Meet other developers and web creators to discuss creating websites to web standards.

Tickets now available for “Move over Web Accessibility, inclusivity is heading straight at you!”

Posted: January 29th, 2010 | Author: bendodson | Filed under: Announcements | No Comments »

You can sign up for our event on 15th February, “Move over Web Accessibility, inclusivity is heading straight at you!” via Eventbrite at http://lwsaccessibility.eventbrite.com/.

Event Details

Sandi Wassmer, Web Accessibility Enthusiast, Inclusivity Advocate, Action for Blind People Blogger and MD of digital agency, Copious, will be talking about why she is rooting for Inclusive Design to lead Accessibility.

We’ll be starting with a couple of lightning talks (please contact Ben Dodson via ben.dodson@londonwebstandards.org if you have something you’d like to present for 5 minutes) at 7pm before moving on to our main presentation at 7:30pm.  There will then be a Q&A session followed by informal discussions.

We look forward to seeing you there!


January 2010 Roundup

Posted: January 27th, 2010 | Author: bendodson | Filed under: Announcements | 1 Comment »

Hi Everyone,

First of all a big thank you to Ben Weiner for his presentation on Web Fonts and for all of you who attended. There is a writeup of the event available on our blog.

Next Meeting

I’m happy to announce that our next talk at London Web Standards will be on the topic “Move over Web Accessibility, inclusivity is heading straight at you!” presented by Sandi Wassmer (@SandiWassmer). The event will take place at 7pm at the Square Pig in Holborn on Monday 15th February – tickets will be available on EventBrite at 3pm this Friday (29th Jan).

Sandi is a Web Accessibility Enthusiast, Inclusivity Advocate, Action for Blind People Blogger and MD of digital agency, Copious, and will be talking about why she is rooting for Inclusive Design to lead Accessibility.

Attendance

Over the past couple of meetups we have had record numbers of people signup for our events which has led to us having to create and administer waiting lists. Unfortunately, a large number of people become unable to attend and don’t notify me leading to empty places at the event which could have been filled by people who weren’t quick enough to get a ticket. If I could remind everybody to be courteous to our presenters and other members and let me know in advance if you are unable to attend as otherwise we will need to introduce a more vigilant registration process which I don’t think should be necessary.

Design Competition

We’re planning on overhauling our website shortly and so will be running a design competition so you can show off your creative sides – the winning design will be used for the new londonwebstandards.org website! We’ll be releasing further details shortly.

Job Vacancies

We are hoping to launch a job board at some point in the future but for the time being I’ll be adding any relevant job vacancies to these monthly emails. If you are interested in a vacancy or have one you would like to add then let me know.

* Unboxed Consulting build Ruby on Rails web solutions and iphone apps for the media and creative industries. We’re passionate about innovation and quality and our web solutions illustrate this. Unboxed are looking for a front-end developer to join the team. If you can work CSS and javascript magic and want to work in an Agile environment get in touch with richard.stobart@unboxedconsulting.com

* PHP / XHTML Developer in Pimlico, London – New media agency based in Pimlico, London looking for a full-time web developer to take a lead on a number of new and exciting projects. As an agency specialising in video, the majority of their previous websites have been made with Adobe Flash but they now require a developer who will be able to build both brochureware and basic CMS sites using a combination of PHP and XHTML / CSS along with jQuery or an equivalent JavaScript framework. Due to the nature of the previous websites, your role will be unique as on the only standards based web developer on-site with a wide ranging brief to help shape the agencies website portfolio. You will have direct input on how the development department should be run leading to excellent experience for future roles. For more information or to apply for this role, please forward your CV to me via recruitment@bendodson.com or visit http://bendodson.com/recruitment/

Until Next Time

I’ll be posting another message here and on our Twitter feed (@webstandards) on Friday once tickets are available for the Web Accessibility event.

Ben Dodson
LWS Organiser


Important changes to London Web Standards

Posted: September 2nd, 2009 | Author: bendodson | Filed under: Announcements | Tags: | No Comments »

Dear London Web Standardistas,

We have a number of important updates to share with the community today.

Our beloved Jeff Van Campen is moving on to become a father for the first time and has handed over the important activity of organising London Web Standards to a new group of enthusiasts. We would like to wish Jeff the best of luck in future and look forward to seeing him sneak out of from the clutches to parenthood every now and then to discuss the important matters of properly formed HTML5, rounded corners with CSS3, linked data, RDFa and so on!

London Web Standards is moving from strength to strength. We have now set up our own dedicated web site at http://www.londonwebstandards.org and have our own professional logo. This megalithic structure will require looking after by a team of well rounded individuals who know a thing or two about these matters. At our handover meeting, we decided the following team structure:

Ben Dodson (@bendodson) will be the main organiser of events and the venue
Nick Smith (@twitrnick) and Jason Grant (@flexewebs) shall be documenting decisions and maintain the content on the web site
Rob Enslin (@robenslin) will be taking care of the social network engagement aspects of LWS
Joe Lanman (@joelanman) will be in charge of back end technical infrastructure for LWS web site

Our last two meetings have been held at ‘The Square Pig’ near Holborn and we will be continuing to use this venue for the foreseeable future. It’s a great central venue with projection facilities and good beer…

Now our website is up and running, we would like to grow the group further in a very open manner and have therefore decided to move over to Upcoming for event organisation as well as Yahoo Groups for various discussions. Our Twitter channel (@webstandards) is still open as usual. We’ll be running a website design competition shortly (more details at the meetup) and hopefully all of the above changes will become a lot clearer then!

Please make sure to signup to the new Yahoo Group as we will be sending all future emails from there. We will no longer be using meetup.com after this months meeting.

We will go over all of these changes at the next meeting which is on 7th September at 7pm at The Square Pig in Holborn and will feature Michael Smethurst (BBC Information Architect) and Yves Raimond (BBC Software Engineer) who will be leading a discussion on Linked Data. They will be covering the basics of Linked Data, and will then be taking any questions or comments. We will also be running some quick-fire 5 minute warm up speeches at the beginning of the meeting covering a wide ranging number of topics. In our October meeting, Phil Archer will be giving a presentation on Mobile Web Best Practices and we have a presentation around web based typography planned for November. If you know of anybody who may want to present in the future, then please email Ben via ben.dodson@londonwebstandards.org

It’s going to be a busy time for us whilst we make the changes listed above but if you have any suggestions on how we can do things better then please let us know by emailing organisers@londonwebstandards.org – we look forward to seeing you on 7th September.

London Web Standards Team