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.

Glenn Barnett

Glenn Barnett is a principal consultant at Molecular, an Internet consulting firm in Boston. He currently handles the technical aspects of new business opportunities. Originally a developer on the Engineering team, Glenn built applications for clients such as American Express, Fidelity Investments, MFS Investment Management and Showtime Networks.

Tim Bray

Tim Bray managed the Oxford English Dictionary project at the University of Waterloo in 1987-1989, co-founded Open Text Corporation (Nasdaq:OTEX) in 1989, launched one of the first public web search engines in 1995, co-invented XML 1.0 and co-edited "Namespaces in XML" between 1996 and 1999, founded Antarctica Systems (antarctica.net) in 1999, and served as a Tim Berners-Lee appointee on the W3C Technical Architecture Group in 2002-2004. Currently, he serves as Director of Web Technologies at Sun Microsystems, publishes a popular weblog, and co-chairs the IETF AtomPub Working Group.

Andy Budd

Andy Budd is the creative director of Clearleft, a user experience consultancy based in Brighton, England. Andy wrote the best selling book, "CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions." In this book, Andy shares his years of experience in creating attractive, standards compliant websites. Andy's design experience and knowledge has been called upon many times as a judge in web design awards, most notably the Bubu Awards, the ReUSEIT Contest and the Web Standards Awards, which he founded in 2004. Andy currently sits on the advisory board for .Net magazine, the UK's leading web development periodical.

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 AjaxWorld Magazine.

Tom Green

Tom Green is a professor of Interactive Multimedia through Humber College's School of Media Studies in Toronto. He's the author of "Flash Professional 8: Training From the Source," published by Macromedia Press, "Foundation Flash 8 Video," and "From After Effects To Flash: poetry in motion graphics," published by friendsofED. Tom is also a partner at CommunityMX, a columnist at Digital-Web. com magazine, and a member of the Adobe's international Community Experts group. He has spoken at conferences around the world including FlashintheCan, Web Design World, Adobe Max and SparkEurope.

Nate Koechley

One of the first web developers at Yahoo!, Nate Koechley has been instrumental in creating and defining the practice of Web development and front-end engineering. Through evolving roles as developer, manager, and evangelist on both the development and user experience and design sides of the company, Nate has championed modern standards-based Web development, a commitment to accessibility, code and pattern library creation, and open-source and blogging initiatives. Through it all, Nate focuses on the intersection and coordination of design and development, helping teams understand "why" in addition to "how". Nate speaks worldwide about the intersections of Design and Technology, and blogs occasionally at http://nate.koechley.com/blog/.

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.

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.

John Nack

John Nack is a Sr. Product Manager for Adobe Photoshop. Prior to joining Adobe John was a Web designer and animator at AGENCY.COM New York, where we developed online content for clients such as Gucci, Nike, British Airways, and Coca-Cola. That experience convinced him that design tools could and had to be better, leading him to join Adobe's Internet Products Group in 2000. John has been on the Photoshop team since 2002 and has worked on features such as Adobe Camera Raw, Smart Objects, Vanishing Point, the File Browser, and Adobe Bridge.

Michael Ninness

Michael moved to Seattle in 1989 to study for a Graphic Design BFA at the University of Washington and fell in love with the Pacific Northwest. He paid his way through design school by teaching professional designers and photographers digital imaging tools and techniques. Michael now has over seven years experience in the graphics software industry as a product manager and user interface designer of products for creative professionals at Extensis, Microsoft and Adobe. In early 2005, Michael returned to his training roots and joined the team at Lynda.com, an award-winning education provider of self-paced online video training, CD-ROMs, books and events for designers, photographers, developers, instructors, students and hobbyists.

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.

Rob Orsini

Rob Orsini is an open source developer living in northern California. He's currently working for O'Reilly Media in their production software group. Previously, Rob was the webmaster at Industrial Light & Magic, where he developed applications in support of the special effects industry. Rob has been programming the web since 1998, and upon discovering Rails, hopes to continue for many more years to come.

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.