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Jenny Wong
WordPowerment: Practical Approaches to Diversity and Empowerment in the WordPress Community
Protecting diversity, empowering oneself and ones colleagues are difficult are challenging career questions that we all face at some point during our professional lives. As WordPress professionals, we are lucky that, in addition to our communities as freelancers, agencies or publishers, the larger WordPress community serves as a support network when we face these challenges. The goal of this panel is to bring together professionals from different sectors of the WordPress community to share their experiences facing questions of diversity and empowerment in the WP community.
WENDIE: All right, is our audience ready, I will start with the audience, are you ready for this final talk of the day? This is our beautiful beautiful Panel. I didn’t write down what they are talking about!
All right. This improvisation thing is not mine, not my specialty. Okay, word powerment in this room we talk today about this afternoon know your users accessibility and then the last talk was about inclusion and now it is about word powerment. So it is a great follow up for all the talks we had this afternoon. I would like to give the word to Elizabeth. She is going to be our chair.
ELIZABETH S BARKER: I am yes. I accept.
WENDIE: Thank god!
You are going the have 20 minutes as a Panel then we are going to invite the audience to join in, please stay awake and prepare questions for our beautiful Panel and have a great time. Give them applause.
ELIZABETH S BARKER: Thanks for joining us this afternoon, my name is Elizabeth Barker, a senior project manager, the intention of this Panel to discuss practical approaches to inclusivity and tech organisations, representatives from many different areas within tech from product, agency, community organisations, and so I think we will be able to have a great discussion about what that means I would like the panelists if they could, quickly introduce themselves to you as well.
MERI WILLIAMS: I am CTO of Moo and mostly run fairly big tech organisations at this point I suppose. So the teams just kind of 300, 400 people in size. South African originally. I am literally the one the Daily Mail warned you about, I am a woman who works in tech, an immigrant with a job — I am gay and disabled and I am godless and my wife is British, I am over here stealing your women and jobs. I know a lot about undeserved and unasked for privilege as well.
JESSICA ROSE: I work in developer relations which is this fantastic job I am not sure whether it should exist. I do a lot of sort of outreach to technical communities, trying to reach them with projects. Before I did this, I did a lot of consultancy, around diversifying teams and trying to balance out and fix where possible toxic culture in different teams. So a real lay wide experience of seeing some really fantastic things, some really beautiful community activity and also being called in when things have gone wrong.
CEDRIC KISEMA: I am a software developer, I am also instructor and mentor and I give talks at these kind of events so I, 101 mentoring which I do part time, trying to get more and more diversity into tech. That is me.
JENNY WONG: I I work at Human Made and I am the community engineer, do a lot of organising of WordCamps and events across the board just general community cheer leading in the WordPress Community and the php community.
ELIZABETH S BARKER: Thanks, so, to get us start I mean, inclusivity is a big conversation in the tech world as we know. It is very broad conversation. So, to make sure we are all on the same page for this particular Panel I would like to ask the panelists if they could speak a little bit about what practically inclusivity means for them in their organisations and in their experience.
MERI WILLIAMS: I get called in by companies who want to do better at this stuff. When somebody is deciding to join a community or organisation, they are trying to answer 3 questions, am I expected here? Will I be respected here? Can I be myself and be respected here?
Those 3 things I think are fairly decent framing for diversity and inclusion. So are you signaling well enough all different kinds of people are welcome, do they know from the information you share up front you never know other people who didn’t apply or didn’t get involved because you put them off before you even engaged, when you interact with people, whether that is in a community setting or interview, do they feel expected or not getting microaggression, telling different boys they are smart and girls are pretty. You are reinforcing.
People tell me my English is good, speaking it since I was born, not like, I am not like a prodigy or anything! Since I learned to talk, but yes.
Like those things reinforce all the time, oh you are different, you don’t belong here, there is a really — then people need to be a I believe to see, if they join and part of somewhere that somebody like them can succeed, that might be, somebody they view as a mentor or role model. There are people who succeed are different from each other and you don’t have to have, I will be honest, every time looking for a queer immigrant woman on the executive of every company I worked at. I would be struggling, so you look for people you can see some part of yourself in.
JESSICA ROSE: Looking at the people who never surface in your community, that is difficult to measure and plan for. For me, in inclusion and really making people aware that they can come participate in the space, I always think that the most important thing is about perspectives. When I first got started in technology my manager had a important thing to tell me, took me into the board room. Have you seen the Father Ted sketch with the cows?
Showed the sketch, Dougal, this cow is small but that cow is far away, didn’t tell me why. Okay, all of your problems in technology are going to be about this.! (LAUGHTER).
Just like oh okay, that is fine, all of this is fine, this is not a weird first day!
And I came back several months later, I finally get it. There are errors, mistakes choices in tooling that you make is not helpful. But all the big problems, it is a matter of perspective right?
Yes yes, that is it.
I think that with inclusion one of the big challenges is that moving beyond our own perspective to design a hiring process or to build community outreach, or to try and find speakers so difficult to do that without really engaging in multiple thought exercises, what would it mean not the be me, what is life like for people who are not like me? That is one of the most challenging and interesting things about inclusion.
CEDRIC KISEMA: I need the question to be repeated.
ELIZABETH S BARKER: The question is essentially when we talk about inclusivity, what we mean, what is our frame of reference?
CEDRIC KISEMA: The way I like to think about inclusivity is, is, will every different types of people, will they feel comfortable within this culture? Lesser about and is accompanied by the culture, I think that is what a lot of people seem to forget is, they, they all give out this mandate and say we need to reach X number of people. But forget they need to change themselves. So, I think culture is really big thing and I am thinking about from, how do you interview and thinking, how is your website? How does your website look? There is some websites where I am thinking, some people might not be able to use the website and comes from being inclusive. Looking at your organisational chart, and seeing who are the people who are in, in what influential positions; what kind of people are there? I got, I remember looking through one organisation and feeling very much like, yes, I am never going to progress in this company. That was a bit, that was a bit difficult to take and I think it is it is because I was included, wasn’t included in the … company. It is very much from the cultural standpoint, are they inclusive and do I feel like I am included in that?
JENNY WONG: I think for me, inclusivity means there is a choice for everyone like everyone gets to choose and have a choice to be in tech you know, like, a lot of people talk about like diversity and like oh we want to get 50/50 people. Well those people probably have a job, not like they are just going to snap your fingers and press, hay, people, 9 months and bla, bla, and many years of learning to talk and whatnot.
So it is not as simple like snapping your fingers and say it is going to be 50/50 now. Even working at an agency like, when we talk about oh who are we going to hire and stuff? I am very acutely aware, if you are hiring from other companies you are just moving the problem like, like that is not going help the whole industry as a whole moving people from location to location. Like it is all about adding people. One of the ways to add people is making it easier for people to make the choice and given them the opportunity to make that choice.
So that to me, when we are talking about inclusivity, it is ensuring that people have a choice the be able to do what they want.
MERI WILLIAMS: And the choice to stay, I think a lot of people are like, well, we can accept slow movement on this problem, it takes a long time for the pipeline. The pipeline is not the problem.
JENNY WONG: It is the drop out rate.
MERI WILLIAMS: When we look at technology as the industry, we lose people in certain demographics and certain, from certain backgrounds and at a very alarming rate compared to others.
Obviously it is not only for those who have computer science degrees as engineers and for those who graduate with a science degree, not men, 40% of them are gone within 5 years from the industry. That is a industry problem.
JENNY WONG: When I did my computer science degree, I did a particular type called multimedia internet technology, specifically aimed at becoming a web developer, so it was the perfect job, perfect degree to move into web development. Out of the, the minorities in that group, I would probably say I am the only minority still in the industry. Most of them have moved on, some of them are administrators, gone into law, they have like different people moved on. They didn’t even bother trying. When I talked to student Panels a lot of the questions I get after the Panels are like, so tell me, what is it really like? I am like well, it is going to be whatever you make it.
ELIZABETH S BARKER: So the drop out rate is an interesting point I think speaks to something that I am really interested in hearing things about too. Which is, company culture and how that signals to people as Meri raised earlier, whether or not they feel like it is a potential place for them to work for the long term and feel and engaged part of the company as Cedric also raised in one of his points seeing hiring charter and feeling based on that he wouldn’t necessarily be able to feel engaged in the company for the long term.
Also, so, I would like to hear a little bit about that and since so much of company culture also revolves around the hiring process, how specifically the hiring process might provide some roadblocks as well for a company that is trying to become more inclusive.
MERI WILLIAMS: The question, is how hiring process gets in the way?
ELIZABETH S BARKER: And how it informs the organisational and how it is adapted to be a little bit more inclusive.
JESSICA ROSE: … I wasn’t but I have a lot of things to say. …
MERI WILLIAMS: …
JESSICA ROSE: Absolutely data is not unbiased but I am very, very into using ways, using technology and using data to minimise human bias in hiring processes.
There maybe a couple of people here and there who are genuinely just terrible people, they maybe involved in the hiring process, I don’t sincerely managers going, yeah, I am hiring and I really need some engineers but can’t to reject like all of the different candidates. That is now how this works. Unconscious bias is people viewing talent that doesn’t see seem like, that doesn’t seem familiar, that doesn’t read as skilled to them as less valuable. A lot of people in technology talk about the way that orchestras worked throughout the 90’s and 2,000s, it is all about how well you play. Who you are, what you look like, doesn’t have anything to do with that.
But, up until the 90’s orchestras were overwhelmingly white and male because of merit ocarcy, you would do your practices behind a screen, so people were judging.
NEW SPEAKER: This is my profession?
FROM THE FLOOR: American orchestras do this and it started in the 80’s and the best ones will take you from taking your audition and signing before they see you, there is a huge change in the percentage starting in the early 80’s. Germany doesn’t do that, that looks different.
JESSICA ROSE: Oh, don’t boo Germany.
FROM THE FLOOR: Good in any other way.
JESSICA ROSE: A lot of the hiring processes I am interested in, do similar things in tech tolling, I really like competency based hiring practices, there is a fantastic book called: What works. It is very, very focused on gender, I think that in technology when we talk about diversifying companies projects, it tends to be focused on gender, often to the detriment of white inclusion. But this is a book by Iris, I forgotten her last name, about organisational design for diversity, not tech focused but it is fantastic.
Talks quite a bit about how competency based evaluations can be valuable. Looked a at study where they found, you can give someone 2 CV’s, male and female. Have a female CV with a bit more practical experience and the male CV more training. They found the male CV was overwhelmingly picked employers said we were looking for the training.
But when they did the same thing and swapped the genders, got the opposite. This guy, really been in industry and knows his stuff. So people found, the research found that people were using reasoning to sort of justify the biases that existed, that justified the choices the biases informed. Competency based hiring, literally go through a form, can you do this thing, a point, this thing, gap jumpers that do screening based on tests are fantastic.
There is a lot of tech focused solutions to sort of taking this squishy human feelings out of it.
MERI WILLIAMS: It is important point that unconscious bias seems rational, because when you believe something and somebody questions why, whether you know you are doing it or not, you make shit up to justify your opinion and I think it is, everybody always has a rational explanation as to why they think this, even, that is the unconscious bit of the bias part, that is a really important point.
CEDRIC KISEMA: I was going to add, perhaps might touch on this later, is interviewing is really hard enough in terms of technically in terms of do we give them an assignment that they take home and come back, like how do you take points and say okay I like that method, it’s 2 lines long, that’s one point. I’m not sure if that’s possible in terms of under hiring programme is. How would you…?
JESSICA ROSE: So it is, but it is difficult. I do recommend programmes like gap jumpers because they work with us as a test then you only see answers with people you’ve passed as a test, so you make your interview decisions based on that; and I really like competency based interviews as well: “tell me about a time when you…” Then you have a point out of 5. There is still bias in the process but it’s much lighter. Often it’s a test. It’s a take home assignment. You’ve to build a thing. This feels like a really bias free way to get something done and it’s absolutely not. If you are an employer giving somebody a test or a project and it takes more than 2 or 3 hours you should probably pay them. So, often times if somebody is responsible for family care, if somebody has a life outside of technology, if somebody already has a demanding job; that can put a bar in place. A really dear friend of mine who is a fantastic engineer just passed on an interview process because it would have taken 20, 30 hours of work when that was never going to work for them.
ELIZABETH S BARKER: So we talk about these things and gap jumpers is one kind of solution for removing these bars. Others that, Meri, you have encountered, Cedric, Jenny?
CEDRIC KISEMA: There is one company that has a really interesting way, they always have a free member Panel when hiring because what they found out, you might be aware of this perhaps, yesterday always have 3 member Panel and that Panel they try and diversify that Panel as much as possible and they try to ask – not ask the same questions but in terms of have the same interview for different candidates. And what they also try and do is during negotiation they have bands and they try to, in some cases, actually increase another persons offer if they find out that they went too low on their offer. I found it interesting they always have that 3 member Panel and it worked quite well for them.
JESSICA ROSE: {Inaudible}.
MERI WILLIAMS: I think there is broadly 2 approaches, right, you try and understand as broadly as possible in order to take account of bias or you try and negate it by removing information so you can remove names, photos on CVs and remove all that information. I personally worry about that because I think we still judge a lot by peoples word choice. Someone from a really individualistic culture will describe their role in a team as their individual achievement much more than someone from a much less individualistic culture. I find it useful to be interviewing someone I know you are from a culture where it’s a really big deal and you told me just give to that and give all credit to the team whereas someone from a individualistic culture tells me they did something my bullshit counter goes off and it’s like having more context in order to account for {inaudible} for instance and sometimes it’s useful to have less. I also really believe in lowering the absolute requirements for roles as much as possible. So, there are very few jobs that require a computer science degree. There are very few jobs that require you to have done hardly any of those things. Think about what the role is about and what skills and experience someone needs to succeed in it and don’t make a laundry risk of requirements because you are putting people off who never think of applying or getting involved because it looks like they won’t meet that and there is some research that shows people in different back grounds will interpret those requirements very differently so they’re people unless they have evidence for 100 per cent of those 10 bullet point they will be like oh I’m under qualified I shouldn’t apply and there are people who have 3 out of 10 go I can go for this it’s fine and there is some evidence it’s culture and all of those things combine.
JESSICA ROSE: I’ve got a citation for that so the study round bullet points; I really recommend people not use bullet points. If you can help it, don’t use bullet points in your job descriptions, please, thank you. And the data comes out of an internal HP study where they looked at people putting themselves forward for internal promotions and they found well represented candidates would go ahead and apply when they met 50 to 60 per cent of the bullet point requirements and that candidate from less well represented backgrounds wouldn’t jump in unless they met more than 100 per cent of the requirements.
Are we allowed to mention individual companies?
JENNY WONG: I’ve been doing it anyway.
JESSICA ROSE: I really like Xapiers, does fantastic job descriptions and I’ve been shamelessly copying their style. Sorry. {Inaudible} often does a good job. When you are developing a job description think about what is this person actually going to be doing? And what I really like to do is I like to think about what does this person need to do within the first 2 weeks? What do I need them to do within the first 2 months? What do I want them to be able to do after 6 months, after a year? So people talk all the time in technology, oh you not we’re not hiring for a skill set, we’re hiring for the ability to learn and we do a bad job at that. Ask these questions, let people know from day 1 you have to do this, can you do this?
JENNY WONG: I think it hard, working at an agency you’ve got and client coming to you and usually you’ve got projects in coming and you don’t have the amount of people to do the work in the workforce and so you’re retro actively hiring at that point so I find it really hard to switch round that problem and I think it’s one of the hardest things, because I’ve always worked in agencies and every agency I’ve worked for always have been retro hiring otherwise you don’t have the money in the pot and when you are retro actively hiring you are constantly just looking at your own network and that’s one of the hardest things to do and like we’re discussing at work trying to debate how we’re going to change this to be pro-active about it because we can’t be doing like a more inclusive places and getting more people on board and even just out reaching into those places if we don’t be pro-active and it’s really hard to switch for I think a lot of businesses especially small medium businesses to do that.
JESSICA ROSE: That’s entirely fair but you said something that’s brilliant that I want to touch on where you said you’re almost always hiring retro actively hiring and it’s a lot of looking at your own networks. So who here has got a job your current or former job based on your social contact? If you are a hiring manager or you are running your own company you are highly placed. If your friend group isn’t representative then your hiring practices aren’t going to be. If your friend group isn’t diverse – in doing consulting work I chat to a lot of people who say we can’t get any female candidates in it’s not possible for this kind of role, where I see other teams which have folks who have really diverse friendship groups, really diverse peer groups and they’re like it’s fine we’ve got an all female team it’s great. It’s rare.
MERI WILLIAMS: Diversity is not just about gender and inclusion is not just about gender, like here we’re not evenly distributed. It’s allowance the belief that folks of under presented groups are less likely to have skills is bull shit. We’re just as likely to have the skill and be able to do that role but if the way we are A attracted to those roles excludes people from applying we’re inefficient and wasting time. It’s just a thing you have to stop doing in order to succeed in these communities.
JENNY WONG: I think that’s partly why like as a conference organiser and an event organiser for like lots of community events I think representation like are making like even if it’s just a call to speakers, accessible for more people is really important. We see a lot of – and even work in London is shamefully bad at this we see a lot of call for speakers which are purely written based call for speakers and I’ve been in conversations with people who say we don’t submit because my writing is really bad and I would really prefer to do a pod cast or video and even having that like sense of like people who find writing really hard but could be great speakers and let’s face it if you are speaking you’re going to be talking so why isn’t the call for speakers a speaking application but then you put them through a Dalek voice so you don’t know who they are – it’s one of those things where you start thinking about it and you think hang on I’m going down a rabbit hole and oh it’s going deeper! And you never know where to go and I don’t know how much community work can you do to try and bring more of that in play then bring it back to the company.
MERI WILLIAMS: Just to add to that specifically so I curate and co-curate and host the lead DEV which is a conference for tech leads and lead developers and we over the last 3 years have got to the point where our CFP gets 50 per cent of folks from index groups and we’ve done a load of stuff published about how we did it and I think one of the important things is to make really clear that everybody is welcome then to do active outreach and then to make sure there is an initial shift about just how people apply, that representation matters and it matters the following year. The first year we invited and it meant immediately the following year we were a conference that cared about having representation on stage and making sure it was there. I’ll tweet out the list of what we did but you’ll see CFP results in a fully representative set of proposals.
WENDIE: Time is up. We have 10 minutes but the last 10 minutes is questions from the audience. 10 minutes for the Panel or are we going to use it for questions from the audience?
ELIZABETH S BARKER: Questions for sure.
WENDIE: Are there any questions?
FROM THE FLOOR: I think I can easily fill 10 minute with questions. I’ve got load’s so I’m the founder of see {inaudible} human made so I make a lot of hiring decisions. It has been very in vogue to talk about hiring for cultural fit, something I used to say a few years ago, until I started to feel that that just often means pervading your existing culture. So I wonder how do you think about cultural fit and the importance of that?
MERI WILLIAMS: You don’t hire for culture fit, you hire for culture add; what is this person going to bring to your culture and add to what you – I feel like give me the mic! You are completely right. What people interpret when you say are they going to be a fit with our culture, is would I like to drink a beer with them on a Friday afternoon? If they’re from a culture that – that’s often how it is interpreted – you are shaking your head but it’s how people interpret it, but it’s very wrong. So if somebody doesn’t like to drink or chooses their social time – there are a lot of different reasons. The university I went to was brilliant like this. You were not allowed to hold anything university related in the bar because there are people who can’t be where alcohol is served so you have to change the mindset from will this person be easy for us. Diversity is valuable – not because it’s easy but because it’s hard because the simple act of making different view points different demographics and experiences par of your decision making part of the things you create together makes it better so it’s mostly about getting people to change the question from culture fit to culture add; how is this person going to make us better than we are today, how are the arguments we’re going to have about whether accessibility comes ahead of performance or how do we get to have {inaudible}? At the same time those are valuable conversations, not because we’re arguing or dissension is valuable but diversity of perspective and experience leads to better decision making solutions more innovative solutions as well.
