Inspired by Erick over at the Texas A&M Webmasters Blog (opens new window) I wanted to outline the conferences and speaking venues for the Web Communications staff. Each year we all try to attend at least one conference to advance our skills, network, and, best of all, spread our knowledge.

This year Rob (opens new window), Tom (opens new window), Joy (opens new window), and Rolaine (opens new window) will be attending An Event Apart in Boston (opens new window) May 23-25. It seems like a lot of us but the conference is so comprehensive it covers design and development very well. Rob and I had the chance to attend An Event Apart a few years ago and we still find ourselves implementing things we learned from the conference.

I will be attending EduWeb in Chicago (opens new window) July 26-28. This will be my first time at EduWeb and I am super excited. I've heard many great things about it from previous attendees. And of course I am excited to see the eduStyle Awards live. (opens new window)

I will be at HighEdWeb in Cincinnati (opens new window) October 10-13. HighEdWeb is by far my favorite higher education conference. I had the pleasure of speaking at it last year and waiting to hear back about a proposal myself and a few other web workers submitted for this year.

I will also will be leading a half-day workshop at the EdUI conference in Charlottesville, Virginia (opens new window) November 8-9 on how to use advanced website analytics to optimize your designs. It's going to be a lot of fun, I will walk everyone through Google Analytics then setup some A/B and multivariate tests.

That is it for now but there may be more that come up throughout the year. If you're not in the Detroit area and want to meet us these are great opportunities to come hang out, give us your opinion and learn. If you can't make it out we try to do a wrap up post after each conference or meetup we attend to spread what we have learned. Hope to see you soon!