Liam McGee

Liam is married and lives in Somerset, UK, with wife, one dog, four chickens and 50,000 bees.

A Cambridge-educated scientist, his academic interests range across information retrieval, experimental psychology, communication theory, text mining and mathematical relationship modelling, all of which have come in mighty handy when working at the cutting edge of search engine optimisation. His academic interest in dinosaurs has so far come in less handy, but he lives in hope.

Liam's expertise in Google grew directly from his specialism in web accessibility. Web accessibility is the art of making the web easy to read, understand and use for everyone - mobile phone users, older users, people with disabilities. And last, and certainly not least: Google. A chance meeting with Steve Johnston over a beer and a website project in 2004 made it clear that Liam's obsession with the clarity, meaning and structural perfection of websites made him a natural fit for Steve's growing Google consultancy business. Liam has been working closely with Steve ever since.

Liam has plenty of real-world understanding as well as theoretical grounding. He has well over a decade of practical commercial experience in specifying, designing, templating, producing, usability testing and maintaining websites for clients large and small. This continues to the present day through his work with Paul Ratcliffe at their web accessibility firm, Communis Ltd (you can follow him on http://twitter.com/liammcgee).

He is passionate about making the web better, and gives his Friday afternoons up to being a working group 'invited expert' for the W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative, and has done so for several years.