CEDRIC KISEMA: I was going to add to that so I don’t drink so every Friday night is oh and I’m lactose intolerance so meet ups with pizza really suck, and quite a few of my friends are too –
MERI WILLIAMS: Cheese haters!
JENNY WONG: I don’t hate cheese it’s just my stomach doesn’t like it.
FROM THE FLOOR: Hi, we’ve talked about interviewing but you’ve mentioned it and something I’ve seen as well that the problem really is the culture of the companies, so it doesn’t matter if you hire you have better interviews if then people are going to leave work because they’re not happy there and they don’t feel they’re valued. So how would you solve that or how would you start changing it especially I think a lot of – I don’t know if it’s a lot. Some themes and some people and some companies don’t even realise they have a problem.
CEDRIC KISEMA: Yes I actually – one idea I got from another company was reverse mentoring where seniors would pair up with juniors and all learn from the juniors, for example let’s say someone who is very much not a programmer but they’re in a managerial role and they actually prepare a programme with that junior and what came out of one discussion someone told me was the senior who was – quite – I’ll say senior – they asked the juniors “why are you finding it so hard, why are you living with housemates, why don’t you just buy your own house?” London! {Laughter} So there was this disconnect and I feel like that that is so – so when you do reverse mentoring they learn more about the junior positions and other people who aren’t like them and they can emphasise more and hopefully that can educate them to lead them to making more decisions that care about inclusion.
JENNY WONG: One of the things I do quite often, I am well-known in the PHP community but one thing I really like doing is every 3 to 4 months is picking a random conference I’ve never been to and going to it just as an attendee. It’s always really interesting because it reminds me what it’s like to be a new attendee at a conference. It’s what makes me really aware of how new people feel at my conference. And experiencing that and reminding yourself of that is really important and also listening to other people’s stories and not just like listening but paying attention to what they’re saying and also not just the words they’re saying but the emotions that it brings up. So I spoke at alter conference in Dublin and I think it was last August now and I went there and it was really cool because I met so many different people who actually explained the situations that tech puts them in and they’ve heard about this stuff on blogs, on web-sites, I’ve read about it, I’ve seen them on twitter talking about it but when you hear them talk and hear the emotion in their voice it’s a completely different experience and because they’re talking from their own personal experiences you can really feel the pain that they’ve already been through and it makes you more empathetic as a person to – decisions that me make in tech that you are just not aware of, for example today a lot of people came up to me and said you know you’ve got those boxes in the men’s bathrooms and I’m like yeah, yeah I know, are they meant to be there? Yeah, yeah they are. And they look at me for 5 seconds. And it say trans. And that’s the only way I say. Then hey yeah of course. Then they carry on and move on. It’s breaking that assumption, breaking that mentality.
JESSICA ROSE: So were you interested in what as talent you can do if you are coming into a team where there is either not the awareness that change needs to happen or not the will?
FROM THE FLOOR: I’ve studied engineering and I’ve been in IT for a long time, different roles, support and all sorts of different things, and I haven’t actually seen any change in 20 years. And I’m worried at the moment my daughter is very good in IT. She is only 13 and she is good at science as well and I am thinking she would be good at a job like this but what’s it going to be like for her? I’m okay because I’ve grown a thick skin and I use the fact that I’m different to my advantage because I think people will remember me, so for me I have learned to turn it into a positive. But I don’t think it’s good enough to improve the interview system or to try to get more girls into stem or more minorities if then when they get to a job the same attitude persists and so I think that is the important thing because you can make a big effort to get them there but if they’re unhappy they won’t stay and so it is going to be a wasted effort.
JESSICA ROSE: So yes this is not the most positive point but it’s a really valuable point that if we were just to look at gender which is very, very cheap it’s not the best way to do it but it’s the access I have the most data on numbers of women in technology the past 30 years have gone down quite a bit. It’s not getting better, it’s getting worse and yes for those of us who stayed in oh I’ve just learned to manage this or – and it is not something that’s optimistic. For individual talent where they say do you know what I don’t see people in management, people in my company don’t think this is a problem and there is no will to change. Leave those jobs if you can. Not everybody can. That’s a huge privilege to be able to say I’m just going to get another job. It’s massive. And it’s such a huge luxury and it’s unreasonable – if you can leave a job and change to a job where there is meaningful change and everything is okay those places are so rare. I would love to tell you this are going to be better but I’ve got a back up burn out career waiting for me. Almost everybody I know who’s been doing this a while has a “am I going to keep doing this?” Moment. And when I talk to people especially when I mentor one on one I don’t think I’ve said this on camera before, I try and tell folks who are under-represented in tech that they don’t need to stay, when you are ready to go you should go. But it doesn’t fix anything for the industry but I don’t think it’s the responsibility of under-represented folks to fix the whole industry.
FROM THE FLOOR: That’s why I asked what do you do in the companies?
MERI WILLIAMS: As someone leading an organisation let me speak to that. It is getting better because I originally helped run a summit for director and above women in engineering and there were a whole – like we, ran out of space, there are increasingly folks who are, who are from less, from underindex background who is are starting to leave these organisations, you bet your fucking life I am having conversations about inclusion, audited every company I have joined to assess pay gap problems and to try and fix it. I agree it is not, nobody has to do emotional labour for the sake of the industry and you should not burn yourself out because you feel like you are alone and that you are fighting. But, there are places that are getting better, there are place that is are better and finding an opportunity to be somewhere, where they are working on these things and it is a becoming a better environment. It is possible. Yes it is possible to leave somewhere and find better places but these places exist and look for them and try and find if you are in a place when I was a lot more junior, a lot of way I made change happen was part of a employee network, adding fresh pressure to fix it, I help runed a LGBT … in Proctor and Gamble, for my career to proposal progress, I had to move to Cincinnati or Singapore. If I had to move to Cincinnati, … if I had to move to Singapore they had … I had a difficult conversation with the company; choosing between my life and my wife was not a positive career change for me. There are people who have the conversations, they don’t require people in IT to progress in the company, one thing I did while I was there, to help that to be true.
JENNY WONG: One thing, I went to FOSDEM two years ago, thousands of people, a lot of people and brain pain so much information you take it in. One of the keynotes by a lady called Karen. I don’t remember most of the talk, I remember a part where she says, if you see something wrong, just say that is not cool. Or ask why did you say that?
When you do that, when you question people for the snarky comments they say, they don’t realise, say, how can you say that? I am being curious, then people double check themselves, oh I didn’t mean that. It is something that just not minorities have to do, it is something everyone can do and support each other on. I think there is a lot of people who want the best for their companies and for the tech industry as a whole. But a lot of us stay silent, a lot of us don’t make actions about how we feel.
I am lucky that I am blunt, I am lucky that I am never going to change that because my parents tried that and and I failed, I am loud. My company accepts that, it can get me in a lot of trouble all the time. What I have learned is that when you are bold and when you just ask questions to why people have said something or written something in a particular way, either you are going to understand the reasoning behind it. And you are going to accept that because you think it is okay, or have a discussion about that and starting that conversation is going to trigger change, triggering change in the way people think. That is one of the major things that we need to do as a whole at least.
WENDIE: I have one final question from this sir at the front row we have to wrap it up, we are far over time. I will give him the mic and one of you the chance to respond, then we are going to finish. Please, have a good question or a good remark because otherwise I am looking really stupid!
FROM THE FLOOR: Yes okay. I have 3 points and they are not really questions. But they are 3 practical things that any of us can do or influence or ask for at our companies.
NEW SPEAKER: stand at the front. Come on John.
FROM THE FLOOR: Our companies from certain roles collected data about peoples, how they were personality type and so on, on metrics against their performance in the jobs, then started reselection for interrues based on the characteristics and interviewed them in a mixed gender, mixed diverse Panel and hiring moved to 51% on the gender scale. That really works. So objective metrix for jobs.
First a friend of mine runs an agency, decent, represent, very he has a total revelation about this. Unconscious bias training is something that you can ask for, that you can do, that you should suggest that your country leadership does and it is having a tremendous effect and points out things like on your hiring page, not only should you write a a good job description, not have a photo of 20 something’s as company culture, if you are a mother, parent, older that is not fun or interesting.
I had a third point — which I think I forgot but that is good enough.
There is practical things we can do.
(APPLAUSE).
WENDIE: I am taking everyone’s mics.
ELIZABETH S BARKER: I would like to thank all the panelists, I felt we could talk about this for —
WENDIE: We have hours at socials to talk about this.
ELIZABETH S BARKER: Thank you very much to all of you, thank you for attending and thanks to WordCamp London for having us. (APPLAUSE).
Thank you Wendie for MC’sing.
MERI WILLIAMS: I won’t be able to go to the social. …
NEW SPEAKER: Do you have Moo card discounts.
MERI WILLIAMS: Of course I do!
WENDIE: Thank you, drinks are in the other building please, join us. It was great. Having you here all day. Thank you and good night.
Jessica Rose
WordPowerment: Practical Approaches to Diversity and Empowerment in the WordPress Community
Protecting diversity, empowering oneself and ones colleagues are difficult are challenging career questions that we all face at some point during our professional lives. As WordPress professionals, we are lucky that, in addition to our communities as freelancers, agencies or publishers, the larger WordPress community serves as a support network when we face these challenges. The goal of this panel is to bring together professionals from different sectors of the WordPress community to share their experiences facing questions of diversity and empowerment in the WP community.
WENDIE: All right, is our audience ready, I will start with the audience, are you ready for this final talk of the day? This is our beautiful beautiful Panel. I didn’t write down what they are talking about!
All right. This improvisation thing is not mine, not my specialty. Okay, word powerment in this room we talk today about this afternoon know your users accessibility and then the last talk was about inclusion and now it is about word powerment. So it is a great follow up for all the talks we had this afternoon. I would like to give the word to Elizabeth. She is going to be our chair.
ELIZABETH S BARKER: I am yes. I accept.
WENDIE: Thank god!
You are going the have 20 minutes as a Panel then we are going to invite the audience to join in, please stay awake and prepare questions for our beautiful Panel and have a great time. Give them applause.
ELIZABETH S BARKER: Thanks for joining us this afternoon, my name is Elizabeth Barker, a senior project manager, the intention of this Panel to discuss practical approaches to inclusivity and tech organisations, representatives from many different areas within tech from product, agency, community organisations, and so I think we will be able to have a great discussion about what that means I would like the panelists if they could, quickly introduce themselves to you as well.
MERI WILLIAMS: I am CTO of Moo and mostly run fairly big tech organisations at this point I suppose. So the teams just kind of 300, 400 people in size. South African originally. I am literally the one the Daily Mail warned you about, I am a woman who works in tech, an immigrant with a job — I am gay and disabled and I am godless and my wife is British, I am over here stealing your women and jobs. I know a lot about undeserved and unasked for privilege as well.
JESSICA ROSE: I work in developer relations which is this fantastic job I am not sure whether it should exist. I do a lot of sort of outreach to technical communities, trying to reach them with projects. Before I did this, I did a lot of consultancy, around diversifying teams and trying to balance out and fix where possible toxic culture in different teams. So a real lay wide experience of seeing some really fantastic things, some really beautiful community activity and also being called in when things have gone wrong.
CEDRIC KISEMA: I am a software developer, I am also instructor and mentor and I give talks at these kind of events so I, 101 mentoring which I do part time, trying to get more and more diversity into tech. That is me.
JENNY WONG: I I work at Human Made and I am the community engineer, do a lot of organising of WordCamps and events across the board just general community cheer leading in the WordPress Community and the php community.
ELIZABETH S BARKER: Thanks, so, to get us start I mean, inclusivity is a big conversation in the tech world as we know. It is very broad conversation. So, to make sure we are all on the same page for this particular Panel I would like to ask the panelists if they could speak a little bit about what practically inclusivity means for them in their organisations and in their experience.
MERI WILLIAMS: I get called in by companies who want to do better at this stuff. When somebody is deciding to join a community or organisation, they are trying to answer 3 questions, am I expected here? Will I be respected here? Can I be myself and be respected here?
Those 3 things I think are fairly decent framing for diversity and inclusion. So are you signaling well enough all different kinds of people are welcome, do they know from the information you share up front you never know other people who didn’t apply or didn’t get involved because you put them off before you even engaged, when you interact with people, whether that is in a community setting or interview, do they feel expected or not getting microaggression, telling different boys they are smart and girls are pretty. You are reinforcing.
People tell me my English is good, speaking it since I was born, not like, I am not like a prodigy or anything! Since I learned to talk, but yes.
Like those things reinforce all the time, oh you are different, you don’t belong here, there is a really — then people need to be a I believe to see, if they join and part of somewhere that somebody like them can succeed, that might be, somebody they view as a mentor or role model. There are people who succeed are different from each other and you don’t have to have, I will be honest, every time looking for a queer immigrant woman on the executive of every company I worked at. I would be struggling, so you look for people you can see some part of yourself in.
JESSICA ROSE: Looking at the people who never surface in your community, that is difficult to measure and plan for. For me, in inclusion and really making people aware that they can come participate in the space, I always think that the most important thing is about perspectives. When I first got started in technology my manager had a important thing to tell me, took me into the board room. Have you seen the Father Ted sketch with the cows?
Showed the sketch, Dougal, this cow is small but that cow is far away, didn’t tell me why. Okay, all of your problems in technology are going to be about this.! (LAUGHTER).
Just like oh okay, that is fine, all of this is fine, this is not a weird first day!
And I came back several months later, I finally get it. There are errors, mistakes choices in tooling that you make is not helpful. But all the big problems, it is a matter of perspective right?
Yes yes, that is it.
I think that with inclusion one of the big challenges is that moving beyond our own perspective to design a hiring process or to build community outreach, or to try and find speakers so difficult to do that without really engaging in multiple thought exercises, what would it mean not the be me, what is life like for people who are not like me? That is one of the most challenging and interesting things about inclusion.
CEDRIC KISEMA: I need the question to be repeated.
ELIZABETH S BARKER: The question is essentially when we talk about inclusivity, what we mean, what is our frame of reference?
CEDRIC KISEMA: The way I like to think about inclusivity is, is, will every different types of people, will they feel comfortable within this culture? Lesser about and is accompanied by the culture, I think that is what a lot of people seem to forget is, they, they all give out this mandate and say we need to reach X number of people. But forget they need to change themselves. So, I think culture is really big thing and I am thinking about from, how do you interview and thinking, how is your website? How does your website look? There is some websites where I am thinking, some people might not be able to use the website and comes from being inclusive. Looking at your organisational chart, and seeing who are the people who are in, in what influential positions; what kind of people are there? I got, I remember looking through one organisation and feeling very much like, yes, I am never going to progress in this company. That was a bit, that was a bit difficult to take and I think it is it is because I was included, wasn’t included in the … company. It is very much from the cultural standpoint, are they inclusive and do I feel like I am included in that?
JENNY WONG: I think for me, inclusivity means there is a choice for everyone like everyone gets to choose and have a choice to be in tech you know, like, a lot of people talk about like diversity and like oh we want to get 50/50 people. Well those people probably have a job, not like they are just going to snap your fingers and press, hay, people, 9 months and bla, bla, and many years of learning to talk and whatnot.
So it is not as simple like snapping your fingers and say it is going to be 50/50 now. Even working at an agency like, when we talk about oh who are we going to hire and stuff? I am very acutely aware, if you are hiring from other companies you are just moving the problem like, like that is not going help the whole industry as a whole moving people from location to location. Like it is all about adding people. One of the ways to add people is making it easier for people to make the choice and given them the opportunity to make that choice.
So that to me, when we are talking about inclusivity, it is ensuring that people have a choice the be able to do what they want.
MERI WILLIAMS: And the choice to stay, I think a lot of people are like, well, we can accept slow movement on this problem, it takes a long time for the pipeline. The pipeline is not the problem.
JENNY WONG: It is the drop out rate.
MERI WILLIAMS: When we look at technology as the industry, we lose people in certain demographics and certain, from certain backgrounds and at a very alarming rate compared to others.
Obviously it is not only for those who have computer science degrees as engineers and for those who graduate with a science degree, not men, 40% of them are gone within 5 years from the industry. That is a industry problem.
JENNY WONG: When I did my computer science degree, I did a particular type called multimedia internet technology, specifically aimed at becoming a web developer, so it was the perfect job, perfect degree to move into web development. Out of the, the minorities in that group, I would probably say I am the only minority still in the industry. Most of them have moved on, some of them are administrators, gone into law, they have like different people moved on. They didn’t even bother trying. When I talked to student Panels a lot of the questions I get after the Panels are like, so tell me, what is it really like? I am like well, it is going to be whatever you make it.
ELIZABETH S BARKER: So the drop out rate is an interesting point I think speaks to something that I am really interested in hearing things about too. Which is, company culture and how that signals to people as Meri raised earlier, whether or not they feel like it is a potential place for them to work for the long term and feel and engaged part of the company as Cedric also raised in one of his points seeing hiring charter and feeling based on that he wouldn’t necessarily be able to feel engaged in the company for the long term.
Also, so, I would like to hear a little bit about that and since so much of company culture also revolves around the hiring process, how specifically the hiring process might provide some roadblocks as well for a company that is trying to become more inclusive.
MERI WILLIAMS: The question, is how hiring process gets in the way?
ELIZABETH S BARKER: And how it informs the organisational and how it is adapted to be a little bit more inclusive.
JESSICA ROSE: … I wasn’t but I have a lot of things to say. …
MERI WILLIAMS: …
JESSICA ROSE: Absolutely data is not unbiased but I am very, very into using ways, using technology and using data to minimise human bias in hiring processes.
There maybe a couple of people here and there who are genuinely just terrible people, they maybe involved in the hiring process, I don’t sincerely managers going, yeah, I am hiring and I really need some engineers but can’t to reject like all of the different candidates. That is now how this works. Unconscious bias is people viewing talent that doesn’t see seem like, that doesn’t seem familiar, that doesn’t read as skilled to them as less valuable. A lot of people in technology talk about the way that orchestras worked throughout the 90’s and 2,000s, it is all about how well you play. Who you are, what you look like, doesn’t have anything to do with that.
But, up until the 90’s orchestras were overwhelmingly white and male because of merit ocarcy, you would do your practices behind a screen, so people were judging.
NEW SPEAKER: This is my profession?
FROM THE FLOOR: American orchestras do this and it started in the 80’s and the best ones will take you from taking your audition and signing before they see you, there is a huge change in the percentage starting in the early 80’s. Germany doesn’t do that, that looks different.
JESSICA ROSE: Oh, don’t boo Germany.
FROM THE FLOOR: Good in any other way.
JESSICA ROSE: A lot of the hiring processes I am interested in, do similar things in tech tolling, I really like competency based hiring practices, there is a fantastic book called: What works. It is very, very focused on gender, I think that in technology when we talk about diversifying companies projects, it tends to be focused on gender, often to the detriment of white inclusion. But this is a book by Iris, I forgotten her last name, about organisational design for diversity, not tech focused but it is fantastic.
Talks quite a bit about how competency based evaluations can be valuable. Looked a at study where they found, you can give someone 2 CV’s, male and female. Have a female CV with a bit more practical experience and the male CV more training. They found the male CV was overwhelmingly picked employers said we were looking for the training.
But when they did the same thing and swapped the genders, got the opposite. This guy, really been in industry and knows his stuff. So people found, the research found that people were using reasoning to sort of justify the biases that existed, that justified the choices the biases informed. Competency based hiring, literally go through a form, can you do this thing, a point, this thing, gap jumpers that do screening based on tests are fantastic.
There is a lot of tech focused solutions to sort of taking this squishy human feelings out of it.
MERI WILLIAMS: It is important point that unconscious bias seems rational, because when you believe something and somebody questions why, whether you know you are doing it or not, you make shit up to justify your opinion and I think it is, everybody always has a rational explanation as to why they think this, even, that is the unconscious bit of the bias part, that is a really important point.
