WebVisions is a 3-day web conference taking place from May 20-22, 2009 in Portland, Oregon. The conference will feature over 50 speakers in keynotes, sessions, panels and workshops on topics related to web design, technology, user experience and business strategy. Conference passes start at $150, providing access to keynote speeches from experts such as Mark Frauenfelder and Jared Spool, as well as half-day workshops on subjects including CSS, design methods, and search engine optimization.

1. start webvisionsevent.com

2. intro webvisionsevent.com WebVisions explores the future of the web with an all-star lineup of over 50 visionary speakers. It’s a conference that’s driven by innovation.

3. when webvisionsevent.com WebVisions is held from May 20-22, 2009 at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, Oregon. Portland is a city that’s known for coffee, micro breweries, book stores, sustainability, urban planning, open source software, entrepreneurs and web start-ups. It’s a fun place for a conference.

4. value webvisionsevent.com WebVisions offers value. Keynotes, sessions, panels and half-day workshops reveal the trends and new ideas in web design, technology, user experience and business strategy. And it’s one of the most affordable web conferences in the world. Conference passes start at $150.

5. keynote lead-in webvisionsevent.com Meet our speakers.

6. Keynote: Mark F. webvisionsevent.com keynote: mark frauenfelder “ The Rise of Modern Making” Mark Frauenfelder tells how home-based innovators are making incredible advances in technology with very small budgets. With 3D printing and rapid prototyping technology, a person can create amazing things in their garage or spare bedroom that would have required millions of dollars and a state-of-the-art facility just a few years ago. Modern Making is fun, educational, and given the current state of our economy, potentially world changing. Mark is an author and illustrator, the editor-in-chief of MAKE magazine and co-founder of BoingBoing.net. His new book “The World in Your Hands” will be published in 2009.

7. Keynote: Jared S. webvisionsevent.com keynote: jared spool “ Cooking Up Gourmet User Experiences on a Fast-Food Budget” Jared Spool observes that we all want to make our designs be the best they could be. We'd like to eliminate all the frustration that our users experience and have them talking about how delightful the experience is. Getting everyone to agree on that is easy. What's more difficult is getting approval to spend money or take the time necessary to make it happen. Jared spends his time working with the research teams at UIE, 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 over 20 conferences every year.

8. Keynote: Virb.com webvisionsevent.com keynotes: brad smith and ryan sims “ Carpe Futurum: Building Communities Without the Blueprints” Online communities have been shifting and evolving since the dial tone squeal of the first modems. As we've seen before, it's impossible to predict when and where the next shift(s) will happen. Therefore, what will the future of social bring? Will we see one monolithic community rise, then fall, when another takes it place? Will people flock to smaller, niche sites that better fit their personalities? When there is no blueprint, where do you begin? Brad Smith is the co-founder and CEO of Virb.com, the newly re-engineered social media network. Ryan Sims is Virb’s lead designer. [ Brad ] [ Ryan ]

9. Workshops webvisionsevent.com workshops Workshops with the Experts At only $375 apiece, workshops offer an in-depth view of topics ranging from design and user experience to CSS and programming for design patterns.

10. Workshop: CSS Spackle Day webvisionsevent.com workshop: css spackle day “ CSS Spackle Day” workshop A detailed and honest look into CSS 2.1 and Web browsers. Designers and developers will be empowered to create well-crafted sites and applications using semantic markup along with CSS layouts. This workshop is designed to promote true understanding of the cascade and application hierarchy: origin, sort order, specificity. Molly will discuss selectors in depth, providing insight into how to best use the application hierarchy within CSS to not only style websites, but also manage and maintain them effectively. Molly Holzschlag is a well-known Web standards advocate, instructor, and author. She is Group Lead for the Web Standards Project (WaSP) and an invited expert to the HTML and GEO working groups at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Among her thirty-plus books is the “The Zen of CSS Design,” co-authored with Dave Shea.

11. Workshop: Good design faster webvisionsevent.com workshop: good design faster “ Good Design Faster” workshop Make it great. Colleagues and clients always want results sooner. How can you deliver without compromising quality? In this workshop, Leah Buley will show you how to use design sprints and lo-fi design techniques to achieve remarkable productivity in relatively short time. Leah Buley is an Experience Designer for Adaptive Path. She speaks and writes about methods for making user experience design more successful inside of business organizations. Leah has worked with clients in a variety of fields, including financial, legal, telecom, social media, and non-profit.

12. Workshop: Mental models webvisionsevent.com workshop: mental models “ Mental Models” workshop In this half-day workshop, Indi Young, author of “Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior,” will teach you how to better understand the user experience through the use of mental models before making design and strategic decisions. Mental models provide design teams with a very clear picture of what their users are trying to accomplish, so the product or design can be structured accordingly. Indi Young is an author, speaker, consultant, and co-founder of Adaptive Path. If the common refrain at the end of a day was, "Who wants to go for chocolate?" instead of "Who want to go for drinks?" then Indi would be the most well-connected designer in the area.

