#DevTO April 2015

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SEO for Devs: Make Sure Your Beautiful New Site Gets Found

Creating awesome looking and functional websites is great, but how do you make sure they get found in search? With search engine optimization (SEO) you can make sure your sites have the best chance of ranking well in search engines like Google. New technologies and site designs create special challenges and opportunities that can make or break your sites search visibility. After a brief introduction to SEO we'll cover modern and dynamic sites: why they pose problems for search engines and how to make them search friendly, semantic markup and how it helps search engines, and finally site transitions and how to not accidentally lose >90% of your search traffic.

Michael Ramsey has a decade of experience in the SEO space and is currently working as the SEO Manager at Reprise Media Canada in Toronto. He has worked with hundreds of sites, from small businesses and start-ups to large enterprises and international NGOs. Going beyond SEO, Michael has worked on both back and front end development, UX and analytics. When not in the digital world he enjoys mountain biking, gaming, craft beer and funny cat gifs.

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What You Can Learn From a 4 Year Old About Ponies and Mobile UX

Presentation on how to look at mobile from a child’s perspective to gain insight to practical take-a-ways for implementation with real world examples. See how storytelling, usability and interactive design change the mobile user experience when designed and developed with a four year in mind.

Andrew Smyk is a dad, educator and UX designer with a focus on Mobile Design. He is also a coffee aficionado, avid cyclist, all-round pirate and HTML5 Evangelist. His work ranges from prototyping communications systems for public transit to information visualization and knowledge building. Past client work includes Bell Canada, Bell Mobility, Alliance-Atlantic, Molson Canadian and the Royal Bank of Canada. Andrew coordinates a postgraduate program in Interactive Media Management (http://imm.sheridancollege.ca/) at Sheridan College and writes about how kids adapt and use technology on his blog.