CEDRIC KISEMA: I was going to add, perhaps might touch on this later, is interviewing is really hard enough in terms of technically in terms of do we give them an assignment that they take home and come back, like how do you take points and say okay I like that method, it’s 2 lines long, that’s one point. I’m not sure if that’s possible in terms of under hiring programme is. How would you…?
JESSICA ROSE: So it is, but it is difficult. I do recommend programmes like gap jumpers because they work with us as a test then you only see answers with people you’ve passed as a test, so you make your interview decisions based on that; and I really like competency based interviews as well: “tell me about a time when you…” Then you have a point out of 5. There is still bias in the process but it’s much lighter. Often it’s a test. It’s a take home assignment. You’ve to build a thing. This feels like a really bias free way to get something done and it’s absolutely not. If you are an employer giving somebody a test or a project and it takes more than 2 or 3 hours you should probably pay them. So, often times if somebody is responsible for family care, if somebody has a life outside of technology, if somebody already has a demanding job; that can put a bar in place. A really dear friend of mine who is a fantastic engineer just passed on an interview process because it would have taken 20, 30 hours of work when that was never going to work for them.
ELIZABETH S BARKER: So we talk about these things and gap jumpers is one kind of solution for removing these bars. Others that, Meri, you have encountered, Cedric, Jenny?
CEDRIC KISEMA: There is one company that has a really interesting way, they always have a free member Panel when hiring because what they found out, you might be aware of this perhaps, yesterday always have 3 member Panel and that Panel they try and diversify that Panel as much as possible and they try to ask – not ask the same questions but in terms of have the same interview for different candidates. And what they also try and do is during negotiation they have bands and they try to, in some cases, actually increase another persons offer if they find out that they went too low on their offer. I found it interesting they always have that 3 member Panel and it worked quite well for them.
JESSICA ROSE: {Inaudible}.
MERI WILLIAMS: I think there is broadly 2 approaches, right, you try and understand as broadly as possible in order to take account of bias or you try and negate it by removing information so you can remove names, photos on CVs and remove all that information. I personally worry about that because I think we still judge a lot by peoples word choice. Someone from a really individualistic culture will describe their role in a team as their individual achievement much more than someone from a much less individualistic culture. I find it useful to be interviewing someone I know you are from a culture where it’s a really big deal and you told me just give to that and give all credit to the team whereas someone from a individualistic culture tells me they did something my bullshit counter goes off and it’s like having more context in order to account for {inaudible} for instance and sometimes it’s useful to have less. I also really believe in lowering the absolute requirements for roles as much as possible. So, there are very few jobs that require a computer science degree. There are very few jobs that require you to have done hardly any of those things. Think about what the role is about and what skills and experience someone needs to succeed in it and don’t make a laundry risk of requirements because you are putting people off who never think of applying or getting involved because it looks like they won’t meet that and there is some research that shows people in different back grounds will interpret those requirements very differently so they’re people unless they have evidence for 100 per cent of those 10 bullet point they will be like oh I’m under qualified I shouldn’t apply and there are people who have 3 out of 10 go I can go for this it’s fine and there is some evidence it’s culture and all of those things combine.
JESSICA ROSE: I’ve got a citation for that so the study round bullet points; I really recommend people not use bullet points. If you can help it, don’t use bullet points in your job descriptions, please, thank you. And the data comes out of an internal HP study where they looked at people putting themselves forward for internal promotions and they found well represented candidates would go ahead and apply when they met 50 to 60 per cent of the bullet point requirements and that candidate from less well represented backgrounds wouldn’t jump in unless they met more than 100 per cent of the requirements.
Are we allowed to mention individual companies?
JENNY WONG: I’ve been doing it anyway.
JESSICA ROSE: I really like Xapiers, does fantastic job descriptions and I’ve been shamelessly copying their style. Sorry. {Inaudible} often does a good job. When you are developing a job description think about what is this person actually going to be doing? And what I really like to do is I like to think about what does this person need to do within the first 2 weeks? What do I need them to do within the first 2 months? What do I want them to be able to do after 6 months, after a year? So people talk all the time in technology, oh you not we’re not hiring for a skill set, we’re hiring for the ability to learn and we do a bad job at that. Ask these questions, let people know from day 1 you have to do this, can you do this?
JENNY WONG: I think it hard, working at an agency you’ve got and client coming to you and usually you’ve got projects in coming and you don’t have the amount of people to do the work in the workforce and so you’re retro actively hiring at that point so I find it really hard to switch round that problem and I think it’s one of the hardest things, because I’ve always worked in agencies and every agency I’ve worked for always have been retro hiring otherwise you don’t have the money in the pot and when you are retro actively hiring you are constantly just looking at your own network and that’s one of the hardest things to do and like we’re discussing at work trying to debate how we’re going to change this to be pro-active about it because we can’t be doing like a more inclusive places and getting more people on board and even just out reaching into those places if we don’t be pro-active and it’s really hard to switch for I think a lot of businesses especially small medium businesses to do that.
JESSICA ROSE: That’s entirely fair but you said something that’s brilliant that I want to touch on where you said you’re almost always hiring retro actively hiring and it’s a lot of looking at your own networks. So who here has got a job your current or former job based on your social contact? If you are a hiring manager or you are running your own company you are highly placed. If your friend group isn’t representative then your hiring practices aren’t going to be. If your friend group isn’t diverse – in doing consulting work I chat to a lot of people who say we can’t get any female candidates in it’s not possible for this kind of role, where I see other teams which have folks who have really diverse friendship groups, really diverse peer groups and they’re like it’s fine we’ve got an all female team it’s great. It’s rare.
MERI WILLIAMS: Diversity is not just about gender and inclusion is not just about gender, like here we’re not evenly distributed. It’s allowance the belief that folks of under presented groups are less likely to have skills is bull shit. We’re just as likely to have the skill and be able to do that role but if the way we are A attracted to those roles excludes people from applying we’re inefficient and wasting time. It’s just a thing you have to stop doing in order to succeed in these communities.
JENNY WONG: I think that’s partly why like as a conference organiser and an event organiser for like lots of community events I think representation like are making like even if it’s just a call to speakers, accessible for more people is really important. We see a lot of – and even work in London is shamefully bad at this we see a lot of call for speakers which are purely written based call for speakers and I’ve been in conversations with people who say we don’t submit because my writing is really bad and I would really prefer to do a pod cast or video and even having that like sense of like people who find writing really hard but could be great speakers and let’s face it if you are speaking you’re going to be talking so why isn’t the call for speakers a speaking application but then you put them through a Dalek voice so you don’t know who they are – it’s one of those things where you start thinking about it and you think hang on I’m going down a rabbit hole and oh it’s going deeper! And you never know where to go and I don’t know how much community work can you do to try and bring more of that in play then bring it back to the company.
MERI WILLIAMS: Just to add to that specifically so I curate and co-curate and host the lead DEV which is a conference for tech leads and lead developers and we over the last 3 years have got to the point where our CFP gets 50 per cent of folks from index groups and we’ve done a load of stuff published about how we did it and I think one of the important things is to make really clear that everybody is welcome then to do active outreach and then to make sure there is an initial shift about just how people apply, that representation matters and it matters the following year. The first year we invited and it meant immediately the following year we were a conference that cared about having representation on stage and making sure it was there. I’ll tweet out the list of what we did but you’ll see CFP results in a fully representative set of proposals.
WENDIE: Time is up. We have 10 minutes but the last 10 minutes is questions from the audience. 10 minutes for the Panel or are we going to use it for questions from the audience?
ELIZABETH S BARKER: Questions for sure.
WENDIE: Are there any questions?
FROM THE FLOOR: I think I can easily fill 10 minute with questions. I’ve got load’s so I’m the founder of see {inaudible} human made so I make a lot of hiring decisions. It has been very in vogue to talk about hiring for cultural fit, something I used to say a few years ago, until I started to feel that that just often means pervading your existing culture. So I wonder how do you think about cultural fit and the importance of that?
MERI WILLIAMS: You don’t hire for culture fit, you hire for culture add; what is this person going to bring to your culture and add to what you – I feel like give me the mic! You are completely right. What people interpret when you say are they going to be a fit with our culture, is would I like to drink a beer with them on a Friday afternoon? If they’re from a culture that – that’s often how it is interpreted – you are shaking your head but it’s how people interpret it, but it’s very wrong. So if somebody doesn’t like to drink or chooses their social time – there are a lot of different reasons. The university I went to was brilliant like this. You were not allowed to hold anything university related in the bar because there are people who can’t be where alcohol is served so you have to change the mindset from will this person be easy for us. Diversity is valuable – not because it’s easy but because it’s hard because the simple act of making different view points different demographics and experiences par of your decision making part of the things you create together makes it better so it’s mostly about getting people to change the question from culture fit to culture add; how is this person going to make us better than we are today, how are the arguments we’re going to have about whether accessibility comes ahead of performance or how do we get to have {inaudible}? At the same time those are valuable conversations, not because we’re arguing or dissension is valuable but diversity of perspective and experience leads to better decision making solutions more innovative solutions as well.
CEDRIC KISEMA: I was going to add to that so I don’t drink so every Friday night is oh and I’m lactose intolerance so meet ups with pizza really suck, and quite a few of my friends are too –
MERI WILLIAMS: Cheese haters!
JENNY WONG: I don’t hate cheese it’s just my stomach doesn’t like it.
FROM THE FLOOR: Hi, we’ve talked about interviewing but you’ve mentioned it and something I’ve seen as well that the problem really is the culture of the companies, so it doesn’t matter if you hire you have better interviews if then people are going to leave work because they’re not happy there and they don’t feel they’re valued. So how would you solve that or how would you start changing it especially I think a lot of – I don’t know if it’s a lot. Some themes and some people and some companies don’t even realise they have a problem.
CEDRIC KISEMA: Yes I actually – one idea I got from another company was reverse mentoring where seniors would pair up with juniors and all learn from the juniors, for example let’s say someone who is very much not a programmer but they’re in a managerial role and they actually prepare a programme with that junior and what came out of one discussion someone told me was the senior who was – quite – I’ll say senior – they asked the juniors “why are you finding it so hard, why are you living with housemates, why don’t you just buy your own house?” London! {Laughter} So there was this disconnect and I feel like that that is so – so when you do reverse mentoring they learn more about the junior positions and other people who aren’t like them and they can emphasise more and hopefully that can educate them to lead them to making more decisions that care about inclusion.
JENNY WONG: One of the things I do quite often, I am well-known in the PHP community but one thing I really like doing is every 3 to 4 months is picking a random conference I’ve never been to and going to it just as an attendee. It’s always really interesting because it reminds me what it’s like to be a new attendee at a conference. It’s what makes me really aware of how new people feel at my conference. And experiencing that and reminding yourself of that is really important and also listening to other people’s stories and not just like listening but paying attention to what they’re saying and also not just the words they’re saying but the emotions that it brings up. So I spoke at alter conference in Dublin and I think it was last August now and I went there and it was really cool because I met so many different people who actually explained the situations that tech puts them in and they’ve heard about this stuff on blogs, on web-sites, I’ve read about it, I’ve seen them on twitter talking about it but when you hear them talk and hear the emotion in their voice it’s a completely different experience and because they’re talking from their own personal experiences you can really feel the pain that they’ve already been through and it makes you more empathetic as a person to – decisions that me make in tech that you are just not aware of, for example today a lot of people came up to me and said you know you’ve got those boxes in the men’s bathrooms and I’m like yeah, yeah I know, are they meant to be there? Yeah, yeah they are. And they look at me for 5 seconds. And it say trans. And that’s the only way I say. Then hey yeah of course. Then they carry on and move on. It’s breaking that assumption, breaking that mentality.
JESSICA ROSE: So were you interested in what as talent you can do if you are coming into a team where there is either not the awareness that change needs to happen or not the will?
FROM THE FLOOR: I’ve studied engineering and I’ve been in IT for a long time, different roles, support and all sorts of different things, and I haven’t actually seen any change in 20 years. And I’m worried at the moment my daughter is very good in IT. She is only 13 and she is good at science as well and I am thinking she would be good at a job like this but what’s it going to be like for her? I’m okay because I’ve grown a thick skin and I use the fact that I’m different to my advantage because I think people will remember me, so for me I have learned to turn it into a positive. But I don’t think it’s good enough to improve the interview system or to try to get more girls into stem or more minorities if then when they get to a job the same attitude persists and so I think that is the important thing because you can make a big effort to get them there but if they’re unhappy they won’t stay and so it is going to be a wasted effort.
JESSICA ROSE: So yes this is not the most positive point but it’s a really valuable point that if we were just to look at gender which is very, very cheap it’s not the best way to do it but it’s the access I have the most data on numbers of women in technology the past 30 years have gone down quite a bit. It’s not getting better, it’s getting worse and yes for those of us who stayed in oh I’ve just learned to manage this or – and it is not something that’s optimistic. For individual talent where they say do you know what I don’t see people in management, people in my company don’t think this is a problem and there is no will to change. Leave those jobs if you can. Not everybody can. That’s a huge privilege to be able to say I’m just going to get another job. It’s massive. And it’s such a huge luxury and it’s unreasonable – if you can leave a job and change to a job where there is meaningful change and everything is okay those places are so rare. I would love to tell you this are going to be better but I’ve got a back up burn out career waiting for me. Almost everybody I know who’s been doing this a while has a “am I going to keep doing this?” Moment. And when I talk to people especially when I mentor one on one I don’t think I’ve said this on camera before, I try and tell folks who are under-represented in tech that they don’t need to stay, when you are ready to go you should go. But it doesn’t fix anything for the industry but I don’t think it’s the responsibility of under-represented folks to fix the whole industry.
FROM THE FLOOR: That’s why I asked what do you do in the companies?
MERI WILLIAMS: As someone leading an organisation let me speak to that. It is getting better because I originally helped run a summit for director and above women in engineering and there were a whole – like we, ran out of space, there are increasingly folks who are, who are from less, from underindex background who is are starting to leave these organisations, you bet your fucking life I am having conversations about inclusion, audited every company I have joined to assess pay gap problems and to try and fix it. I agree it is not, nobody has to do emotional labour for the sake of the industry and you should not burn yourself out because you feel like you are alone and that you are fighting. But, there are places that are getting better, there are place that is are better and finding an opportunity to be somewhere, where they are working on these things and it is a becoming a better environment. It is possible. Yes it is possible to leave somewhere and find better places but these places exist and look for them and try and find if you are in a place when I was a lot more junior, a lot of way I made change happen was part of a employee network, adding fresh pressure to fix it, I help runed a LGBT … in Proctor and Gamble, for my career to proposal progress, I had to move to Cincinnati or Singapore. If I had to move to Cincinnati, … if I had to move to Singapore they had … I had a difficult conversation with the company; choosing between my life and my wife was not a positive career change for me. There are people who have the conversations, they don’t require people in IT to progress in the company, one thing I did while I was there, to help that to be true.
JENNY WONG: One thing, I went to FOSDEM two years ago, thousands of people, a lot of people and brain pain so much information you take it in. One of the keynotes by a lady called Karen. I don’t remember most of the talk, I remember a part where she says, if you see something wrong, just say that is not cool. Or ask why did you say that?
When you do that, when you question people for the snarky comments they say, they don’t realise, say, how can you say that? I am being curious, then people double check themselves, oh I didn’t mean that. It is something that just not minorities have to do, it is something everyone can do and support each other on. I think there is a lot of people who want the best for their companies and for the tech industry as a whole. But a lot of us stay silent, a lot of us don’t make actions about how we feel.
I am lucky that I am blunt, I am lucky that I am never going to change that because my parents tried that and and I failed, I am loud. My company accepts that, it can get me in a lot of trouble all the time. What I have learned is that when you are bold and when you just ask questions to why people have said something or written something in a particular way, either you are going to understand the reasoning behind it. And you are going to accept that because you think it is okay, or have a discussion about that and starting that conversation is going to trigger change, triggering change in the way people think. That is one of the major things that we need to do as a whole at least.
WENDIE: I have one final question from this sir at the front row we have to wrap it up, we are far over time. I will give him the mic and one of you the chance to respond, then we are going to finish. Please, have a good question or a good remark because otherwise I am looking really stupid!
FROM THE FLOOR: Yes okay. I have 3 points and they are not really questions. But they are 3 practical things that any of us can do or influence or ask for at our companies.
NEW SPEAKER: stand at the front. Come on John.
FROM THE FLOOR: Our companies from certain roles collected data about peoples, how they were personality type and so on, on metrics against their performance in the jobs, then started reselection for interrues based on the characteristics and interviewed them in a mixed gender, mixed diverse Panel and hiring moved to 51% on the gender scale. That really works. So objective metrix for jobs.
First a friend of mine runs an agency, decent, represent, very he has a total revelation about this. Unconscious bias training is something that you can ask for, that you can do, that you should suggest that your country leadership does and it is having a tremendous effect and points out things like on your hiring page, not only should you write a a good job description, not have a photo of 20 something’s as company culture, if you are a mother, parent, older that is not fun or interesting.
I had a third point — which I think I forgot but that is good enough.
There is practical things we can do.
(APPLAUSE).
WENDIE: I am taking everyone’s mics.
ELIZABETH S BARKER: I would like to thank all the panelists, I felt we could talk about this for —
WENDIE: We have hours at socials to talk about this.
ELIZABETH S BARKER: Thank you very much to all of you, thank you for attending and thanks to WordCamp London for having us. (APPLAUSE).
Thank you Wendie for MC’sing.
MERI WILLIAMS: I won’t be able to go to the social. …
NEW SPEAKER: Do you have Moo card discounts.
MERI WILLIAMS: Of course I do!
WENDIE: Thank you, drinks are in the other building please, join us. It was great. Having you here all day. Thank you and good night.
Cedric Kisema
WordPowerment: Practical Approaches to Diversity and Empowerment in the WordPress Community
Protecting diversity, empowering oneself and ones colleagues are difficult are challenging career questions that we all face at some point during our professional lives. As WordPress professionals, we are lucky that, in addition to our communities as freelancers, agencies or publishers, the larger WordPress community serves as a support network when we face these challenges. The goal of this panel is to bring together professionals from different sectors of the WordPress community to share their experiences facing questions of diversity and empowerment in the WP community.
WENDIE: All right, is our audience ready, I will start with the audience, are you ready for this final talk of the day? This is our beautiful beautiful Panel. I didn’t write down what they are talking about!
All right. This improvisation thing is not mine, not my specialty. Okay, word powerment in this room we talk today about this afternoon know your users accessibility and then the last talk was about inclusion and now it is about word powerment. So it is a great follow up for all the talks we had this afternoon. I would like to give the word to Elizabeth. She is going to be our chair.
ELIZABETH S BARKER: I am yes. I accept.
WENDIE: Thank god!
You are going the have 20 minutes as a Panel then we are going to invite the audience to join in, please stay awake and prepare questions for our beautiful Panel and have a great time. Give them applause.
ELIZABETH S BARKER: Thanks for joining us this afternoon, my name is Elizabeth Barker, a senior project manager, the intention of this Panel to discuss practical approaches to inclusivity and tech organisations, representatives from many different areas within tech from product, agency, community organisations, and so I think we will be able to have a great discussion about what that means I would like the panelists if they could, quickly introduce themselves to you as well.
MERI WILLIAMS: I am CTO of Moo and mostly run fairly big tech organisations at this point I suppose. So the teams just kind of 300, 400 people in size. South African originally. I am literally the one the Daily Mail warned you about, I am a woman who works in tech, an immigrant with a job — I am gay and disabled and I am godless and my wife is British, I am over here stealing your women and jobs. I know a lot about undeserved and unasked for privilege as well.