13. Workshop: Paper prototyping webvisionsevent.com workshop: paper prototyping “ Paper Prototyping” workshop So your company went agile and it isn't working so well. Or maybe your design, development and writing teams and have a difficult time syncing up on a project. Or perhaps you find out after you have built your website, web application or intranet that there are major usability issues that would be too costly to fix. In this workshop, Justin Garrity will provide an overview to the Paper Prototyping methodology, followed by a collaborative portion which will allow participants to prototype a web application and test it with actual users. Justin Garrity is the new User Experience director at WebTrends. His mandate is to focus on user centered design, refined data visualization, and narrative context driven workflow. Formerly the Creative Director at Pop Art, working with interactive clients in designing web applications, online advertising, websites, and creating interactive strategies.

14. Workshop: Search engine tools webvisionsevent.com workshop: tips for using search engine tools to increase site traffic “ Tips for Using Search Engine Tools to Increase Site Traffic” workshop Vanessa Fox will show you how to use Web tools to their fullest potential, including tips and tricks that help you use the data to increase your traffic from organic search. She'll describe how to use these tools to diagnose issues with your site and be alerted to problems early. Vanessa Fox , creator of Google's Webmaster Central, is a “cyberspace visionary” and an expert in understanding customer acquisition from organic search. She shares her perspective on how this impacts marketing and user experience at Nine by Blue and provides authoritative search-friendly design patterns for developers at Jane and Robot.com. She’s also an entrepreneur-in-residence with Ignition Partners and Features Editor at Search Engine Land.

15. Workshop: Designing for content rich sites webvisionsevent.com workshop: designing for content-rich sites “ Designing for Content-Rich Sites” workshop Research has shown us how some sites, no matter what users are looking for, make it easy to always find the relevant information. Other sites, no matter how hard the users try, are too difficult and frustrating to navigate. In this workshop, Jared Spool will share the secret of designing sites rich in content, such that users are delighted and ready to return time after time. Jared Spool spends his time working with the research teams at UIE, 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 conference speaker. He is on the faculty of the Tufts University Gordon Institute, and manages to squeeze in a fair amount of writing time.

16. Workshop: Designing with patterns webvisionsevent.com workshop: designing with patterns “ Designing with Patterns” workshop What can you learn from others? That is the idea behind the growing number of design pattern libraries. Patterns form common solutions to recurring problems. In this workshop, Bill will survey the best pattern libraries and then take a deep-dive into 50+ patterns as well as anti-patterns (what not to mimic). A number of familiar web sites will be studied and several real world problems will form the basis for some hands-on activities for applying the patterns surveyed.. Bill Scott is the Director of User Interface Engineering at Netflix where he guides the UI Engineering team's efforts to continue Netflix's excellence in user experience, improve client performance and refactor the presentation tier to use the latest best practices for both the DHTML layer as well as the Java tier layer.

17. Workshop: From PSD to XHTML webvisionsevent.com workshop: from psd to xhtml + css 4tw! “ From PSD to XHTML+CSS 4TW!” workshop Digital images in GIF and JPEG format laid the foundation for what the Web is today, a visually engaging place for information and commerce. Yet going from a final design to crafting usable Web elements can be a daunting task if one doesn't know how to properly design for the medium or know the limitations of CSS-enabled designs. Christopher Schmitt is an award-winning Web designer who has been working with the Web since 1993, Christopher is the founder of Heat Vision, a new media publishing and design firm.

18. Workshop: Get to the point webvisionsevent.com workshop: get to the point “ Get to the Point” workshop How can you deliver your company's message in a simple, meaningful and memorable way, regardless of the setting? And how do you blend storytelling into delivering that "elevator speech?" This hands-on storytelling workshop will focus on how to get to the point and avoid the usual corporate babble that so many people default to when trying to explain just what they do and why anyone would care. Dave Yewman is a former newspaper reporter and columnist who has conducted media and presentation training sessions for thousands of executives at numerous companies, including Adidas, Craigslist, Digg, eHarmony, K-Swiss, Microsoft, Avenue A Razorfish, Reebok, and Vignette.

19. Workshop: Performance optimization webvisionsevent.com workshop: get to the point “ Performance Optimization for Web and Mobile” workshop Whether you're building traditional web sites, AJAX applications or cutting edge mobile web tools, speed is paramount. Despite this fact, a shocking number of web sites don't do the simple things necessary to make their sites run more quickly. Jason Grigsby was one of the project leads on the Obama iPhone Application and helped design the user interface for the Wall Street Journal's Blackberry application. He founded and organizes Mobile Portland, a local mobile development user group.

20. sessions and panels webvisionsevent.com Sessions and Panels Held all day on May 21 and 22, a conference pass provides full access to as many sessions and panels as you wish to attend.

21. pongu webvisionsevent.com “ Universal Design is Sexy” “ Pimp My Web Page” “ Decentralized Social Networks” “ Future of Organic Search” “ Twitter Marketing” “ Subject to Change” “ Web Design: The Good, the Bad and the Future” “ Graphic Storytelling in New Media” “ Future of Mobile” “ iPhone Intelligence” “ The End of Obsolescence” “ An Introduction to Cyborg Anthorpology” “ Future of Web Communities” “ From Idea to Startup in 21 Days” “ Development” “ Rich Interface” Behind Your UI” “ Designing Blogs” “ The Future of Work”

22. register webvisionsevent.com Explore the Future. Register today at webvisionsevent.com/register/ or contact Brad or Dana at (503) 230-2058 for group rates and special packages.