Web Directions Year round learning for product, design and engineering professionals

tl;dr; today we launched “The Wrap”, an in-depth, session by session wrap-up of our Respond conference, the next best thing to being there. Get your (free) copy now.

The details

I hope that long time attendees and others following along here at Web Directions have noticed quite a few changes here lately (don’t worry, a long overdue aesthetic one is in the pipeline too).

We’ve not made a song and dance about our 10th anniversary, rather we’ve knuckled down and made significant efforts to reinvigorate our events, and much more, to commemorate a pretty significant milestone. Over the last few months we’ve

• * expanded Respond from a single day conference in Sydney to a pair of 2 day conferences in Sydney and Melbourne.
• * held a brand new, successful Government focused conference, Transform
• * expanded Code, our Front End conference to include Sydney as well as Melbourne
• * rebooted our long standing Web Directions conference as Direction (more about this in the coming week, as we launch the lineup for 2016)

And that’s just the start. We also

• * launched Scroll Magazine to coincide with Respond, and each of our major events will be accompanied by a new edition of Scroll, with profiles, interviews, articles and more. Have you got your free digital copy yet?
• * started a weekly schedule of articles, videos, profiles and more here at the site. Why not subscribe to our RSS feed, old school style?

And today we’re launching something I’ve wanted to do for a long long time, Wrap.

Introducing “Wrap”

Conferences like ours hope to both inspire, and to introduce ideas, technologies and practices that improve the work you do and the decisions you make. One of our goals when we put together a conference program is to provide immediate, actionable value to those who attend–one of my favourite comments I hear from attendees is “I can’t wait to put this into action on Monday morning”.

But I also find that as the “high” of attending an event fades, so too can many of the ideas associated with it. This is something we’ve long looked to address, beginning with post-conference podcasts of each conference session (from as far back as 2005, in fact) and post-conference videos in more recent years.

Wrap is something new again. With it we’re looking to distil and make available the wisdom and knowledge of each conference, making the experience of attending even more valuable and providing a reference point for when you can’t quite remember what that speaker said. And for those who couldn’t attend, it’s still an invaluable resource, summarising the key points, ideas and takeaways from every session, and capturing some of the flavour of the event.

Ricky Onsman, who has attended more of our events than anyone else, even travelling all the way to Canada for one of our events there, has for some months been working with us as editor of Scroll, and also takes the helm of Wrap.