JESSICA ROSE: I work in developer relations which is this fantastic job I am not sure whether it should exist. I do a lot of sort of outreach to technical communities, trying to reach them with projects. Before I did this, I did a lot of consultancy, around diversifying teams and trying to balance out and fix where possible toxic culture in different teams. So a real lay wide experience of seeing some really fantastic things, some really beautiful community activity and also being called in when things have gone wrong.
CEDRIC KISEMA: I am a software developer, I am also instructor and mentor and I give talks at these kind of events so I, 101 mentoring which I do part time, trying to get more and more diversity into tech. That is me.
JENNY WONG: I I work at Human Made and I am the community engineer, do a lot of organising of WordCamps and events across the board just general community cheer leading in the WordPress Community and the php community.
ELIZABETH S BARKER: Thanks, so, to get us start I mean, inclusivity is a big conversation in the tech world as we know. It is very broad conversation. So, to make sure we are all on the same page for this particular Panel I would like to ask the panelists if they could speak a little bit about what practically inclusivity means for them in their organisations and in their experience.
MERI WILLIAMS: I get called in by companies who want to do better at this stuff. When somebody is deciding to join a community or organisation, they are trying to answer 3 questions, am I expected here? Will I be respected here? Can I be myself and be respected here?
Those 3 things I think are fairly decent framing for diversity and inclusion. So are you signaling well enough all different kinds of people are welcome, do they know from the information you share up front you never know other people who didn’t apply or didn’t get involved because you put them off before you even engaged, when you interact with people, whether that is in a community setting or interview, do they feel expected or not getting microaggression, telling different boys they are smart and girls are pretty. You are reinforcing.
People tell me my English is good, speaking it since I was born, not like, I am not like a prodigy or anything! Since I learned to talk, but yes.
Like those things reinforce all the time, oh you are different, you don’t belong here, there is a really — then people need to be a I believe to see, if they join and part of somewhere that somebody like them can succeed, that might be, somebody they view as a mentor or role model. There are people who succeed are different from each other and you don’t have to have, I will be honest, every time looking for a queer immigrant woman on the executive of every company I worked at. I would be struggling, so you look for people you can see some part of yourself in.
JESSICA ROSE: Looking at the people who never surface in your community, that is difficult to measure and plan for. For me, in inclusion and really making people aware that they can come participate in the space, I always think that the most important thing is about perspectives. When I first got started in technology my manager had a important thing to tell me, took me into the board room. Have you seen the Father Ted sketch with the cows?
Showed the sketch, Dougal, this cow is small but that cow is far away, didn’t tell me why. Okay, all of your problems in technology are going to be about this.! (LAUGHTER).
Just like oh okay, that is fine, all of this is fine, this is not a weird first day!
And I came back several months later, I finally get it. There are errors, mistakes choices in tooling that you make is not helpful. But all the big problems, it is a matter of perspective right?
Yes yes, that is it.
I think that with inclusion one of the big challenges is that moving beyond our own perspective to design a hiring process or to build community outreach, or to try and find speakers so difficult to do that without really engaging in multiple thought exercises, what would it mean not the be me, what is life like for people who are not like me? That is one of the most challenging and interesting things about inclusion.
CEDRIC KISEMA: I need the question to be repeated.
ELIZABETH S BARKER: The question is essentially when we talk about inclusivity, what we mean, what is our frame of reference?
CEDRIC KISEMA: The way I like to think about inclusivity is, is, will every different types of people, will they feel comfortable within this culture? Lesser about and is accompanied by the culture, I think that is what a lot of people seem to forget is, they, they all give out this mandate and say we need to reach X number of people. But forget they need to change themselves. So, I think culture is really big thing and I am thinking about from, how do you interview and thinking, how is your website? How does your website look? There is some websites where I am thinking, some people might not be able to use the website and comes from being inclusive. Looking at your organisational chart, and seeing who are the people who are in, in what influential positions; what kind of people are there? I got, I remember looking through one organisation and feeling very much like, yes, I am never going to progress in this company. That was a bit, that was a bit difficult to take and I think it is it is because I was included, wasn’t included in the … company. It is very much from the cultural standpoint, are they inclusive and do I feel like I am included in that?
JENNY WONG: I think for me, inclusivity means there is a choice for everyone like everyone gets to choose and have a choice to be in tech you know, like, a lot of people talk about like diversity and like oh we want to get 50/50 people. Well those people probably have a job, not like they are just going to snap your fingers and press, hay, people, 9 months and bla, bla, and many years of learning to talk and whatnot.
So it is not as simple like snapping your fingers and say it is going to be 50/50 now. Even working at an agency like, when we talk about oh who are we going to hire and stuff? I am very acutely aware, if you are hiring from other companies you are just moving the problem like, like that is not going help the whole industry as a whole moving people from location to location. Like it is all about adding people. One of the ways to add people is making it easier for people to make the choice and given them the opportunity to make that choice.
So that to me, when we are talking about inclusivity, it is ensuring that people have a choice the be able to do what they want.
MERI WILLIAMS: And the choice to stay, I think a lot of people are like, well, we can accept slow movement on this problem, it takes a long time for the pipeline. The pipeline is not the problem.
JENNY WONG: It is the drop out rate.
MERI WILLIAMS: When we look at technology as the industry, we lose people in certain demographics and certain, from certain backgrounds and at a very alarming rate compared to others.
Obviously it is not only for those who have computer science degrees as engineers and for those who graduate with a science degree, not men, 40% of them are gone within 5 years from the industry. That is a industry problem.
JENNY WONG: When I did my computer science degree, I did a particular type called multimedia internet technology, specifically aimed at becoming a web developer, so it was the perfect job, perfect degree to move into web development. Out of the, the minorities in that group, I would probably say I am the only minority still in the industry. Most of them have moved on, some of them are administrators, gone into law, they have like different people moved on. They didn’t even bother trying. When I talked to student Panels a lot of the questions I get after the Panels are like, so tell me, what is it really like? I am like well, it is going to be whatever you make it.
ELIZABETH S BARKER: So the drop out rate is an interesting point I think speaks to something that I am really interested in hearing things about too. Which is, company culture and how that signals to people as Meri raised earlier, whether or not they feel like it is a potential place for them to work for the long term and feel and engaged part of the company as Cedric also raised in one of his points seeing hiring charter and feeling based on that he wouldn’t necessarily be able to feel engaged in the company for the long term.
Also, so, I would like to hear a little bit about that and since so much of company culture also revolves around the hiring process, how specifically the hiring process might provide some roadblocks as well for a company that is trying to become more inclusive.
MERI WILLIAMS: The question, is how hiring process gets in the way?
ELIZABETH S BARKER: And how it informs the organisational and how it is adapted to be a little bit more inclusive.
JESSICA ROSE: … I wasn’t but I have a lot of things to say. …
MERI WILLIAMS: …
JESSICA ROSE: Absolutely data is not unbiased but I am very, very into using ways, using technology and using data to minimise human bias in hiring processes.
There maybe a couple of people here and there who are genuinely just terrible people, they maybe involved in the hiring process, I don’t sincerely managers going, yeah, I am hiring and I really need some engineers but can’t to reject like all of the different candidates. That is now how this works. Unconscious bias is people viewing talent that doesn’t see seem like, that doesn’t seem familiar, that doesn’t read as skilled to them as less valuable. A lot of people in technology talk about the way that orchestras worked throughout the 90’s and 2,000s, it is all about how well you play. Who you are, what you look like, doesn’t have anything to do with that.
But, up until the 90’s orchestras were overwhelmingly white and male because of merit ocarcy, you would do your practices behind a screen, so people were judging.
NEW SPEAKER: This is my profession?
FROM THE FLOOR: American orchestras do this and it started in the 80’s and the best ones will take you from taking your audition and signing before they see you, there is a huge change in the percentage starting in the early 80’s. Germany doesn’t do that, that looks different.
JESSICA ROSE: Oh, don’t boo Germany.
FROM THE FLOOR: Good in any other way.
JESSICA ROSE: A lot of the hiring processes I am interested in, do similar things in tech tolling, I really like competency based hiring practices, there is a fantastic book called: What works. It is very, very focused on gender, I think that in technology when we talk about diversifying companies projects, it tends to be focused on gender, often to the detriment of white inclusion. But this is a book by Iris, I forgotten her last name, about organisational design for diversity, not tech focused but it is fantastic.
Talks quite a bit about how competency based evaluations can be valuable. Looked a at study where they found, you can give someone 2 CV’s, male and female. Have a female CV with a bit more practical experience and the male CV more training. They found the male CV was overwhelmingly picked employers said we were looking for the training.
But when they did the same thing and swapped the genders, got the opposite. This guy, really been in industry and knows his stuff. So people found, the research found that people were using reasoning to sort of justify the biases that existed, that justified the choices the biases informed. Competency based hiring, literally go through a form, can you do this thing, a point, this thing, gap jumpers that do screening based on tests are fantastic.
There is a lot of tech focused solutions to sort of taking this squishy human feelings out of it.
MERI WILLIAMS: It is important point that unconscious bias seems rational, because when you believe something and somebody questions why, whether you know you are doing it or not, you make shit up to justify your opinion and I think it is, everybody always has a rational explanation as to why they think this, even, that is the unconscious bit of the bias part, that is a really important point.
CEDRIC KISEMA: I was going to add, perhaps might touch on this later, is interviewing is really hard enough in terms of technically in terms of do we give them an assignment that they take home and come back, like how do you take points and say okay I like that method, it’s 2 lines long, that’s one point. I’m not sure if that’s possible in terms of under hiring programme is. How would you…?
JESSICA ROSE: So it is, but it is difficult. I do recommend programmes like gap jumpers because they work with us as a test then you only see answers with people you’ve passed as a test, so you make your interview decisions based on that; and I really like competency based interviews as well: “tell me about a time when you…” Then you have a point out of 5. There is still bias in the process but it’s much lighter. Often it’s a test. It’s a take home assignment. You’ve to build a thing. This feels like a really bias free way to get something done and it’s absolutely not. If you are an employer giving somebody a test or a project and it takes more than 2 or 3 hours you should probably pay them. So, often times if somebody is responsible for family care, if somebody has a life outside of technology, if somebody already has a demanding job; that can put a bar in place. A really dear friend of mine who is a fantastic engineer just passed on an interview process because it would have taken 20, 30 hours of work when that was never going to work for them.
ELIZABETH S BARKER: So we talk about these things and gap jumpers is one kind of solution for removing these bars. Others that, Meri, you have encountered, Cedric, Jenny?
CEDRIC KISEMA: There is one company that has a really interesting way, they always have a free member Panel when hiring because what they found out, you might be aware of this perhaps, yesterday always have 3 member Panel and that Panel they try and diversify that Panel as much as possible and they try to ask – not ask the same questions but in terms of have the same interview for different candidates. And what they also try and do is during negotiation they have bands and they try to, in some cases, actually increase another persons offer if they find out that they went too low on their offer. I found it interesting they always have that 3 member Panel and it worked quite well for them.
JESSICA ROSE: {Inaudible}.
MERI WILLIAMS: I think there is broadly 2 approaches, right, you try and understand as broadly as possible in order to take account of bias or you try and negate it by removing information so you can remove names, photos on CVs and remove all that information. I personally worry about that because I think we still judge a lot by peoples word choice. Someone from a really individualistic culture will describe their role in a team as their individual achievement much more than someone from a much less individualistic culture. I find it useful to be interviewing someone I know you are from a culture where it’s a really big deal and you told me just give to that and give all credit to the team whereas someone from a individualistic culture tells me they did something my bullshit counter goes off and it’s like having more context in order to account for {inaudible} for instance and sometimes it’s useful to have less. I also really believe in lowering the absolute requirements for roles as much as possible. So, there are very few jobs that require a computer science degree. There are very few jobs that require you to have done hardly any of those things. Think about what the role is about and what skills and experience someone needs to succeed in it and don’t make a laundry risk of requirements because you are putting people off who never think of applying or getting involved because it looks like they won’t meet that and there is some research that shows people in different back grounds will interpret those requirements very differently so they’re people unless they have evidence for 100 per cent of those 10 bullet point they will be like oh I’m under qualified I shouldn’t apply and there are people who have 3 out of 10 go I can go for this it’s fine and there is some evidence it’s culture and all of those things combine.
JESSICA ROSE: I’ve got a citation for that so the study round bullet points; I really recommend people not use bullet points. If you can help it, don’t use bullet points in your job descriptions, please, thank you. And the data comes out of an internal HP study where they looked at people putting themselves forward for internal promotions and they found well represented candidates would go ahead and apply when they met 50 to 60 per cent of the bullet point requirements and that candidate from less well represented backgrounds wouldn’t jump in unless they met more than 100 per cent of the requirements.
Are we allowed to mention individual companies?
JENNY WONG: I’ve been doing it anyway.
JESSICA ROSE: I really like Xapiers, does fantastic job descriptions and I’ve been shamelessly copying their style. Sorry. {Inaudible} often does a good job. When you are developing a job description think about what is this person actually going to be doing? And what I really like to do is I like to think about what does this person need to do within the first 2 weeks? What do I need them to do within the first 2 months? What do I want them to be able to do after 6 months, after a year? So people talk all the time in technology, oh you not we’re not hiring for a skill set, we’re hiring for the ability to learn and we do a bad job at that. Ask these questions, let people know from day 1 you have to do this, can you do this?
JENNY WONG: I think it hard, working at an agency you’ve got and client coming to you and usually you’ve got projects in coming and you don’t have the amount of people to do the work in the workforce and so you’re retro actively hiring at that point so I find it really hard to switch round that problem and I think it’s one of the hardest things, because I’ve always worked in agencies and every agency I’ve worked for always have been retro hiring otherwise you don’t have the money in the pot and when you are retro actively hiring you are constantly just looking at your own network and that’s one of the hardest things to do and like we’re discussing at work trying to debate how we’re going to change this to be pro-active about it because we can’t be doing like a more inclusive places and getting more people on board and even just out reaching into those places if we don’t be pro-active and it’s really hard to switch for I think a lot of businesses especially small medium businesses to do that.
JESSICA ROSE: That’s entirely fair but you said something that’s brilliant that I want to touch on where you said you’re almost always hiring retro actively hiring and it’s a lot of looking at your own networks. So who here has got a job your current or former job based on your social contact? If you are a hiring manager or you are running your own company you are highly placed. If your friend group isn’t representative then your hiring practices aren’t going to be. If your friend group isn’t diverse – in doing consulting work I chat to a lot of people who say we can’t get any female candidates in it’s not possible for this kind of role, where I see other teams which have folks who have really diverse friendship groups, really diverse peer groups and they’re like it’s fine we’ve got an all female team it’s great. It’s rare.
MERI WILLIAMS: Diversity is not just about gender and inclusion is not just about gender, like here we’re not evenly distributed. It’s allowance the belief that folks of under presented groups are less likely to have skills is bull shit. We’re just as likely to have the skill and be able to do that role but if the way we are A attracted to those roles excludes people from applying we’re inefficient and wasting time. It’s just a thing you have to stop doing in order to succeed in these communities.
JENNY WONG: I think that’s partly why like as a conference organiser and an event organiser for like lots of community events I think representation like are making like even if it’s just a call to speakers, accessible for more people is really important. We see a lot of – and even work in London is shamefully bad at this we see a lot of call for speakers which are purely written based call for speakers and I’ve been in conversations with people who say we don’t submit because my writing is really bad and I would really prefer to do a pod cast or video and even having that like sense of like people who find writing really hard but could be great speakers and let’s face it if you are speaking you’re going to be talking so why isn’t the call for speakers a speaking application but then you put them through a Dalek voice so you don’t know who they are – it’s one of those things where you start thinking about it and you think hang on I’m going down a rabbit hole and oh it’s going deeper! And you never know where to go and I don’t know how much community work can you do to try and bring more of that in play then bring it back to the company.
MERI WILLIAMS: Just to add to that specifically so I curate and co-curate and host the lead DEV which is a conference for tech leads and lead developers and we over the last 3 years have got to the point where our CFP gets 50 per cent of folks from index groups and we’ve done a load of stuff published about how we did it and I think one of the important things is to make really clear that everybody is welcome then to do active outreach and then to make sure there is an initial shift about just how people apply, that representation matters and it matters the following year. The first year we invited and it meant immediately the following year we were a conference that cared about having representation on stage and making sure it was there. I’ll tweet out the list of what we did but you’ll see CFP results in a fully representative set of proposals.
WENDIE: Time is up. We have 10 minutes but the last 10 minutes is questions from the audience. 10 minutes for the Panel or are we going to use it for questions from the audience?
ELIZABETH S BARKER: Questions for sure.
WENDIE: Are there any questions?
FROM THE FLOOR: I think I can easily fill 10 minute with questions. I’ve got load’s so I’m the founder of see {inaudible} human made so I make a lot of hiring decisions. It has been very in vogue to talk about hiring for cultural fit, something I used to say a few years ago, until I started to feel that that just often means pervading your existing culture. So I wonder how do you think about cultural fit and the importance of that?
MERI WILLIAMS: You don’t hire for culture fit, you hire for culture add; what is this person going to bring to your culture and add to what you – I feel like give me the mic! You are completely right. What people interpret when you say are they going to be a fit with our culture, is would I like to drink a beer with them on a Friday afternoon? If they’re from a culture that – that’s often how it is interpreted – you are shaking your head but it’s how people interpret it, but it’s very wrong. So if somebody doesn’t like to drink or chooses their social time – there are a lot of different reasons. The university I went to was brilliant like this. You were not allowed to hold anything university related in the bar because there are people who can’t be where alcohol is served so you have to change the mindset from will this person be easy for us. Diversity is valuable – not because it’s easy but because it’s hard because the simple act of making different view points different demographics and experiences par of your decision making part of the things you create together makes it better so it’s mostly about getting people to change the question from culture fit to culture add; how is this person going to make us better than we are today, how are the arguments we’re going to have about whether accessibility comes ahead of performance or how do we get to have {inaudible}? At the same time those are valuable conversations, not because we’re arguing or dissension is valuable but diversity of perspective and experience leads to better decision making solutions more innovative solutions as well.
CEDRIC KISEMA: I was going to add to that so I don’t drink so every Friday night is oh and I’m lactose intolerance so meet ups with pizza really suck, and quite a few of my friends are too –
MERI WILLIAMS: Cheese haters!
JENNY WONG: I don’t hate cheese it’s just my stomach doesn’t like it.
FROM THE FLOOR: Hi, we’ve talked about interviewing but you’ve mentioned it and something I’ve seen as well that the problem really is the culture of the companies, so it doesn’t matter if you hire you have better interviews if then people are going to leave work because they’re not happy there and they don’t feel they’re valued. So how would you solve that or how would you start changing it especially I think a lot of – I don’t know if it’s a lot. Some themes and some people and some companies don’t even realise they have a problem.
CEDRIC KISEMA: Yes I actually – one idea I got from another company was reverse mentoring where seniors would pair up with juniors and all learn from the juniors, for example let’s say someone who is very much not a programmer but they’re in a managerial role and they actually prepare a programme with that junior and what came out of one discussion someone told me was the senior who was – quite – I’ll say senior – they asked the juniors “why are you finding it so hard, why are you living with housemates, why don’t you just buy your own house?” London! {Laughter} So there was this disconnect and I feel like that that is so – so when you do reverse mentoring they learn more about the junior positions and other people who aren’t like them and they can emphasise more and hopefully that can educate them to lead them to making more decisions that care about inclusion.
