About US

The Cleveland Web Design and Development Meetup Group exists to promote a relaxed environment for developers across the spectrum to associate and share ideas. We like eating, drinking and generally just having nice conversations with each other. Our meetups are lively discussions with no small amount of laughter. Be prepared to experience the hover effect as we jump up and move often since we have a tendency to bring our laptops and show off what we've been doing.

We are non-religious in nature. This means, that even though we all use a variety of systems, tools, programs, and methodologies, we just share our habits, we don't try to force folks into them. For instance, you will find folks at our meetups that use Windows, Mac, BSD, Linux, and other Operating Systems. Despite our individual enthusiasm for whatever OS we have chosen, you'll not find us fighting about it, just sharing. The same goes for our choice of programming languages on the back end. Some of us use PHP, ASP, Python, and..um (hides) COBOL. (Ok just one dude and we've all determined he is nuts.) We're also very keen to promote standards. This includes web standards, which provides some great recommendations on how HTML, CSS, and JS should be used. It also includes concepts of proper programming conventions. Since we are non-religious about these topics, you can be sure to feel comfortable sharing your own ideas and methods.

This group is comprised of a wonderful mix of very experienced designers/developers and and lots of folks who are beginners. No question is considered stupid and no method is touted as the "only" way to skin a cat. Ideas for best practices are discussed and recommendations are often made to find further information on any topic imaginable.

Members of this group range from being graphic artists to CSS/(X)HTML gurus, from back-end programmers to front end designers, from database specialists to SEO enthusiasts. It appears that all the bases are covered in this single group on any issue related to web-based implementation. While one of our core focuses is standards/accessibility/508 compliance, we realize that such standards are very difficult to reach and require a lot of work. So if you're not there yet, or feel you can't move there at the moment, we really understand. But we'll be more than happy to help you, if you let us.