We’ve negotiated with the organizers of Web Directions South to save you $55 on your ticket to this fantastic 3 day Web Conference which is held in Sydney between September 23 and 26.

I’ve been to Web Directions South many times - it’s one of the best conferences for web designers, developers, or anyone who makes a living from the Web, not only in Australia but worldwide.

Granted, not everyone can get out to Australia, but if you’re intending to visit this is a great excuse to make your trip a tax deduction.

Big name speakers include:

- Douglas Crockford - JavaScript authrority - Yahoo!
- Jeffrey Veen- user experience expert - Adaptive Path
- Derek Featherstone - accessibility for web apps
- Daniel Burka - interaction design - Digg
- Mark Pesce - web visionary

Topics covered include:
 
- front and back end design and development
- mobile design and development
- information architecture
- user experience and interaction design
- social media and networks
- Ajax and JavaScript
- semantic web
- marketing and advertising online
- and so much more

Grab your tickets before July 19th using this special code “WDS08-99designs” to save fifty five bucks. Tickets cost $795. Let me know if you’re going to be there and we’ll buy you a drink or two.

It seems the voting for this month’s best design has been quite popular and votes are still pouring in. We have decided to extend voting till the end of the week so that everyone has a chance to view the entries. Voting will close at midnight of the 4th of July and we will be announcing the winner on the morning of the 7th of July.

If you haven’t already, vote now!

Update: The voting deadline has been extended to the 4th of July.

The time has come to vote for the winning entry for the Win a MacBook competition. We are thrilled with the response, nearly 800 entries are in the running! We have put together a page for you guys to vote on your favorites. Voting will be open for 7 days, after which the design with the most votes will be the winner!

You can only vote if you signed up before June 20th. We will be discounting votes from duplicate accounts (yes, we are well aware of these).

Click here to Vote Now!

A new image is created and uploaded to 99designs.com every 30 seconds of every minute, of every hour, of every day, and it’s been running at that rate for at least the last month. That’s an amazing amount of creative juice!

The other amazing stat is that 99designs.com generated over 6 million pageviews in the last 30 days. That’s not our log files talking, that’s google analytics. It’s at this point I’m thanking our developers for taking the extra time to build the foundations of this sucker properly on a scalable infrastructure.

99designs is growing fast.  We are currently hunting down a front-end ninja to swiftly craft slick user interfaces for 99designs.com.  If you live for XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript and are passionate about the visual side of web development we want to hear from you.

Salary commensurate with “wow factor”. This job is based out of Melbourne Australia, but we will consider you if you can relocate at a moments notice and your work knocks our socks off…

To apply for this job search for “99designs” on seek.com.au or click here

Just a final reminder that we are giving away a free MacBook to one lucky designer who submits a winning design to 99designs.com before June 20th. Any design that is selected as a winner before that date is in the running.  The more winners you have, the more chances you’ve got, so get designing quickly! 

Designers Tip: Pick contests to enter that are likely to choose a winner in the next 4 days.

Contest Holders Tip: Declare a winner before June 20th for your winning designer to be in the running.

Overnight we had someone presumably from no-spec posting propaganda in our contests. They posted their no-spec logo to 127 of our contests.  Isn’t it ironic that a group which claims to be out to protect designers would make life hard for our design community who at the end of day are just trying to make a living like everyone else. Thanks to everyone who quickly reported this to us - it’s all sorted now. Apologies to any contest holders who were inconvenienced.

At the time of posting this there’s $70,504 USD in prize money up for grabs. That’s a new record for 99designs. Contests run for 7 days or less, so you could say that on average roughly $10,000 USD of new prize money is being offered every day at 99designs.com  Not too shabby! 

We are having a site outage due to a strange software bug. We are investigating the issue at present, one of the symptoms is emails being repeatedly sent in some cases. Thanks for your patience guys and we are extremely sorry for the inconvenience.

We have ended the trial of guaranteed contests, thanks to everyone involved. There was certainly more interest than we anticipated, I am still trying to catch up with all the payments! The good news is that guaranteed contests are here to stay in the near future. We are working away at 99designs HQ on automating the process and making sure it is fair for all involved. Watch this space over the next couple of weeks.

For those of you waiting for payments, I should have caught up on the backlog of payments over the next 24-48 hours. Thanks for your patience.