JENNY WONG: One of the things I do quite often, I am well-known in the PHP community but one thing I really like doing is every 3 to 4 months is picking a random conference I’ve never been to and going to it just as an attendee. It’s always really interesting because it reminds me what it’s like to be a new attendee at a conference. It’s what makes me really aware of how new people feel at my conference. And experiencing that and reminding yourself of that is really important and also listening to other people’s stories and not just like listening but paying attention to what they’re saying and also not just the words they’re saying but the emotions that it brings up. So I spoke at alter conference in Dublin and I think it was last August now and I went there and it was really cool because I met so many different people who actually explained the situations that tech puts them in and they’ve heard about this stuff on blogs, on web-sites, I’ve read about it, I’ve seen them on twitter talking about it but when you hear them talk and hear the emotion in their voice it’s a completely different experience and because they’re talking from their own personal experiences you can really feel the pain that they’ve already been through and it makes you more empathetic as a person to – decisions that me make in tech that you are just not aware of, for example today a lot of people came up to me and said you know you’ve got those boxes in the men’s bathrooms and I’m like yeah, yeah I know, are they meant to be there? Yeah, yeah they are. And they look at me for 5 seconds. And it say trans. And that’s the only way I say. Then hey yeah of course. Then they carry on and move on. It’s breaking that assumption, breaking that mentality.
JESSICA ROSE: So were you interested in what as talent you can do if you are coming into a team where there is either not the awareness that change needs to happen or not the will?
FROM THE FLOOR: I’ve studied engineering and I’ve been in IT for a long time, different roles, support and all sorts of different things, and I haven’t actually seen any change in 20 years. And I’m worried at the moment my daughter is very good in IT. She is only 13 and she is good at science as well and I am thinking she would be good at a job like this but what’s it going to be like for her? I’m okay because I’ve grown a thick skin and I use the fact that I’m different to my advantage because I think people will remember me, so for me I have learned to turn it into a positive. But I don’t think it’s good enough to improve the interview system or to try to get more girls into stem or more minorities if then when they get to a job the same attitude persists and so I think that is the important thing because you can make a big effort to get them there but if they’re unhappy they won’t stay and so it is going to be a wasted effort.
JESSICA ROSE: So yes this is not the most positive point but it’s a really valuable point that if we were just to look at gender which is very, very cheap it’s not the best way to do it but it’s the access I have the most data on numbers of women in technology the past 30 years have gone down quite a bit. It’s not getting better, it’s getting worse and yes for those of us who stayed in oh I’ve just learned to manage this or – and it is not something that’s optimistic. For individual talent where they say do you know what I don’t see people in management, people in my company don’t think this is a problem and there is no will to change. Leave those jobs if you can. Not everybody can. That’s a huge privilege to be able to say I’m just going to get another job. It’s massive. And it’s such a huge luxury and it’s unreasonable – if you can leave a job and change to a job where there is meaningful change and everything is okay those places are so rare. I would love to tell you this are going to be better but I’ve got a back up burn out career waiting for me. Almost everybody I know who’s been doing this a while has a “am I going to keep doing this?” Moment. And when I talk to people especially when I mentor one on one I don’t think I’ve said this on camera before, I try and tell folks who are under-represented in tech that they don’t need to stay, when you are ready to go you should go. But it doesn’t fix anything for the industry but I don’t think it’s the responsibility of under-represented folks to fix the whole industry.
FROM THE FLOOR: That’s why I asked what do you do in the companies?
MERI WILLIAMS: As someone leading an organisation let me speak to that. It is getting better because I originally helped run a summit for director and above women in engineering and there were a whole – like we, ran out of space, there are increasingly folks who are, who are from less, from underindex background who is are starting to leave these organisations, you bet your fucking life I am having conversations about inclusion, audited every company I have joined to assess pay gap problems and to try and fix it. I agree it is not, nobody has to do emotional labour for the sake of the industry and you should not burn yourself out because you feel like you are alone and that you are fighting. But, there are places that are getting better, there are place that is are better and finding an opportunity to be somewhere, where they are working on these things and it is a becoming a better environment. It is possible. Yes it is possible to leave somewhere and find better places but these places exist and look for them and try and find if you are in a place when I was a lot more junior, a lot of way I made change happen was part of a employee network, adding fresh pressure to fix it, I help runed a LGBT … in Proctor and Gamble, for my career to proposal progress, I had to move to Cincinnati or Singapore. If I had to move to Cincinnati, … if I had to move to Singapore they had … I had a difficult conversation with the company; choosing between my life and my wife was not a positive career change for me. There are people who have the conversations, they don’t require people in IT to progress in the company, one thing I did while I was there, to help that to be true.
JENNY WONG: One thing, I went to FOSDEM two years ago, thousands of people, a lot of people and brain pain so much information you take it in. One of the keynotes by a lady called Karen. I don’t remember most of the talk, I remember a part where she says, if you see something wrong, just say that is not cool. Or ask why did you say that?
When you do that, when you question people for the snarky comments they say, they don’t realise, say, how can you say that? I am being curious, then people double check themselves, oh I didn’t mean that. It is something that just not minorities have to do, it is something everyone can do and support each other on. I think there is a lot of people who want the best for their companies and for the tech industry as a whole. But a lot of us stay silent, a lot of us don’t make actions about how we feel.
I am lucky that I am blunt, I am lucky that I am never going to change that because my parents tried that and and I failed, I am loud. My company accepts that, it can get me in a lot of trouble all the time. What I have learned is that when you are bold and when you just ask questions to why people have said something or written something in a particular way, either you are going to understand the reasoning behind it. And you are going to accept that because you think it is okay, or have a discussion about that and starting that conversation is going to trigger change, triggering change in the way people think. That is one of the major things that we need to do as a whole at least.
WENDIE: I have one final question from this sir at the front row we have to wrap it up, we are far over time. I will give him the mic and one of you the chance to respond, then we are going to finish. Please, have a good question or a good remark because otherwise I am looking really stupid!
FROM THE FLOOR: Yes okay. I have 3 points and they are not really questions. But they are 3 practical things that any of us can do or influence or ask for at our companies.
NEW SPEAKER: stand at the front. Come on John.
FROM THE FLOOR: Our companies from certain roles collected data about peoples, how they were personality type and so on, on metrics against their performance in the jobs, then started reselection for interrues based on the characteristics and interviewed them in a mixed gender, mixed diverse Panel and hiring moved to 51% on the gender scale. That really works. So objective metrix for jobs.
First a friend of mine runs an agency, decent, represent, very he has a total revelation about this. Unconscious bias training is something that you can ask for, that you can do, that you should suggest that your country leadership does and it is having a tremendous effect and points out things like on your hiring page, not only should you write a a good job description, not have a photo of 20 something’s as company culture, if you are a mother, parent, older that is not fun or interesting.
I had a third point — which I think I forgot but that is good enough.
There is practical things we can do.
(APPLAUSE).
WENDIE: I am taking everyone’s mics.
ELIZABETH S BARKER: I would like to thank all the panelists, I felt we could talk about this for —
WENDIE: We have hours at socials to talk about this.
ELIZABETH S BARKER: Thank you very much to all of you, thank you for attending and thanks to WordCamp London for having us. (APPLAUSE).
Thank you Wendie for MC’sing.
MERI WILLIAMS: I won’t be able to go to the social. …
NEW SPEAKER: Do you have Moo card discounts.
MERI WILLIAMS: Of course I do!
WENDIE: Thank you, drinks are in the other building please, join us. It was great. Having you here all day. Thank you and good night.
Meri Williams
WordPowerment: Practical Approaches to Diversity and Empowerment in the WordPress Community
Protecting diversity, empowering oneself and ones colleagues are difficult are challenging career questions that we all face at some point during our professional lives. As WordPress professionals, we are lucky that, in addition to our communities as freelancers, agencies or publishers, the larger WordPress community serves as a support network when we face these challenges. The goal of this panel is to bring together professionals from different sectors of the WordPress community to share their experiences facing questions of diversity and empowerment in the WP community.
WENDIE: All right, is our audience ready, I will start with the audience, are you ready for this final talk of the day? This is our beautiful beautiful Panel. I didn’t write down what they are talking about!
All right. This improvisation thing is not mine, not my specialty. Okay, word powerment in this room we talk today about this afternoon know your users accessibility and then the last talk was about inclusion and now it is about word powerment. So it is a great follow up for all the talks we had this afternoon. I would like to give the word to Elizabeth. She is going to be our chair.
ELIZABETH S BARKER: I am yes. I accept.
WENDIE: Thank god!
You are going the have 20 minutes as a Panel then we are going to invite the audience to join in, please stay awake and prepare questions for our beautiful Panel and have a great time. Give them applause.
ELIZABETH S BARKER: Thanks for joining us this afternoon, my name is Elizabeth Barker, a senior project manager, the intention of this Panel to discuss practical approaches to inclusivity and tech organisations, representatives from many different areas within tech from product, agency, community organisations, and so I think we will be able to have a great discussion about what that means I would like the panelists if they could, quickly introduce themselves to you as well.
MERI WILLIAMS: I am CTO of Moo and mostly run fairly big tech organisations at this point I suppose. So the teams just kind of 300, 400 people in size. South African originally. I am literally the one the Daily Mail warned you about, I am a woman who works in tech, an immigrant with a job — I am gay and disabled and I am godless and my wife is British, I am over here stealing your women and jobs. I know a lot about undeserved and unasked for privilege as well.
JESSICA ROSE: I work in developer relations which is this fantastic job I am not sure whether it should exist. I do a lot of sort of outreach to technical communities, trying to reach them with projects. Before I did this, I did a lot of consultancy, around diversifying teams and trying to balance out and fix where possible toxic culture in different teams. So a real lay wide experience of seeing some really fantastic things, some really beautiful community activity and also being called in when things have gone wrong.
CEDRIC KISEMA: I am a software developer, I am also instructor and mentor and I give talks at these kind of events so I, 101 mentoring which I do part time, trying to get more and more diversity into tech. That is me.
JENNY WONG: I I work at Human Made and I am the community engineer, do a lot of organising of WordCamps and events across the board just general community cheer leading in the WordPress Community and the php community.
ELIZABETH S BARKER: Thanks, so, to get us start I mean, inclusivity is a big conversation in the tech world as we know. It is very broad conversation. So, to make sure we are all on the same page for this particular Panel I would like to ask the panelists if they could speak a little bit about what practically inclusivity means for them in their organisations and in their experience.
MERI WILLIAMS: I get called in by companies who want to do better at this stuff. When somebody is deciding to join a community or organisation, they are trying to answer 3 questions, am I expected here? Will I be respected here? Can I be myself and be respected here?
Those 3 things I think are fairly decent framing for diversity and inclusion. So are you signaling well enough all different kinds of people are welcome, do they know from the information you share up front you never know other people who didn’t apply or didn’t get involved because you put them off before you even engaged, when you interact with people, whether that is in a community setting or interview, do they feel expected or not getting microaggression, telling different boys they are smart and girls are pretty. You are reinforcing.
People tell me my English is good, speaking it since I was born, not like, I am not like a prodigy or anything! Since I learned to talk, but yes.
Like those things reinforce all the time, oh you are different, you don’t belong here, there is a really — then people need to be a I believe to see, if they join and part of somewhere that somebody like them can succeed, that might be, somebody they view as a mentor or role model. There are people who succeed are different from each other and you don’t have to have, I will be honest, every time looking for a queer immigrant woman on the executive of every company I worked at. I would be struggling, so you look for people you can see some part of yourself in.
JESSICA ROSE: Looking at the people who never surface in your community, that is difficult to measure and plan for. For me, in inclusion and really making people aware that they can come participate in the space, I always think that the most important thing is about perspectives. When I first got started in technology my manager had a important thing to tell me, took me into the board room. Have you seen the Father Ted sketch with the cows?
Showed the sketch, Dougal, this cow is small but that cow is far away, didn’t tell me why. Okay, all of your problems in technology are going to be about this.! (LAUGHTER).
Just like oh okay, that is fine, all of this is fine, this is not a weird first day!
And I came back several months later, I finally get it. There are errors, mistakes choices in tooling that you make is not helpful. But all the big problems, it is a matter of perspective right?
Yes yes, that is it.
I think that with inclusion one of the big challenges is that moving beyond our own perspective to design a hiring process or to build community outreach, or to try and find speakers so difficult to do that without really engaging in multiple thought exercises, what would it mean not the be me, what is life like for people who are not like me? That is one of the most challenging and interesting things about inclusion.
CEDRIC KISEMA: I need the question to be repeated.
ELIZABETH S BARKER: The question is essentially when we talk about inclusivity, what we mean, what is our frame of reference?
CEDRIC KISEMA: The way I like to think about inclusivity is, is, will every different types of people, will they feel comfortable within this culture? Lesser about and is accompanied by the culture, I think that is what a lot of people seem to forget is, they, they all give out this mandate and say we need to reach X number of people. But forget they need to change themselves. So, I think culture is really big thing and I am thinking about from, how do you interview and thinking, how is your website? How does your website look? There is some websites where I am thinking, some people might not be able to use the website and comes from being inclusive. Looking at your organisational chart, and seeing who are the people who are in, in what influential positions; what kind of people are there? I got, I remember looking through one organisation and feeling very much like, yes, I am never going to progress in this company. That was a bit, that was a bit difficult to take and I think it is it is because I was included, wasn’t included in the … company. It is very much from the cultural standpoint, are they inclusive and do I feel like I am included in that?
JENNY WONG: I think for me, inclusivity means there is a choice for everyone like everyone gets to choose and have a choice to be in tech you know, like, a lot of people talk about like diversity and like oh we want to get 50/50 people. Well those people probably have a job, not like they are just going to snap your fingers and press, hay, people, 9 months and bla, bla, and many years of learning to talk and whatnot.
So it is not as simple like snapping your fingers and say it is going to be 50/50 now. Even working at an agency like, when we talk about oh who are we going to hire and stuff? I am very acutely aware, if you are hiring from other companies you are just moving the problem like, like that is not going help the whole industry as a whole moving people from location to location. Like it is all about adding people. One of the ways to add people is making it easier for people to make the choice and given them the opportunity to make that choice.
So that to me, when we are talking about inclusivity, it is ensuring that people have a choice the be able to do what they want.
MERI WILLIAMS: And the choice to stay, I think a lot of people are like, well, we can accept slow movement on this problem, it takes a long time for the pipeline. The pipeline is not the problem.
JENNY WONG: It is the drop out rate.
MERI WILLIAMS: When we look at technology as the industry, we lose people in certain demographics and certain, from certain backgrounds and at a very alarming rate compared to others.
Obviously it is not only for those who have computer science degrees as engineers and for those who graduate with a science degree, not men, 40% of them are gone within 5 years from the industry. That is a industry problem.
JENNY WONG: When I did my computer science degree, I did a particular type called multimedia internet technology, specifically aimed at becoming a web developer, so it was the perfect job, perfect degree to move into web development. Out of the, the minorities in that group, I would probably say I am the only minority still in the industry. Most of them have moved on, some of them are administrators, gone into law, they have like different people moved on. They didn’t even bother trying. When I talked to student Panels a lot of the questions I get after the Panels are like, so tell me, what is it really like? I am like well, it is going to be whatever you make it.
ELIZABETH S BARKER: So the drop out rate is an interesting point I think speaks to something that I am really interested in hearing things about too. Which is, company culture and how that signals to people as Meri raised earlier, whether or not they feel like it is a potential place for them to work for the long term and feel and engaged part of the company as Cedric also raised in one of his points seeing hiring charter and feeling based on that he wouldn’t necessarily be able to feel engaged in the company for the long term.
Also, so, I would like to hear a little bit about that and since so much of company culture also revolves around the hiring process, how specifically the hiring process might provide some roadblocks as well for a company that is trying to become more inclusive.
MERI WILLIAMS: The question, is how hiring process gets in the way?
ELIZABETH S BARKER: And how it informs the organisational and how it is adapted to be a little bit more inclusive.
JESSICA ROSE: … I wasn’t but I have a lot of things to say. …
MERI WILLIAMS: …
JESSICA ROSE: Absolutely data is not unbiased but I am very, very into using ways, using technology and using data to minimise human bias in hiring processes.
There maybe a couple of people here and there who are genuinely just terrible people, they maybe involved in the hiring process, I don’t sincerely managers going, yeah, I am hiring and I really need some engineers but can’t to reject like all of the different candidates. That is now how this works. Unconscious bias is people viewing talent that doesn’t see seem like, that doesn’t seem familiar, that doesn’t read as skilled to them as less valuable. A lot of people in technology talk about the way that orchestras worked throughout the 90’s and 2,000s, it is all about how well you play. Who you are, what you look like, doesn’t have anything to do with that.
But, up until the 90’s orchestras were overwhelmingly white and male because of merit ocarcy, you would do your practices behind a screen, so people were judging.
NEW SPEAKER: This is my profession?
FROM THE FLOOR: American orchestras do this and it started in the 80’s and the best ones will take you from taking your audition and signing before they see you, there is a huge change in the percentage starting in the early 80’s. Germany doesn’t do that, that looks different.
JESSICA ROSE: Oh, don’t boo Germany.
FROM THE FLOOR: Good in any other way.
JESSICA ROSE: A lot of the hiring processes I am interested in, do similar things in tech tolling, I really like competency based hiring practices, there is a fantastic book called: What works. It is very, very focused on gender, I think that in technology when we talk about diversifying companies projects, it tends to be focused on gender, often to the detriment of white inclusion. But this is a book by Iris, I forgotten her last name, about organisational design for diversity, not tech focused but it is fantastic.
Talks quite a bit about how competency based evaluations can be valuable. Looked a at study where they found, you can give someone 2 CV’s, male and female. Have a female CV with a bit more practical experience and the male CV more training. They found the male CV was overwhelmingly picked employers said we were looking for the training.
But when they did the same thing and swapped the genders, got the opposite. This guy, really been in industry and knows his stuff. So people found, the research found that people were using reasoning to sort of justify the biases that existed, that justified the choices the biases informed. Competency based hiring, literally go through a form, can you do this thing, a point, this thing, gap jumpers that do screening based on tests are fantastic.
There is a lot of tech focused solutions to sort of taking this squishy human feelings out of it.
MERI WILLIAMS: It is important point that unconscious bias seems rational, because when you believe something and somebody questions why, whether you know you are doing it or not, you make shit up to justify your opinion and I think it is, everybody always has a rational explanation as to why they think this, even, that is the unconscious bit of the bias part, that is a really important point.
CEDRIC KISEMA: I was going to add, perhaps might touch on this later, is interviewing is really hard enough in terms of technically in terms of do we give them an assignment that they take home and come back, like how do you take points and say okay I like that method, it’s 2 lines long, that’s one point. I’m not sure if that’s possible in terms of under hiring programme is. How would you…?
JESSICA ROSE: So it is, but it is difficult. I do recommend programmes like gap jumpers because they work with us as a test then you only see answers with people you’ve passed as a test, so you make your interview decisions based on that; and I really like competency based interviews as well: “tell me about a time when you…” Then you have a point out of 5. There is still bias in the process but it’s much lighter. Often it’s a test. It’s a take home assignment. You’ve to build a thing. This feels like a really bias free way to get something done and it’s absolutely not. If you are an employer giving somebody a test or a project and it takes more than 2 or 3 hours you should probably pay them. So, often times if somebody is responsible for family care, if somebody has a life outside of technology, if somebody already has a demanding job; that can put a bar in place. A really dear friend of mine who is a fantastic engineer just passed on an interview process because it would have taken 20, 30 hours of work when that was never going to work for them.
ELIZABETH S BARKER: So we talk about these things and gap jumpers is one kind of solution for removing these bars. Others that, Meri, you have encountered, Cedric, Jenny?
CEDRIC KISEMA: There is one company that has a really interesting way, they always have a free member Panel when hiring because what they found out, you might be aware of this perhaps, yesterday always have 3 member Panel and that Panel they try and diversify that Panel as much as possible and they try to ask – not ask the same questions but in terms of have the same interview for different candidates. And what they also try and do is during negotiation they have bands and they try to, in some cases, actually increase another persons offer if they find out that they went too low on their offer. I found it interesting they always have that 3 member Panel and it worked quite well for them.
JESSICA ROSE: {Inaudible}.
