private corporations and the general public. He also speaks and publishes about Web 2.0 and SOA; he is working on a book about Web 2.0 for Addison-Wesley and is Editor-in-Chief of the upcoming Real World Ajax. He is also currently Editor-in-Chief of the Web 2.0 Journal and former Editor-in-Chief AjaxWorld Magazine.

Lance Loveday

Lance Loveday is the Founder and CEO of Closed Loop Marketing, an online marketing company dedicated to helping clients understand and maximize the return on their Web investments. Drawing on 10 years of experience in user psychology, economics, usability testing and design, Lance works directly with companies like Hewlett-Packard, InsWeb, SalesForce.com and Quicken Loans to create end-to-end marketing campaigns with measurable ROI. Lance is a regular speaker at industry conferences and produces custom training seminars on the topics of online marketing strategy, increasing online conversion, search engine marketing, usability consulting, online lead generation, information architecture and ROI analysis (closed loop marketing). With a knack (and a passion) for making online marketing exciting and engaging for novice and expert alike, Lance is currently working on a New Riders book on conversion marketing and Web design, due out in 2007.

Joe Marini

Joe Marini has been active in the Web and graphics industry for more than 15 years. He was an original member of the Dreamweaver engineering team at Macromedia, and has also held prominent roles in creating products such as QuarkXPress, mFactory's mTropolis, and Extensis QX-Tools. He is a regularly featured speaker at industry conferences and has authored or co-authored several books on Web development. His book The Document Object Model is widely regarded as the definitive resource for working with the DOM.

Joanne McLernon

Joanne is a ten-year veteran in usability and experience design whose clients have included Intuit, BrownCo (now eTrade), TripAdvisor and adidas.

Currently, she sets up usability testing programs, leads user research planning, and is moving into advanced product-experience testing. Her forte is improving experimental design in usability studies. She would like to erase the word "usability" from the language and make user-centered design synonymous with good business design.

Eric Meyer

Eric Meyer is an internationally recognized expert in CSS and the use of web standards, and has been working on the web since 1993. In that time, he has written a wide variety of tutorials, articles, and books devoted to helping designers and developers improve their web skills. He is the best-selling CSS author and best-recognized CSS authority in the world. His seven books have been translated into six languages and have sold in the hundreds of thousands.

Eric is the principal of Complex Spiral Consulting, which focuses on helping clients use standards to cut costs and improve user experience. In that capacity, he has assisted organizations from universities to government laboratories to Fortune 500 companies; some recent and notable clients include America On-Line, Apple Computer, Macromedia, Sandia National Laboratory, and Wells Fargo Bank.

Steve Mulder

Steve Mulder is author of The User Is Always Right: A Practical Guide to Creating and Using Personas for the Web, and a regular speaker at web conferences. With over ten years of experience in user research, information architecture, interaction design, and usability, Steve practices what he preaches by delivering successful user experiences that drive business results. He has brought his expertise to a wide range of companies, including Morgan Stanley, PC Connection, 3M, CVS, Estee Lauder, Talbots, Wired, Terra Lycos, and ZDNet.

Garrett Murray

Garrett has been designing and developing for the web for nine years. He has a broad client list that includes the United Nations Development Programme, Pfizer, and Columbia University. Throughout his career, he has placed an emphasis on building efficient and elegant web applications with a focus on user experience.

A technology addict, Garrett started learning Perl at the tender age of 16. Shortly after, it was Javascript, PHP, then ASP, ColdFusion and everything in between. Recently, Garrett has been focusing on developing with Ruby on Rails.

In 2003, Garrett wrote and released xPad, a Mac OS X application praised for its ease of use. Recently, he released SimpleLog, a Ruby on Rails weblogging application, which helps users focus on writing through an efficiently designed interface that eliminates clutter.

Joshua Porter

Joshua is responsible for overseeing the development of the User Interface Engineering's web sites, managing UIE's top notch team of web developers. Josh is also a leading member of UIE's research team and has written extensively on such topics as Web 2.0, Ajax, web standards, and on-site search systems. Josh shares many of his design thoughts and commentaries on his personal blog: Bokardo.com.

Josh received his Master’s degree in Information Technology and his Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He brings with him extensive experience and knowledge in the areas of human factors, usability testing, and web site design and development.

Greg Rewis

With nearly 20 years of computer industry experience, Greg spends up to 200 days of the year on the road, talking with customers, giving product demonstrations at trade shows and seminars, speaking at industry conferences, and leading specialized advanced training sessions featuring Adobe's Web Tools product line. He is the co-author of the soon to be released book Mastering CSS with Dreamweaver CS3.

Jared Spool

If you've ever seen Jared speak about usability, you know that he's one of the most effective, knowledgeable communicators on the subject today. What you probably don't know is that he has guided the research agenda and built User Interface Engineering into the largest research organization of its kind in the world. He's been working in the field of usability and design since 1978, before the term "usability" was ever associated with computers.

Jared spends his time working with the research teams at the company, helps clients understand how to solve their design problems, explains to reporters and industry analysts what the current state of design is all about, and is a top-rated speaker at more than 20 conferences every year. He is also the conference chair and keynote speaker at the annual User Interface Conference, is on the faculty of the Tufts University Gordon Institute, and manages to squeeze in a fair amount of writing time.

Stephanie Sullivan

Founder and principal of web standards redesign company W3Conversions, Stephanie Sullivan is a Dreamweaver, accessibility, CSS and XHTML expert, whose services are in demand by top firms across the United States. She's a top gun that companies go to for troubleshooting problems, training their web team, or to work behind-the-scenes transforming their in-house designs into functioning standard-based websites.

She wrote the CSS Layouts included in Dreamweaver CS3, serves as co-lead of the influential Web Standards Project (WaSP) Adobe Task Force and is a partner at Community MX, a site offering over 2,300 tutorials to web developers seeking to increase their skills. Though an admitted workaholic, she escapes from the little people inside her computer to play beach volleyball. Her guilty pleasure? 80's music.

Jeffrey Zeldman

Jeffrey Zeldman is the founder and executive creative director of Happy Cog, a web design agency with offices in New York City and Philadelphia. In 1995, the former art director and copywriter launched one of the first personal sites and began publishing web design tutorials. In 1998 he co-founded The Web Standards Project, a grassroots coalition that brought standards to our browsers. That same year he launched A List Apart “for people who make websites.”

He has written many articles and two books, notably the foundational web standards text Designing With Web Standards, now in its second edition.
Jeffrey speaks everywhere and sits on the Advisory Boards of the SXSW Interactive Festival, Rosenfeld Media, and the Dandelife Social Biography Network.