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 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 thirty 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 Senior Contributor of Macworld magazine since 1984, specializing in digital media topics. He's the author of The Macintosh iLife series of books, the world's top selling books on Apple's iLife suite. 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.

Jeffrey Zeldman

In 1995, Jeffrey Zeldman launched one of the first personal sites and began publishing web design tutorials. In 1998, the former art director and copywriter 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.

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

A recognized expert in the field of standards-based web design, Dan Cederholm co-founded the wine community site, Cork'd and has worked with Google, MTV, ESPN, Fast Company, Blogger (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.

Dana E. Chisnell

Dana is an independent usability consultant and user researcher who founded UsabilityWorks in San Francisco, CA. She has been doing usability research, user interface design, and technical communications consulting and development since 1982.

Dana took part in her first usability test in 1983 while she was working as a research assistant at the Document Design Center. It was on a mainframe office system developed by IBM. Since then, she has worked with hundreds of study participants, for dozens of clients, to learn about design issues in software, hardware, web sites, online services, games, and ballots (and probably other things that are better forgotten about). She has helped companies like Yahoo!, Intuit, AARP, Wells Fargo, E*TRADE, Sun Microsystems, and RLG (now OCLC) perform usability tests and other user research to inform and improve the designs of their products and services.

Dana's colleagues consider her an expert in usability issues for older adults and plain language. (She says she's still learning.) Lately, she has been working on issues related to ballot design and usability and accessibility in voting.

Bill Cullifer

Bill Cullifer is founder of the World Organization of Webmasters (WOW), a non-profit professional association established in 1996, providing community, education and certification for Web professionals worldwide. As the organization's executive director, Cullifer participates in a variety of industry, government and educational advisory boards that assist WOW in developing and delivering professional standards and improving communication between all Web professionals and business and industry. He acts as the organization's chief evangelist to stimulate the continued growth and opportunities of the Web. He also provides daily podcast regarding a variety of Web professional topics.

Aaron Gustafson

After getting hooked on the web in 1996 and spending several years pushing pixels and bits for the likes of IBM and Konica Minolta, Aaron Gustafson founded his own web consultancy: Easy! Designs LLC. Aaron is a Group Manager of the Web Standards Project (WaSP) and is a member of the Guild of Accessible Web Designers (GAWDS). He serves as Technical Editor for A List Apart and has built a small library of writing and editing credits in both the print and web worlds. Aaron has graced the stage at numerous conferences and is frequently called on to provide web standards training in both the public and private sector.

Shawn Henry

Shawn Henry leads worldwide education and outreach promoting web accessibility for people with disabilities at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Before joining the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), she developed and implemented strategies to optimize user interface design for usability and accessibility with Fortune 500 companies, nonprofit organizations, education providers, and research centers. Shawn focuses her personal passion for accessibility on bringing together the needs of individuals and the goals of organizations in designing human-computer interfaces. Her most recent book, Just Ask: Integrating Accessibility Throughout Design, offers an approach for developing products that are more usable for everyone.

Amy Konefal

As Director of Search Engine Marketing at Closed Loop Marketing, Amy brings extensive expertise in both paid search and organic search engine optimization to every client account. She has worked in the online marketing industry for more than four years, managing campaigns for both B2B and B2C clients across a wide variety of industries. Amy's approach is to blend both paid and organic search into a complementary, holistic campaign focused on achieving client business goals and maximum ROI. She is certified as a Google Advertising Professional and a Yahoo Search Marketing Ambassador.

Having been a teacher for five years prior to entering the world of Search Engine Marketing, Amy has a natural gift for explaining new information to clients in a manner that is both understandable and relevant to their specific industry. Her goal in working with clients is to develop and execute sound marketing strategies for maximizing their return on investment, while also explaining the complexities of Search Engine Marketing in a way that makes them feel comfortable and confident with their search campaigns.