MERI WILLIAMS: I think there is broadly 2 approaches, right, you try and understand as broadly as possible in order to take account of bias or you try and negate it by removing information so you can remove names, photos on CVs and remove all that information. I personally worry about that because I think we still judge a lot by peoples word choice. Someone from a really individualistic culture will describe their role in a team as their individual achievement much more than someone from a much less individualistic culture. I find it useful to be interviewing someone I know you are from a culture where it’s a really big deal and you told me just give to that and give all credit to the team whereas someone from a individualistic culture tells me they did something my bullshit counter goes off and it’s like having more context in order to account for {inaudible} for instance and sometimes it’s useful to have less. I also really believe in lowering the absolute requirements for roles as much as possible. So, there are very few jobs that require a computer science degree. There are very few jobs that require you to have done hardly any of those things. Think about what the role is about and what skills and experience someone needs to succeed in it and don’t make a laundry risk of requirements because you are putting people off who never think of applying or getting involved because it looks like they won’t meet that and there is some research that shows people in different back grounds will interpret those requirements very differently so they’re people unless they have evidence for 100 per cent of those 10 bullet point they will be like oh I’m under qualified I shouldn’t apply and there are people who have 3 out of 10 go I can go for this it’s fine and there is some evidence it’s culture and all of those things combine.
JESSICA ROSE: I’ve got a citation for that so the study round bullet points; I really recommend people not use bullet points. If you can help it, don’t use bullet points in your job descriptions, please, thank you. And the data comes out of an internal HP study where they looked at people putting themselves forward for internal promotions and they found well represented candidates would go ahead and apply when they met 50 to 60 per cent of the bullet point requirements and that candidate from less well represented backgrounds wouldn’t jump in unless they met more than 100 per cent of the requirements.
Are we allowed to mention individual companies?
JENNY WONG: I’ve been doing it anyway.
JESSICA ROSE: I really like Xapiers, does fantastic job descriptions and I’ve been shamelessly copying their style. Sorry. {Inaudible} often does a good job. When you are developing a job description think about what is this person actually going to be doing? And what I really like to do is I like to think about what does this person need to do within the first 2 weeks? What do I need them to do within the first 2 months? What do I want them to be able to do after 6 months, after a year? So people talk all the time in technology, oh you not we’re not hiring for a skill set, we’re hiring for the ability to learn and we do a bad job at that. Ask these questions, let people know from day 1 you have to do this, can you do this?
JENNY WONG: I think it hard, working at an agency you’ve got and client coming to you and usually you’ve got projects in coming and you don’t have the amount of people to do the work in the workforce and so you’re retro actively hiring at that point so I find it really hard to switch round that problem and I think it’s one of the hardest things, because I’ve always worked in agencies and every agency I’ve worked for always have been retro hiring otherwise you don’t have the money in the pot and when you are retro actively hiring you are constantly just looking at your own network and that’s one of the hardest things to do and like we’re discussing at work trying to debate how we’re going to change this to be pro-active about it because we can’t be doing like a more inclusive places and getting more people on board and even just out reaching into those places if we don’t be pro-active and it’s really hard to switch for I think a lot of businesses especially small medium businesses to do that.
JESSICA ROSE: That’s entirely fair but you said something that’s brilliant that I want to touch on where you said you’re almost always hiring retro actively hiring and it’s a lot of looking at your own networks. So who here has got a job your current or former job based on your social contact? If you are a hiring manager or you are running your own company you are highly placed. If your friend group isn’t representative then your hiring practices aren’t going to be. If your friend group isn’t diverse – in doing consulting work I chat to a lot of people who say we can’t get any female candidates in it’s not possible for this kind of role, where I see other teams which have folks who have really diverse friendship groups, really diverse peer groups and they’re like it’s fine we’ve got an all female team it’s great. It’s rare.
MERI WILLIAMS: Diversity is not just about gender and inclusion is not just about gender, like here we’re not evenly distributed. It’s allowance the belief that folks of under presented groups are less likely to have skills is bull shit. We’re just as likely to have the skill and be able to do that role but if the way we are A attracted to those roles excludes people from applying we’re inefficient and wasting time. It’s just a thing you have to stop doing in order to succeed in these communities.
JENNY WONG: I think that’s partly why like as a conference organiser and an event organiser for like lots of community events I think representation like are making like even if it’s just a call to speakers, accessible for more people is really important. We see a lot of – and even work in London is shamefully bad at this we see a lot of call for speakers which are purely written based call for speakers and I’ve been in conversations with people who say we don’t submit because my writing is really bad and I would really prefer to do a pod cast or video and even having that like sense of like people who find writing really hard but could be great speakers and let’s face it if you are speaking you’re going to be talking so why isn’t the call for speakers a speaking application but then you put them through a Dalek voice so you don’t know who they are – it’s one of those things where you start thinking about it and you think hang on I’m going down a rabbit hole and oh it’s going deeper! And you never know where to go and I don’t know how much community work can you do to try and bring more of that in play then bring it back to the company.
MERI WILLIAMS: Just to add to that specifically so I curate and co-curate and host the lead DEV which is a conference for tech leads and lead developers and we over the last 3 years have got to the point where our CFP gets 50 per cent of folks from index groups and we’ve done a load of stuff published about how we did it and I think one of the important things is to make really clear that everybody is welcome then to do active outreach and then to make sure there is an initial shift about just how people apply, that representation matters and it matters the following year. The first year we invited and it meant immediately the following year we were a conference that cared about having representation on stage and making sure it was there. I’ll tweet out the list of what we did but you’ll see CFP results in a fully representative set of proposals.
WENDIE: Time is up. We have 10 minutes but the last 10 minutes is questions from the audience. 10 minutes for the Panel or are we going to use it for questions from the audience?
ELIZABETH S BARKER: Questions for sure.
WENDIE: Are there any questions?
FROM THE FLOOR: I think I can easily fill 10 minute with questions. I’ve got load’s so I’m the founder of see {inaudible} human made so I make a lot of hiring decisions. It has been very in vogue to talk about hiring for cultural fit, something I used to say a few years ago, until I started to feel that that just often means pervading your existing culture. So I wonder how do you think about cultural fit and the importance of that?
MERI WILLIAMS: You don’t hire for culture fit, you hire for culture add; what is this person going to bring to your culture and add to what you – I feel like give me the mic! You are completely right. What people interpret when you say are they going to be a fit with our culture, is would I like to drink a beer with them on a Friday afternoon? If they’re from a culture that – that’s often how it is interpreted – you are shaking your head but it’s how people interpret it, but it’s very wrong. So if somebody doesn’t like to drink or chooses their social time – there are a lot of different reasons. The university I went to was brilliant like this. You were not allowed to hold anything university related in the bar because there are people who can’t be where alcohol is served so you have to change the mindset from will this person be easy for us. Diversity is valuable – not because it’s easy but because it’s hard because the simple act of making different view points different demographics and experiences par of your decision making part of the things you create together makes it better so it’s mostly about getting people to change the question from culture fit to culture add; how is this person going to make us better than we are today, how are the arguments we’re going to have about whether accessibility comes ahead of performance or how do we get to have {inaudible}? At the same time those are valuable conversations, not because we’re arguing or dissension is valuable but diversity of perspective and experience leads to better decision making solutions more innovative solutions as well.
CEDRIC KISEMA: I was going to add to that so I don’t drink so every Friday night is oh and I’m lactose intolerance so meet ups with pizza really suck, and quite a few of my friends are too –
MERI WILLIAMS: Cheese haters!
JENNY WONG: I don’t hate cheese it’s just my stomach doesn’t like it.
FROM THE FLOOR: Hi, we’ve talked about interviewing but you’ve mentioned it and something I’ve seen as well that the problem really is the culture of the companies, so it doesn’t matter if you hire you have better interviews if then people are going to leave work because they’re not happy there and they don’t feel they’re valued. So how would you solve that or how would you start changing it especially I think a lot of – I don’t know if it’s a lot. Some themes and some people and some companies don’t even realise they have a problem.
CEDRIC KISEMA: Yes I actually – one idea I got from another company was reverse mentoring where seniors would pair up with juniors and all learn from the juniors, for example let’s say someone who is very much not a programmer but they’re in a managerial role and they actually prepare a programme with that junior and what came out of one discussion someone told me was the senior who was – quite – I’ll say senior – they asked the juniors “why are you finding it so hard, why are you living with housemates, why don’t you just buy your own house?” London! {Laughter} So there was this disconnect and I feel like that that is so – so when you do reverse mentoring they learn more about the junior positions and other people who aren’t like them and they can emphasise more and hopefully that can educate them to lead them to making more decisions that care about inclusion.
JENNY WONG: One of the things I do quite often, I am well-known in the PHP community but one thing I really like doing is every 3 to 4 months is picking a random conference I’ve never been to and going to it just as an attendee. It’s always really interesting because it reminds me what it’s like to be a new attendee at a conference. It’s what makes me really aware of how new people feel at my conference. And experiencing that and reminding yourself of that is really important and also listening to other people’s stories and not just like listening but paying attention to what they’re saying and also not just the words they’re saying but the emotions that it brings up. So I spoke at alter conference in Dublin and I think it was last August now and I went there and it was really cool because I met so many different people who actually explained the situations that tech puts them in and they’ve heard about this stuff on blogs, on web-sites, I’ve read about it, I’ve seen them on twitter talking about it but when you hear them talk and hear the emotion in their voice it’s a completely different experience and because they’re talking from their own personal experiences you can really feel the pain that they’ve already been through and it makes you more empathetic as a person to – decisions that me make in tech that you are just not aware of, for example today a lot of people came up to me and said you know you’ve got those boxes in the men’s bathrooms and I’m like yeah, yeah I know, are they meant to be there? Yeah, yeah they are. And they look at me for 5 seconds. And it say trans. And that’s the only way I say. Then hey yeah of course. Then they carry on and move on. It’s breaking that assumption, breaking that mentality.
JESSICA ROSE: So were you interested in what as talent you can do if you are coming into a team where there is either not the awareness that change needs to happen or not the will?
FROM THE FLOOR: I’ve studied engineering and I’ve been in IT for a long time, different roles, support and all sorts of different things, and I haven’t actually seen any change in 20 years. And I’m worried at the moment my daughter is very good in IT. She is only 13 and she is good at science as well and I am thinking she would be good at a job like this but what’s it going to be like for her? I’m okay because I’ve grown a thick skin and I use the fact that I’m different to my advantage because I think people will remember me, so for me I have learned to turn it into a positive. But I don’t think it’s good enough to improve the interview system or to try to get more girls into stem or more minorities if then when they get to a job the same attitude persists and so I think that is the important thing because you can make a big effort to get them there but if they’re unhappy they won’t stay and so it is going to be a wasted effort.
JESSICA ROSE: So yes this is not the most positive point but it’s a really valuable point that if we were just to look at gender which is very, very cheap it’s not the best way to do it but it’s the access I have the most data on numbers of women in technology the past 30 years have gone down quite a bit. It’s not getting better, it’s getting worse and yes for those of us who stayed in oh I’ve just learned to manage this or – and it is not something that’s optimistic. For individual talent where they say do you know what I don’t see people in management, people in my company don’t think this is a problem and there is no will to change. Leave those jobs if you can. Not everybody can. That’s a huge privilege to be able to say I’m just going to get another job. It’s massive. And it’s such a huge luxury and it’s unreasonable – if you can leave a job and change to a job where there is meaningful change and everything is okay those places are so rare. I would love to tell you this are going to be better but I’ve got a back up burn out career waiting for me. Almost everybody I know who’s been doing this a while has a “am I going to keep doing this?” Moment. And when I talk to people especially when I mentor one on one I don’t think I’ve said this on camera before, I try and tell folks who are under-represented in tech that they don’t need to stay, when you are ready to go you should go. But it doesn’t fix anything for the industry but I don’t think it’s the responsibility of under-represented folks to fix the whole industry.
FROM THE FLOOR: That’s why I asked what do you do in the companies?
MERI WILLIAMS: As someone leading an organisation let me speak to that. It is getting better because I originally helped run a summit for director and above women in engineering and there were a whole – like we, ran out of space, there are increasingly folks who are, who are from less, from underindex background who is are starting to leave these organisations, you bet your fucking life I am having conversations about inclusion, audited every company I have joined to assess pay gap problems and to try and fix it. I agree it is not, nobody has to do emotional labour for the sake of the industry and you should not burn yourself out because you feel like you are alone and that you are fighting. But, there are places that are getting better, there are place that is are better and finding an opportunity to be somewhere, where they are working on these things and it is a becoming a better environment. It is possible. Yes it is possible to leave somewhere and find better places but these places exist and look for them and try and find if you are in a place when I was a lot more junior, a lot of way I made change happen was part of a employee network, adding fresh pressure to fix it, I help runed a LGBT … in Proctor and Gamble, for my career to proposal progress, I had to move to Cincinnati or Singapore. If I had to move to Cincinnati, … if I had to move to Singapore they had … I had a difficult conversation with the company; choosing between my life and my wife was not a positive career change for me. There are people who have the conversations, they don’t require people in IT to progress in the company, one thing I did while I was there, to help that to be true.
JENNY WONG: One thing, I went to FOSDEM two years ago, thousands of people, a lot of people and brain pain so much information you take it in. One of the keynotes by a lady called Karen. I don’t remember most of the talk, I remember a part where she says, if you see something wrong, just say that is not cool. Or ask why did you say that?
When you do that, when you question people for the snarky comments they say, they don’t realise, say, how can you say that? I am being curious, then people double check themselves, oh I didn’t mean that. It is something that just not minorities have to do, it is something everyone can do and support each other on. I think there is a lot of people who want the best for their companies and for the tech industry as a whole. But a lot of us stay silent, a lot of us don’t make actions about how we feel.
I am lucky that I am blunt, I am lucky that I am never going to change that because my parents tried that and and I failed, I am loud. My company accepts that, it can get me in a lot of trouble all the time. What I have learned is that when you are bold and when you just ask questions to why people have said something or written something in a particular way, either you are going to understand the reasoning behind it. And you are going to accept that because you think it is okay, or have a discussion about that and starting that conversation is going to trigger change, triggering change in the way people think. That is one of the major things that we need to do as a whole at least.
WENDIE: I have one final question from this sir at the front row we have to wrap it up, we are far over time. I will give him the mic and one of you the chance to respond, then we are going to finish. Please, have a good question or a good remark because otherwise I am looking really stupid!
FROM THE FLOOR: Yes okay. I have 3 points and they are not really questions. But they are 3 practical things that any of us can do or influence or ask for at our companies.
NEW SPEAKER: stand at the front. Come on John.
FROM THE FLOOR: Our companies from certain roles collected data about peoples, how they were personality type and so on, on metrics against their performance in the jobs, then started reselection for interrues based on the characteristics and interviewed them in a mixed gender, mixed diverse Panel and hiring moved to 51% on the gender scale. That really works. So objective metrix for jobs.
First a friend of mine runs an agency, decent, represent, very he has a total revelation about this. Unconscious bias training is something that you can ask for, that you can do, that you should suggest that your country leadership does and it is having a tremendous effect and points out things like on your hiring page, not only should you write a a good job description, not have a photo of 20 something’s as company culture, if you are a mother, parent, older that is not fun or interesting.
I had a third point — which I think I forgot but that is good enough.
There is practical things we can do.
(APPLAUSE).
WENDIE: I am taking everyone’s mics.
ELIZABETH S BARKER: I would like to thank all the panelists, I felt we could talk about this for —
WENDIE: We have hours at socials to talk about this.
ELIZABETH S BARKER: Thank you very much to all of you, thank you for attending and thanks to WordCamp London for having us. (APPLAUSE).
Thank you Wendie for MC’sing.
MERI WILLIAMS: I won’t be able to go to the social. …
NEW SPEAKER: Do you have Moo card discounts.
MERI WILLIAMS: Of course I do!
WENDIE: Thank you, drinks are in the other building please, join us. It was great. Having you here all day. Thank you and good night.
Sue Fernandes
Panel: How do you Build a Custom Theme?
Theme frameworks vs starter themes vs build from scratch vs hack up a premium theme – there are lots of different ways that people build themes!
A short (2-3 minute) talk from each panel member on their chosen preferred development model, followed by an open discussion with the audience of QandA’s on building custom themes.
ANT MILLER: It’s Saturday, it’s 5.10, no it’s not Crackerjack, it’s your final session of track A! Well done you’re nearly through, that was almost an entire day of WordCamp London you have managed to get through today hasn’t it been fantastic? I think so yes. Right now to put a cherry on the cake to cap it off on a grand final, we have Jonny Allbut and his wonder panel to explain to you in intricacy, the wonders that are making custom themes. Jonny, take it away.
JONNY ALLBUT: Thank you for that amazing introduction, I hope I live up to expectations. So, welcome to the last presentation of the day, and what an awesome conference it been. I have got a huge list of R&D, and that’s without even starting tomorrow, so yeah so just as a brief introduction my name is Jonny Allbut I am director of digital at a company called Wider I have been working with WordPress since 2005 and built my first custom theme in 2006. I will be hosting this discussion today we have this wonder range of panellists, we all approach theme building in slightly different ways, that’s why we have such a wonderful panel because ultimately it’s like getting four presentations in one instead of hearing me ramble about how I think you should build themes, you will have a very balanced perspective, so its probably the best value presentation you will come to today.
So, I will pass the mic now oh they have already got their own, awesome, to let the panel introduce themselves, we’re going to kick it straight off. So the one thing I am going to say hopefully we will have questions at the end, but rather than me introduce topics and then throw it out to audience, we will probably only get through about two or three things, I am sure you would prefer to hear me and the panellists ramble about our perspectives, and hopefully at the end there will be time for questions, if there’s not of course please feel free to grab us at the end and ramble to your hearts content about if you think we’re doing things, the wrong, indifferent we’ll be happy to share our opinion. Please guys if you would like to introduce yourselves.
AFZAAL: Hi my name is Afzaal I run a WordPress theme company, we develop premium WordPress themes and distribute themes to WordPress.org as well. Personally, I help out a lot with the theme review, theme shaping the guidelines getting involved in that side of things as well. Think up themes was we initially released our first theme in 2013, prior to that I had a career in finance as an actuary not related to WordPress at all.
SUE FERNANDES: My name is Sue Fernandes I am a freelance design developer from Stockport up north near Manchester, I have been working with WordPress now since 2006, and I create custom themes for small to medium size clients.
SAMI KEIJONEN: Hi everybody my name is Sami I come from Finland I am actually a teacher but at the same time a front-end developer. I build also public themes in .org and .com but also for clients, for custom themes and let’s have a good show.
ULRICH POGSON: Hi my name is Ulrich I am from Switzerland I work for a Swiss agency called Required, working on back end different things, and I have also got a theme shop wp zoowear with a friend I am selling themes. I work on the theme review team and at the moment I am working on ought mating the process of reviewing themes, and if anyone is interested in talking to me about that afterwards, they are welcome to.
JONNY ALLBUT: Awesome thank you very much. So, obviously the first burning question here is how do you build your themes? So, obviously we all come at this from a slightly different perspective, myself and Sue are somewhat similar in our approach, but you know obviously there’s a lot of different ways to do, it from scratch, starter themes, parent themes, right up to framework’s all kinds of cool things. In my part, we have our own in house theme framework which is open source it’s completely free, I won’t ramble on about it it’s awesome though. (laughter) called Wonderflux. So, all of our themes in are agency are built bespoke as child themes for our theme framework. So if I pass you over if you would like to outline how you build yours.
AFZAAL: We initially started off with underscore, we develop a custom framework from that we continually develop that framework any new theme we release is built from that framework. The good thing about that it is pretty much have all the functionality within that framework itself that you would want in any of you themes so if whether it’s a sidebar theme, a sticky header or theme that focus on WooCommerce it’s all in that framework. It’s a case of cutting the framework down to get to theme you want. We have a designer who designs all the themes just in PSD format they have a broad remit whether it will be multipurpose focusing on a specific area or a theme for a niche like a law firm then we just develop, build with the framework to meet that PSD. That’s essentially how we do it I am sure we’ll tell you more as we go on.
