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Web Development, Web Design and Applications

Attending web development meetings, conferences, and exhibitions is an excellent way to expose yourself to new ideas and technologies that you may not be familiar with. Web design has the unique position of being an art as well as a science, as even the most technologically sound web site is useless if it does not draw the attention of the intended audience, is hard to navigate, or is simply unpleasant to look at.

By attending web development exhibitions you can see what the best and brightest minds in the field are doing to draw in the attention of customers and clients, and see firsthand what the competition is doing in these regards. More importantly, it allows you to gauge the effectiveness of these techniques without investing large amounts of time and money into the process. Bad ideas come to the surface just as easily as good ideas, and by attending exhibitions you can see everything that is on the cutting edge of web development technology.

While there are web development conferences, meetings, and exhibitions all over the world for web developers, there are a few right in London that are front runners in the race to bring the newest technologies and methodologies to the world. One of the biggest of these is the Learning Technologies conference in London, which has a significant amount of information at http://www.learningtechnologies.co.uk.

One of the things to keep an eye out for at these conferences is discussions regarding applications and website design. Nothing can draw more traffic to your pages quite like a well thought out and useful application that you can simply drop into your site and use. Most of these applications are released under open-source licenses and can be used on any site, though some of them have restrictions against commercial use.

By spending time at these conferences and meetings, you can see new applications in use and even speak with the developers of these applications, giving you a business advantage should your company decide to deploy these applications on your web site. Even if the application cannot be used for commercial purposes you can still take the idea and run with it, creating your own version of a similar application and reaping the rewards.

Another major conference that comes to London on a regular basis is the SES Conference and Expo. Focusing primarily on social media and social marketing, the SES Conference and Expo is a great place to learn new ways to drive traffic to your sites and turn what could be a money losing web presence into one of the primary revenue streams for your company. Another advantage to the SES Conference and Expo is that it takes place in multiple locations around the world, which means that your satellite offices may be close to one of the sites, allowing you to send your remote workers there to learn new techniques and technologies without the expense of flying them to the home office in London. The website for the SES Conference and Expo is http://www.sesconference.com.

There are also smaller meetings and conferences that take place in London, from the fairly large QCon Software Development Conference, an annual meeting of software and web development experts at http://www.qconferences.com, to smaller meetings that take place in libraries and pubs all over the city. There is no shortage of web development resources available for those who wish to take advantage of them.

Attending these meetings and conferences is one of the best ways to take advantage of the massive amount of development and innovation that is present in any web based industry. With the internet changing by the minute the only way to stay competitive is to make sure your developers and designers are familiar with the latest techniques, in programming, search engine optimization (SEO), or design that will allow you to draw in clients and keep them.

With the plethora of different conferences available, there is sure to be one that meets your needs both for location, cost of entry, and quality of the presented materials. While the Learning Technologies conference may focus primarily on services for training and education, that doesn't mean that there are not discussions or presentations there that you will find informative and valuable.