Nishant Kothary

A creative schizophrenic at heart, Nishant was once human – pure flesh and blood – but now seems to be best identified by a set of IP addresses. Upon discovering the Internet in 2000, Nishant made his transformation from human to emoticon over a number of years that involved traversing a variety of roles: from teaching standards-based development and interactive media at Purdue, to writing books on Flash, to overseeing the release of Amazon Unbox, to working as a UX designer on Amazon Kindle, to working with the top design agencies in the world.

Nishant has worn the hats of designer, developer, business owner, marketer and much in between, eventually finding himself at the Death Star — Microsoft — where he now works as a Senior Evangelist. As and when he can, he helps organize and presents at national and international conferences on computer graphics, web technologies and design, such as, the annual ACM SIGGRAPH Conference, Conference on Designing for User Experience, Webmaster Jam Session, MIX, and others.

Nishant lives in Kirkland, Washington with his wife, Pita, who effortlessly manages him and their mini-zoo consisting of a Weimaraner by the name of Yoshi, and two bossy tabbies, Izzy and Mango. Check out Nishant’s severely neglected blog at rainypixels.com.

Ivaylo Lenkov

Ivaylo Lenkov is the founder and CEO of SiteKreator, a leading business website design tool. Prior to SiteKreator, Lenkov was a principal at Studio VISIA, an interactive agency based in Los Angeles with a client roster including Paramount Pictures, Viacom, Vivendi and others. Before that, he led the development of one of the early VoIP software phones, IRIS Phone, and the peer-to-peer network operating system RoNET. In his free time Lenkov is an extreme skier, passionate soccer player, and loves to push the speed limits of his Yamaha YZF600.

Lance Loveday

As the CEO of Closed Loop Marketing (CLM) Lance Loveday is a recognized thought leader in the online marketing industry as well as co-author of the breakout business strategy book Web Design for ROI, which was published in 2007 by New Riders Press. He is a regular speaker at industry events where his strategic, humorous and down-to-earth approach inspires designers, online marketers and business executives alike.

Lance's experience in the world of search marketing stretches back to 1998, when he became web site manager for a Fortune 100 company in Silicon Valley. During this stint, he developed a passion for transparent, results-focused online marketing that motivated him to start Closed Loop Marketing. Since its inception in 2001, CLM has become a highly sought after agency serving a wide array of clients—from startups to big brands like Hewlett-Packard, Brocade, and Lockheed Martin. To each client, CLM brings a deep expertise in not only online advertising platforms but also the user experience—what happens "after the click." It's this combination of skill, experience and knowledge to which Lance attributes his company's success.

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 helps organizations innovate on customer relationships using social media, social networking, rich interfaces, and emerging digital interactions. He is also the 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 13 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 Adidas, TD Waterhouse, TripAdvisor, HumanaOne, Talbots, PC Connection, 3M, CVS, and Estee Lauder.

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.

Dan Rubin

Dan Rubin is a highly accomplished user interface designer and usability consultant, with over ten years of experience as a leader in the fields of web standards and usability, specifically focusing on the use of (X)HTML and CSS to streamline development and increase flexibility and accessibility. His passion for all things creative and artistic isn't a solely selfish endeavor either—you'll frequently find him waxing educational about a cappella jazz and barbershop harmony, interface design, usability, web standards, typography, and graphic design in general.

In addition to his contributions to sites including Blogger, the CSS Zen Garden, Yahoo! Small Business and Microsoft's ASP.net portal, Dan is a contributing author of Cascading Style Sheets: Separating Content from Presentation (2nd Edition, friends of ED, 2003), a technical reviewer for Beginning CSS Web Development (Apress, 2006) and The Art & Science of CSS (SitePoint, 2007), coauthor of Pro CSS Techniques (Apress, 2006), and Web Standards Creativity (friends of ED, 2007), writes about web standards, design and life in general on his blog, SuperfluousBanter.org, and spends his professional time on a variety of online and offline projects for Sidebar Creative and Black Seagull.

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.