SUE FERNANDES: When I first started developing themes I started working in building themes from scratch which as a freelancer when you’re doing everything, it proved to be incredibly inefficient so for about the last 8 years I have been using the Genesis Framework, and over that time I have been created my own custom child theme which is now use for the, as the starting point for the majority of my clients sites. Then I now adapt and use that to create any sort of different functionality and styling that I need for that particular site, so I can create everything to be custom and bespoke.
SAMI KEIJONEN: Yeah when I started out building themes I think I built them from scratch every time, but I think at least for four years now I have been using underscores, and I have been thinking a lot or making a fork of it like most companies do already, have their own fork and Github or somewhere. I also used for example, web dev studio’s they own Fork in the Github for example, and in Finland we also have another fork from another company, called Dude, that’s really, really good. Basically myself I use also, I always underscores as my starting point. Then I also use some portions of the hybrid core if you know Justin Dadlock and his hybrid core framework it’s not a parent theme it’s kind of different, it’s kind of library stuff you can put in your theme. When I started out I was always using everything that hybrid core had, I just put it in the theme folder and started from there. But nowadays, I just take the best parts what fits into that project. So for me it’s underscores and the best part of the hybrid core framework.
ULRICH POGSON: So at work at Required we use underscores for client site, just using that an working on just adding the stuff that we need for. For my theme shop that I have we use underscores also as the base, but what we started trying to do using Grunt to create the lite version of the theme then the pro version also so we end up having just one repo, and then when we want to generate the lite version to upload to WordPress.org we run a Grunt task which removes some of the files that are not needed which are premium code in them, and create a zip file that we can just up WordPress.org.
JONNY ALLBUT: I think you can see all of us have got quite a few years of building themes, my takeaway from everything we have said here is that although we may approach it in slightly different ways, ultimately, we are starting with a common set of functionality in some form or another. I think the deeper you move into bespoke theme development, especially client based work you are been paid for, not personal projects, personally I think it becomes more of a combination of working smartly and efficiently, and quickly to basically execute your projects in the smallest amount of time and the best way you can, but also quite an important aspect and I think you know you have picked this up from what the guys have said here that there is a level of consistency amongst your projects so, consistency is a good thing because when you revisit that project 6, 12, 18 months later have a got to do those a mends if you’re working in a team or even individually, having consistency in your code just allows you to jump on that project and then next to no time you know where you are and you know where your bits and pieces are and you can just get to work on it so that’s my take away from what’s been talked about there it’s consistency and starting off with some common functionality, rather than blank line, line one off we go Monday morning.
Ok let’s move on to talking about CSS. So my question to you guys is how do you deal with your core CSS layout? So, when I talk about that, you will obviously was of you will be familiar with things like Bootstrap, that kind of thing, which in some ways could be called a framework in itself. So, my question to you guys next is do you use a pre-existing framework do you have your own, do you code it bespoke every time, how do you guys do it? Tell us.
AFZAAL: So, we actually have a bespoke framework and we don’t use Bootstrap or anything like that for the grid layout because, well when you look at the responsive layout the theme is easier to control it that way when have a custom plugins like a page builder or custom short codes is easier to have at grid layout completely under your control. If you work on Bootstrap and they release an update it’s not necessarily going to be the case that it’s going to be compatible across your plugins, your short codes and everything else in the theme so just find it a bit easier from a management perspective to keep that complete in-house. It’s a bit more work to build up that layout initially, but it’s one of the more simpler things if you are going to run a theme company, it’s something which is easier to keep in-house.
JONNY ALLBUT: Once again consistency, really.
AFZAAL: Exactly especially as you are releasing more and more themes, that flows through all themes.
SUE FERNANDES: Working with Genesis also gives you that base framework so Genesis has a really good structure, in its core layout and also gives you it’s core CSS included with the theme framework. The beauty of Genesis is that using hooks and filters an function you can move that layout round as you wish to create your custom code then overlay that with custom CSS to make it look complete bespoke. Whereas in actual fact the underpinning of the site is the same in every case. What that gives you is a really robust site that’s built on a very strong structure, without you having to worry about rewriting the lay outs fret time you start a new project
SAMI KEIJONEN: I basically never use any CSS frameworks they are more or less in my way and give me headaches more than they help me. Kind of my rule, kind if you are starting out with the CSS you should definitely learn it first without any frameworks, then you know the CSS then you probably can use any frameworks if you want, but you really need to know what they are doing and what, where it’s going to lead you. So, I don’t actually use any frameworks, but I might have some kind of grid systems, because, you know, the layouts could be crazy or something different, but I kind of… I don’t have kind of bespoke, in that sense, because that’s more of the really easy thing to do in my project, any ways. So I kind of, kind of start from scratch in that sense.
ULRICH POGSON: I don’t really work much with CSS, I leave the answers for everyone else.
JONNY ALLBUT: No problem. So, yeah, there is obviously some different approaches here, the key theme here, again, consistency and development.
We have our own CSS layout framework called flex layout that’s built into our framework, it’s less than 3k minified, hyper efficient, any number of columns, that’s Open Source too on Github, by the way — little plug.
I think a really important point got pulled up here about learning covers with anything when you start talking about pre-existing frameworks, tools, whatever it may be, jQuery, whatever it may be, there is always a learning curve and I think the challenge to a lot of theme developers is deciding if it’s worth investing the time to save the time in the future, so you invest the time, learn the system and get the most out of it, or you just run around every time. You know, I think it’s a matter of opinion, but again, consistency is key I think in development, speed that up and ultimately if you are working in teams as well, using consistent naming in your CSS will save the sanity of you and your friends and your family. [Laughter]. Okay.
So, keeping on with CSS, a real hot topic is pre-processors, versus vanilla CSS, when I talk about pre-processes, I’m talking about Sass, that kind of stuff that basically allow you to do clever, efficient things with CSS, but I think for my five pence worth on it, it comes to the learning curve thing, Sass is awesome, it’s got a really cool name, who doesn’t want Sass, CSS for God’s sake. At the same time it can be used for a lot of different ways.
Let’s hear from the panellists, the question to be clear is, do you just go to CSS vanilla or use pre-processors.
AFZAAL: We don’t use pre-processors at all, just CSS vanilla that way, when you are doing it that way you do need to do more testing, we do a lot of the unit tests on the dot [Laughter] Organise website, I wouldn’t release a theme until I’m truly happy any way, I’m not the biggest fan of short cuts any way, that’s my personal preference, you probably save a little bit of time on development, but it’s not time that I find so valuable that I need to save it we cover it in testing any way.
JONNY ALLBUT: Sure.
SUE FERNANDES: I use SaSS and I also use [Inaudible] for the library, as a freelancer again it goes back to efficiency, I need to produce my code in the highest quality and most efficient and time-sensitive way. Sass saves me a huge amount of time on every single project, I really find it very intuitive to use, it means I can put everything I need in the same place, rather than searching I’ve and down a 5,000-line stylesheet for hours and hours on end.
SAMI KEIJONEN: In the last question already I love pure vanilla CSS, if it’s a simple project, for example, for a public theme I’m definitely going with the vanilla CSS, it’s kind of what it is and pure HTML and CSS is the first thing that you learn any ways. Of course, with custom themes or more complex themes, I use Sass also, it has maintained the project so much easily and saves time. Yep.
JONNY ALLBUT: No CSS.
ULRICH POGSON: No!!
JONNY ALLBUT: Got it check!! [Laughter].
Okay, so the take away from here is an interesting one, it kind of touches upon some of the, some of the points from last outcome, which was really about working smart and deciding if you should dedicate the time to learning the framework. But a good point was made here, twice I have to say, so it must be a particularly good point, in that a decision must be made about investment in time, but also let’s not forget that at the end of the day, regardless of whether you are using Sass, if you are new to creating CSS, please, please, please, learn CSS first. You will actually too yourself quite a disservice by learning a framework or CSS or Sass, or something, all of these kind of cool things that can give you hyper efficiency in due time, once you have got past the learning curve, ultimately if you don’t understand the core, fundamental aspect you are doing yourself a disservice, you will come across a problem, probably about half past two in the morning and suddenly you can’t fix it. So, I think, a real important point here is to make sure that you learn the underlying technologies before moving on to the fancy stuff, in a nutshell.
Okay, that’s quite interesting. Sue, just before we move on, I’m going to put you on the spot here, little bit, but I am not going to be mean, I promise, I would just be really, really interested because we ourselves just, I hate to say it we’re not sassy, we’re old school, we just like vanilla CSS the team that we work in, one or two developers want to work on Sass, I’m not exactly an expert in it, the decision was made that it would be really difficult to move our projects around our team and basically force them to learn new technologies, when in fact I would prefer them to become super ninja JavaScript experts, rather than pour weeks and weeks into learning Sass, Sue, could ask you, roughly speaking, how long did it take you to become confident with Sass.
SUE FERNANDES: About a week.
JONNY ALLBUT: The mic.
SUE FERNANDES: About a week.
JONNY ALLBUT: Quick learner!!
SUE FERNANDES: I went on-line, took some courses, watched some videos, I had a really solid understanding of CSS which is the point that you were making, that converting that CSS into Sass, wasn’t a great, great leap, if I had started with Sass it would have been a nightmare, once I got into using it and using it modularly, when you see the benefit it clicks into place.
JONNY ALLBUT: It’s a good point, for those that don’t really understand CSS pre-process, I’m going to give you an extremely simple example of how they are used: you could, for instance, have a certain colour value or measurement in your file that is common and maybe repeated ten, twenty, fifty times throughout the CSS file and using a pre-processor, would allow you to set a single variable that is then generated. So, you can change the variable once and it sort of generates itself and obviously plates it through your file if you are old school like me, you just do Search & Replace, yeah, that’s one of the cool things in a very, very simple application of why you would use a pre-processor.
Okay, so moving on, for me this is a really, really big topic. Once you get beyond basic theme building, you quickly discover the short comings of the standard editor in WordPress. If I outline a simple example, if you have got your ‘the content’, displayed and it’s inside a kind of container on your site, how then without getting the client to write lots of closing and opening dives, how would you then include something like a full width section. The next question is: how do you deploy custom layout in page sections? They essentially go beyond what the standard editor is capable of, what technology do you use?
AFZAAL: For that it’s the page builder, if you want to add full width span the whole width of the page, if you want to add a Parallax background so when you switch themes the functionality is there, it’s the easiest way the user can select specific rows, customise the text in that section, centralise the text, even change the pad in the margin all of that stuff. We looked at various different ways, short cuts for things like that, but by far the easiest was to have a pagebuilder, sometimes even having a separate template, they can have a canal template, but it won’t be the width of the whole page, page builder is by far the easiest.
JONNY ALLBUT: Just before we move on so we are clear, when you say, “Page builder”, is that something you developed in-house, is it a plugin.
AFZAAL: It was from the site origin page from 2013, there was a lot of functionality in the original version that wasn’t, just wasn’t there, eventually the functionality was added to the core version, now it’s an extension to that plugin, that has theme-specific functionality.
SUE FERNANDES: I use advance custom fields I’m a great fan of their flexible content fields, so what I normally do I’ll create a range of different layouts which are given to the — well, me mainly, because the client tends not to touch them after they have been set, but in theory the client can then move those content sections around the page to suit their own agendas and whatever they need and add and delete them on the fly, as they wish. Then I can choose what options and what variations they can include in that.
SAMI KEIJONEN: I also use custom fields but I normally use custom meta box 2, or carbon fields you probably haven’t heard that before [Inaudible] if it’s really, really simple ones then I probably create my own meta fields but if it’s more complex ones then I use the plugin, custom meta box 2.
ULRICH POGSON: So for our clients we have built plugins that have shortcodes but then adding support for short cake which allows you to have a UI so the customer if they activated a visual tab they don’t see the short code but a nice representation of the front-end, then they click the button and enter the fields, with the information, some of it can be pre-plated, you can have things they can choose or a checkbox, they can upload images, super useful, it works great.
JONNY ALLBUT: Okay, great, I’m just going to touch on what we do, love it or hate it, we use advance custom fields as well. We really like the flexible content stuff and by building out with that, in the pro version, you can then use all kinds of cool stuff, repeater fields can be used to build out things like accordions, we haven’t built one in any custom themes in 18 months now, even fancy looking home pages are perfectly modular, in fact it allows us to build out any page config, so a very fancy looking homepage, elements of that can be used on any part of the site and I think a common thing that we are hearing hear, is that we do not like to reveal the code to our clients. If we reveal code to our clients and expect them to even do what we would consider very, very simple things, personally I think it’s dangerous ground, purely for the fact that I do not feel that it provides a good end-user experience and between you me and the gate post and the panel over he you will massively reduce your support inbound inquiries if you maybe research some of the things that have been talked about here, you know there is a lot of different ways to do this, at its most base value it could be a custom page template with some custom boxes, right up to page builder, advance custom fields et cetera, it really does depend on the project and the layout the technologies you pick.
Okay, so moving on. I’m sure 95% of the themes that we all build here end up having custom post types and custom taxonomies. So, there is a couple of different ways of approaching this, there is plugins that will configure this stuff for you, that’s crazy talk, you should code it yourself, the functionality is actually pretty easy to understand.
My question to the panel next is: with that kind of functionality when you are creating your custom post type and your taxonomies, do you use a plug in I’m not going to be mean on you if you do. Do you put it straight into functions, PHP, or create your own stand-alone plugin for that site? How do you do it guys?
AFZAAL: So at the moment the customer post set functionality is in the theme, which isn’t that great if you are familiar with the WordPress theme requirements, the reason why our themes have a CPT within the theme itself, is because the CPC is across all themes, so it doesn’t make sense to release a plug-in with that, if they install a theme that doesn’t support it, then it will still be there and it won’t be styled and there is a problem. Over time, as we are developing the themes to include the CPTs, the view is we will move that to a separate plugin and the plugin itself will check if that CPT should be loaded for the theme currently active at that time, one theme is a [Inaudible] theme, that has things to do specifically for that industry which aren’t relevant to other themes, so that is easier to manage, when we need to update any of that code we just update it within the plugin directly, not needing to have to update 20 themes or whatever. So.
SUE FERNANDES: I would always put it in plugin, yeah. When I was sort of getting started developing and even now I get clients that come to me that have custom page built into a theme, then we change a theme, develop a nice new custom one built in genesis and all of that custom post data disappears and we can’t access it. As a general rule of thumb, anything that is meant to work the theme, anything that is meant to be part of the theme, stays in functions. PHP, anything that works independently goes into a custom plugin, that way if they ever decide they don’t want to use that theme anymore they won’t lose it, it might look ugly but they won’t lose the content they have got there already.
SAMI KEIJONEN: Yeah pretty much the same for me always a custom plugin for custom sites, it’s something that is going to stay thereafter the theme switches, it’s always a custom plugin.
ULRICH POGSON: Yeah same here. (laughter).
JONNY ALLBUT: Ok we’re in agreement, you can see a commonality, just finish up on that topic we also drop it into our own kind of little custom plugin that just has an array that sits all the taxonomies and post types and joins up all the relationships. The reason why we do that is sometimes when you’re in testing, it’s quite useful say if you like, hideously break your theme, you still want to actually keep the core content structure together for testing say for certain archive views and stuff like that. Our mentality is that it’s almost becomes a dependency on that specific theme that we have the plugin configures that kind of stuff, that is pretty much along the lines of what everyone is saying here. We’re going have to wind it up really soon, I have now got one minute left. There’s a certain question, we’re going to have to whip through this really quick guys otherwise we will be in trouble. But I think it’s important. I am not going to even share my opinion because there’s no time for that I think we would like to hear from the panellists, when considering accessibility, what are the key things you consider. You have got 10 seconds each.
AFZAAL: So when it comes to accessibility make sure they can get through the page just by using tabs, making sure that wherever the users highlighting at that point is clear, so maybe have a visual change in the background colour or box round, it but just making sure the tab feature is really important to get.
JONNY ALLBUT: Time is up.
SUE FERNANDES: Genesis framework comes already enabled with a huge amount of really good accessibility stuff, especially the last couple of releases, so knowing that gives me the confidence that the themes I am producing are going to be really robust in terms of accessibility. Then I just need to concentrate don’t sign side of things, in terms of colours and focus and so on.
SAMI KEIJONEN: Everything you do just keep accessibility in mind. Every step you take.
ULRICH POGSON: Underscores comes with a number of accessibility features in it, so there’s like with Genesis you just need to make sure that when you design it you choose the right colours and things like that but it’s also important to realise that the content needs to be accessible also, not sufficient just for the theme to be accessible.
JONNY ALLBUT: Absolutely. Good point made that’s is for us, we had about another 20-odd questions, which unfortunately we didn’t have time for, so unfortunately I don’t think we have got time for questions either. So, please do feel free to catch anyone of us either at the social tonight, or tomorrow indeed. We would love to share our opinions on theme building and thank you very much. (applause).
ANT MILLER: Do you want 5 minutes for questions? There’s a slight miscommunication, yeah 5 minutes. I will hold this I will do running from the floor you got the things up there ok. Oh, there’s a mic runner, we have got another one there your first question is coming in. You watch that one, here we go.
FROM THE FLOOR: Hello, first of all great panel, and I have one question to ask you. It’s about the amount of code you reuse in your composer elements, visual composer, page builder or custom, do you have some base templates that you use and then apply design elements to those, or do you most of the time build bespoke elements.
JONNY ALLBUT: Anyone feel like answer that.
AFZAAL: Each theme would have its own custom styling so if you are looking at page builder modules where there’s modules are available across all themes you would still want something in the theme that fits with the design layout of that particular theme. So that’s not always the case, there’s a lot of short codes where there is no styling needed at all like video short codes things like that, and it’s difficult to style like a tab short code and a toggle short code but you would try to have some sort level of consistency throughout the themes.
FROM THE FLOOR: Ok thank you.
ANT MILLER: Anyone else have any points?
JONNY ALLBUT: Next question then please.
ANT MILLER: We have got one over here.
FROM THE FLOOR: Hi. My microphone wasn’t as loud as his, I just shout at everybody. So I think all of you mentioned building themes based from frameworks or other themes making child themes, how do you feel about building themes from scratch, because a lot of the themes have a lot of functionality built into them that you might not necessarily need in the themes for your clients, how would you handle maybe a really elaborate theme build and the framework that you use for example, only provides a small percentage of that rather than doing most of it for you, would you build that from scratch or would you carry on with the theme work.
JONNY ALLBUT: Ok well I am just going to give you my 5p worth and pass it down. It’s a kind of tricky question to answer in some ways, because we have kind of got a couple of guys here that actually will use a starter theme to build on, which I would imagine I mean if you look at underscores is basically has no visual design in it. It just has kind of core layout, and there is really hardly any CSS in it, and I presume the same goes for Genesis as well. Certainly, our framework from base install, has a part from the responsive stuff and the grid layout it has no visual aspects. So, from our point of view the way we approach it we are able to create literally anything visually, we’re not limited in anyway shape or form. I am going to pass it on down the line to get some other opinions on this, but for us if you’re framework if you have to override 10,000 lines of CSS that’s a waste of time, highly inefficient.
AFZAAL: When you develop a custom framework even if it starts off with underscore by the time you finish your framework it will have no resemblance to underscore S anyway. In terms of building advance functionality you can do that via hooks, add custom action, filters put all your function in separate file hook it in. That’s probably the easiest way to make sure have a really simple template structure and keep all your complex stuff in separate files.
SUE FERNANDES: Exactly, anything, speaking from a business point of view you need to have something that is going to give you a head start. If you start to think about coding everything from scratch, then the amount of time is just going to eat into your profit margins and especially when you’re a small business it will take your bankrupt very, very quickly so anything you can do to get ahead, make your time work more efficiently for you which means having a structured base theme that is a vanilla, if you like, theme, which you can then build your CSS over the top and add any style and functionality that you want to and means you are always starting from halfway up the track, you’re not starting from the bottom every single time. That can be the difference between profit and loss on a project.
SAMI KEIJONEN: Just one comment I am with Jonny here what he said, but before if you are just starting out, then please do build stuff from scratch, learn from the bottom up, that’s my main point.
ANT MILLER: I think that’s your lot. Thank you very much indeed Jonny, thank you to our panel. (applause) thank you to Jo I in the corner on the desk, thank you Jonny, great works on the microphones. Thank you to our wonder stenographer, transcription crew for their awesome, awesome work. You can put your Twitter link up there again, this just the most awesome thing it’s like having a sort of little mental cache of the moment running through as we run along.
That’s it for Track A, that’s it for the session of the first day of WordCamp London, of course we have the social. 7.30 here for dinner, but the bar opens sooner downstairs. Enjoy it see you tomorrow!
Sami Keijonen
Afzaal
Panel: How do you Build a Custom Theme?
Theme frameworks vs starter themes vs build from scratch vs hack up a premium theme – there are lots of different ways that people build themes!
A short (2-3 minute) talk from each panel member on their chosen preferred development model, followed by an open discussion with the audience of QandA’s on building custom themes.
ANT MILLER: It’s Saturday, it’s 5.10, no it’s not Crackerjack, it’s your final session of track A! Well done you’re nearly through, that was almost an entire day of WordCamp London you have managed to get through today hasn’t it been fantastic? I think so yes. Right now to put a cherry on the cake to cap it off on a grand final, we have Jonny Allbut and his wonder panel to explain to you in intricacy, the wonders that are making custom themes. Jonny, take it away.
JONNY ALLBUT: Thank you for that amazing introduction, I hope I live up to expectations. So, welcome to the last presentation of the day, and what an awesome conference it been. I have got a huge list of R&D, and that’s without even starting tomorrow, so yeah so just as a brief introduction my name is Jonny Allbut I am director of digital at a company called Wider I have been working with WordPress since 2005 and built my first custom theme in 2006. I will be hosting this discussion today we have this wonder range of panellists, we all approach theme building in slightly different ways, that’s why we have such a wonderful panel because ultimately it’s like getting four presentations in one instead of hearing me ramble about how I think you should build themes, you will have a very balanced perspective, so its probably the best value presentation you will come to today.
So, I will pass the mic now oh they have already got their own, awesome, to let the panel introduce themselves, we’re going to kick it straight off. So the one thing I am going to say hopefully we will have questions at the end, but rather than me introduce topics and then throw it out to audience, we will probably only get through about two or three things, I am sure you would prefer to hear me and the panellists ramble about our perspectives, and hopefully at the end there will be time for questions, if there’s not of course please feel free to grab us at the end and ramble to your hearts content about if you think we’re doing things, the wrong, indifferent we’ll be happy to share our opinion. Please guys if you would like to introduce yourselves.
AFZAAL: Hi my name is Afzaal I run a WordPress theme company, we develop premium WordPress themes and distribute themes to WordPress.org as well. Personally, I help out a lot with the theme review, theme shaping the guidelines getting involved in that side of things as well. Think up themes was we initially released our first theme in 2013, prior to that I had a career in finance as an actuary not related to WordPress at all.
SUE FERNANDES: My name is Sue Fernandes I am a freelance design developer from Stockport up north near Manchester, I have been working with WordPress now since 2006, and I create custom themes for small to medium size clients.
SAMI KEIJONEN: Hi everybody my name is Sami I come from Finland I am actually a teacher but at the same time a front-end developer. I build also public themes in .org and .com but also for clients, for custom themes and let’s have a good show.
ULRICH POGSON: Hi my name is Ulrich I am from Switzerland I work for a Swiss agency called Required, working on back end different things, and I have also got a theme shop wp zoowear with a friend I am selling themes. I work on the theme review team and at the moment I am working on ought mating the process of reviewing themes, and if anyone is interested in talking to me about that afterwards, they are welcome to.
JONNY ALLBUT: Awesome thank you very much. So, obviously the first burning question here is how do you build your themes? So, obviously we all come at this from a slightly different perspective, myself and Sue are somewhat similar in our approach, but you know obviously there’s a lot of different ways to do, it from scratch, starter themes, parent themes, right up to framework’s all kinds of cool things. In my part, we have our own in house theme framework which is open source it’s completely free, I won’t ramble on about it it’s awesome though. (laughter) called Wonderflux. So, all of our themes in are agency are built bespoke as child themes for our theme framework. So if I pass you over if you would like to outline how you build yours.
AFZAAL: We initially started off with underscore, we develop a custom framework from that we continually develop that framework any new theme we release is built from that framework. The good thing about that it is pretty much have all the functionality within that framework itself that you would want in any of you themes so if whether it’s a sidebar theme, a sticky header or theme that focus on WooCommerce it’s all in that framework. It’s a case of cutting the framework down to get to theme you want. We have a designer who designs all the themes just in PSD format they have a broad remit whether it will be multipurpose focusing on a specific area or a theme for a niche like a law firm then we just develop, build with the framework to meet that PSD. That’s essentially how we do it I am sure we’ll tell you more as we go on.
SUE FERNANDES: When I first started developing themes I started working in building themes from scratch which as a freelancer when you’re doing everything, it proved to be incredibly inefficient so for about the last 8 years I have been using the Genesis Framework, and over that time I have been created my own custom child theme which is now use for the, as the starting point for the majority of my clients sites. Then I now adapt and use that to create any sort of different functionality and styling that I need for that particular site, so I can create everything to be custom and bespoke.
SAMI KEIJONEN: Yeah when I started out building themes I think I built them from scratch every time, but I think at least for four years now I have been using underscores, and I have been thinking a lot or making a fork of it like most companies do already, have their own fork and Github or somewhere. I also used for example, web dev studio’s they own Fork in the Github for example, and in Finland we also have another fork from another company, called Dude, that’s really, really good. Basically myself I use also, I always underscores as my starting point. Then I also use some portions of the hybrid core if you know Justin Dadlock and his hybrid core framework it’s not a parent theme it’s kind of different, it’s kind of library stuff you can put in your theme. When I started out I was always using everything that hybrid core had, I just put it in the theme folder and started from there. But nowadays, I just take the best parts what fits into that project. So for me it’s underscores and the best part of the hybrid core framework.
ULRICH POGSON: So at work at Required we use underscores for client site, just using that an working on just adding the stuff that we need for. For my theme shop that I have we use underscores also as the base, but what we started trying to do using Grunt to create the lite version of the theme then the pro version also so we end up having just one repo, and then when we want to generate the lite version to upload to WordPress.org we run a Grunt task which removes some of the files that are not needed which are premium code in them, and create a zip file that we can just up WordPress.org.
JONNY ALLBUT: I think you can see all of us have got quite a few years of building themes, my takeaway from everything we have said here is that although we may approach it in slightly different ways, ultimately, we are starting with a common set of functionality in some form or another. I think the deeper you move into bespoke theme development, especially client based work you are been paid for, not personal projects, personally I think it becomes more of a combination of working smartly and efficiently, and quickly to basically execute your projects in the smallest amount of time and the best way you can, but also quite an important aspect and I think you know you have picked this up from what the guys have said here that there is a level of consistency amongst your projects so, consistency is a good thing because when you revisit that project 6, 12, 18 months later have a got to do those a mends if you’re working in a team or even individually, having consistency in your code just allows you to jump on that project and then next to no time you know where you are and you know where your bits and pieces are and you can just get to work on it so that’s my take away from what’s been talked about there it’s consistency and starting off with some common functionality, rather than blank line, line one off we go Monday morning.
Ok let’s move on to talking about CSS. So my question to you guys is how do you deal with your core CSS layout? So, when I talk about that, you will obviously was of you will be familiar with things like Bootstrap, that kind of thing, which in some ways could be called a framework in itself. So, my question to you guys next is do you use a pre-existing framework do you have your own, do you code it bespoke every time, how do you guys do it? Tell us.
AFZAAL: So, we actually have a bespoke framework and we don’t use Bootstrap or anything like that for the grid layout because, well when you look at the responsive layout the theme is easier to control it that way when have a custom plugins like a page builder or custom short codes is easier to have at grid layout completely under your control. If you work on Bootstrap and they release an update it’s not necessarily going to be the case that it’s going to be compatible across your plugins, your short codes and everything else in the theme so just find it a bit easier from a management perspective to keep that complete in-house. It’s a bit more work to build up that layout initially, but it’s one of the more simpler things if you are going to run a theme company, it’s something which is easier to keep in-house.
JONNY ALLBUT: Once again consistency, really.
AFZAAL: Exactly especially as you are releasing more and more themes, that flows through all themes.
SUE FERNANDES: Working with Genesis also gives you that base framework so Genesis has a really good structure, in its core layout and also gives you it’s core CSS included with the theme framework. The beauty of Genesis is that using hooks and filters an function you can move that layout round as you wish to create your custom code then overlay that with custom CSS to make it look complete bespoke. Whereas in actual fact the underpinning of the site is the same in every case. What that gives you is a really robust site that’s built on a very strong structure, without you having to worry about rewriting the lay outs fret time you start a new project
SAMI KEIJONEN: I basically never use any CSS frameworks they are more or less in my way and give me headaches more than they help me. Kind of my rule, kind if you are starting out with the CSS you should definitely learn it first without any frameworks, then you know the CSS then you probably can use any frameworks if you want, but you really need to know what they are doing and what, where it’s going to lead you. So, I don’t actually use any frameworks, but I might have some kind of grid systems, because, you know, the layouts could be crazy or something different, but I kind of… I don’t have kind of bespoke, in that sense, because that’s more of the really easy thing to do in my project, any ways. So I kind of, kind of start from scratch in that sense.
ULRICH POGSON: I don’t really work much with CSS, I leave the answers for everyone else.
JONNY ALLBUT: No problem. So, yeah, there is obviously some different approaches here, the key theme here, again, consistency and development.
We have our own CSS layout framework called flex layout that’s built into our framework, it’s less than 3k minified, hyper efficient, any number of columns, that’s Open Source too on Github, by the way — little plug.
I think a really important point got pulled up here about learning covers with anything when you start talking about pre-existing frameworks, tools, whatever it may be, jQuery, whatever it may be, there is always a learning curve and I think the challenge to a lot of theme developers is deciding if it’s worth investing the time to save the time in the future, so you invest the time, learn the system and get the most out of it, or you just run around every time. You know, I think it’s a matter of opinion, but again, consistency is key I think in development, speed that up and ultimately if you are working in teams as well, using consistent naming in your CSS will save the sanity of you and your friends and your family. [Laughter]. Okay.
So, keeping on with CSS, a real hot topic is pre-processors, versus vanilla CSS, when I talk about pre-processes, I’m talking about Sass, that kind of stuff that basically allow you to do clever, efficient things with CSS, but I think for my five pence worth on it, it comes to the learning curve thing, Sass is awesome, it’s got a really cool name, who doesn’t want Sass, CSS for God’s sake. At the same time it can be used for a lot of different ways.
Let’s hear from the panellists, the question to be clear is, do you just go to CSS vanilla or use pre-processors.
AFZAAL: We don’t use pre-processors at all, just CSS vanilla that way, when you are doing it that way you do need to do more testing, we do a lot of the unit tests on the dot [Laughter] Organise website, I wouldn’t release a theme until I’m truly happy any way, I’m not the biggest fan of short cuts any way, that’s my personal preference, you probably save a little bit of time on development, but it’s not time that I find so valuable that I need to save it we cover it in testing any way.
JONNY ALLBUT: Sure.
SUE FERNANDES: I use SaSS and I also use [Inaudible] for the library, as a freelancer again it goes back to efficiency, I need to produce my code in the highest quality and most efficient and time-sensitive way. Sass saves me a huge amount of time on every single project, I really find it very intuitive to use, it means I can put everything I need in the same place, rather than searching I’ve and down a 5,000-line stylesheet for hours and hours on end.
SAMI KEIJONEN: In the last question already I love pure vanilla CSS, if it’s a simple project, for example, for a public theme I’m definitely going with the vanilla CSS, it’s kind of what it is and pure HTML and CSS is the first thing that you learn any ways. Of course, with custom themes or more complex themes, I use Sass also, it has maintained the project so much easily and saves time. Yep.
JONNY ALLBUT: No CSS.
ULRICH POGSON: No!!
JONNY ALLBUT: Got it check!! [Laughter].
Okay, so the take away from here is an interesting one, it kind of touches upon some of the, some of the points from last outcome, which was really about working smart and deciding if you should dedicate the time to learning the framework. But a good point was made here, twice I have to say, so it must be a particularly good point, in that a decision must be made about investment in time, but also let’s not forget that at the end of the day, regardless of whether you are using Sass, if you are new to creating CSS, please, please, please, learn CSS first. You will actually too yourself quite a disservice by learning a framework or CSS or Sass, or something, all of these kind of cool things that can give you hyper efficiency in due time, once you have got past the learning curve, ultimately if you don’t understand the core, fundamental aspect you are doing yourself a disservice, you will come across a problem, probably about half past two in the morning and suddenly you can’t fix it. So, I think, a real important point here is to make sure that you learn the underlying technologies before moving on to the fancy stuff, in a nutshell.
Okay, that’s quite interesting. Sue, just before we move on, I’m going to put you on the spot here, little bit, but I am not going to be mean, I promise, I would just be really, really interested because we ourselves just, I hate to say it we’re not sassy, we’re old school, we just like vanilla CSS the team that we work in, one or two developers want to work on Sass, I’m not exactly an expert in it, the decision was made that it would be really difficult to move our projects around our team and basically force them to learn new technologies, when in fact I would prefer them to become super ninja JavaScript experts, rather than pour weeks and weeks into learning Sass, Sue, could ask you, roughly speaking, how long did it take you to become confident with Sass.
SUE FERNANDES: About a week.
JONNY ALLBUT: The mic.
SUE FERNANDES: About a week.
JONNY ALLBUT: Quick learner!!
SUE FERNANDES: I went on-line, took some courses, watched some videos, I had a really solid understanding of CSS which is the point that you were making, that converting that CSS into Sass, wasn’t a great, great leap, if I had started with Sass it would have been a nightmare, once I got into using it and using it modularly, when you see the benefit it clicks into place.
JONNY ALLBUT: It’s a good point, for those that don’t really understand CSS pre-process, I’m going to give you an extremely simple example of how they are used: you could, for instance, have a certain colour value or measurement in your file that is common and maybe repeated ten, twenty, fifty times throughout the CSS file and using a pre-processor, would allow you to set a single variable that is then generated. So, you can change the variable once and it sort of generates itself and obviously plates it through your file if you are old school like me, you just do Search & Replace, yeah, that’s one of the cool things in a very, very simple application of why you would use a pre-processor.
Okay, so moving on, for me this is a really, really big topic. Once you get beyond basic theme building, you quickly discover the short comings of the standard editor in WordPress. If I outline a simple example, if you have got your ‘the content’, displayed and it’s inside a kind of container on your site, how then without getting the client to write lots of closing and opening dives, how would you then include something like a full width section. The next question is: how do you deploy custom layout in page sections? They essentially go beyond what the standard editor is capable of, what technology do you use?
AFZAAL: For that it’s the page builder, if you want to add full width span the whole width of the page, if you want to add a Parallax background so when you switch themes the functionality is there, it’s the easiest way the user can select specific rows, customise the text in that section, centralise the text, even change the pad in the margin all of that stuff. We looked at various different ways, short cuts for things like that, but by far the easiest was to have a pagebuilder, sometimes even having a separate template, they can have a canal template, but it won’t be the width of the whole page, page builder is by far the easiest.
JONNY ALLBUT: Just before we move on so we are clear, when you say, “Page builder”, is that something you developed in-house, is it a plugin.
AFZAAL: It was from the site origin page from 2013, there was a lot of functionality in the original version that wasn’t, just wasn’t there, eventually the functionality was added to the core version, now it’s an extension to that plugin, that has theme-specific functionality.
SUE FERNANDES: I use advance custom fields I’m a great fan of their flexible content fields, so what I normally do I’ll create a range of different layouts which are given to the — well, me mainly, because the client tends not to touch them after they have been set, but in theory the client can then move those content sections around the page to suit their own agendas and whatever they need and add and delete them on the fly, as they wish. Then I can choose what options and what variations they can include in that.
SAMI KEIJONEN: I also use custom fields but I normally use custom meta box 2, or carbon fields you probably haven’t heard that before [Inaudible] if it’s really, really simple ones then I probably create my own meta fields but if it’s more complex ones then I use the plugin, custom meta box 2.
ULRICH POGSON: So for our clients we have built plugins that have shortcodes but then adding support for short cake which allows you to have a UI so the customer if they activated a visual tab they don’t see the short code but a nice representation of the front-end, then they click the button and enter the fields, with the information, some of it can be pre-plated, you can have things they can choose or a checkbox, they can upload images, super useful, it works great.
JONNY ALLBUT: Okay, great, I’m just going to touch on what we do, love it or hate it, we use advance custom fields as well. We really like the flexible content stuff and by building out with that, in the pro version, you can then use all kinds of cool stuff, repeater fields can be used to build out things like accordions, we haven’t built one in any custom themes in 18 months now, even fancy looking home pages are perfectly modular, in fact it allows us to build out any page config, so a very fancy looking homepage, elements of that can be used on any part of the site and I think a common thing that we are hearing hear, is that we do not like to reveal the code to our clients. If we reveal code to our clients and expect them to even do what we would consider very, very simple things, personally I think it’s dangerous ground, purely for the fact that I do not feel that it provides a good end-user experience and between you me and the gate post and the panel over he you will massively reduce your support inbound inquiries if you maybe research some of the things that have been talked about here, you know there is a lot of different ways to do this, at its most base value it could be a custom page template with some custom boxes, right up to page builder, advance custom fields et cetera, it really does depend on the project and the layout the technologies you pick.
Okay, so moving on. I’m sure 95% of the themes that we all build here end up having custom post types and custom taxonomies. So, there is a couple of different ways of approaching this, there is plugins that will configure this stuff for you, that’s crazy talk, you should code it yourself, the functionality is actually pretty easy to understand.
My question to the panel next is: with that kind of functionality when you are creating your custom post type and your taxonomies, do you use a plug in I’m not going to be mean on you if you do. Do you put it straight into functions, PHP, or create your own stand-alone plugin for that site? How do you do it guys?
AFZAAL: So at the moment the customer post set functionality is in the theme, which isn’t that great if you are familiar with the WordPress theme requirements, the reason why our themes have a CPT within the theme itself, is because the CPC is across all themes, so it doesn’t make sense to release a plug-in with that, if they install a theme that doesn’t support it, then it will still be there and it won’t be styled and there is a problem. Over time, as we are developing the themes to include the CPTs, the view is we will move that to a separate plugin and the plugin itself will check if that CPT should be loaded for the theme currently active at that time, one theme is a [Inaudible] theme, that has things to do specifically for that industry which aren’t relevant to other themes, so that is easier to manage, when we need to update any of that code we just update it within the plugin directly, not needing to have to update 20 themes or whatever. So.
SUE FERNANDES: I would always put it in plugin, yeah. When I was sort of getting started developing and even now I get clients that come to me that have custom page built into a theme, then we change a theme, develop a nice new custom one built in genesis and all of that custom post data disappears and we can’t access it. As a general rule of thumb, anything that is meant to work the theme, anything that is meant to be part of the theme, stays in functions. PHP, anything that works independently goes into a custom plugin, that way if they ever decide they don’t want to use that theme anymore they won’t lose it, it might look ugly but they won’t lose the content they have got there already.
SAMI KEIJONEN: Yeah pretty much the same for me always a custom plugin for custom sites, it’s something that is going to stay thereafter the theme switches, it’s always a custom plugin.
ULRICH POGSON: Yeah same here. (laughter).
JONNY ALLBUT: Ok we’re in agreement, you can see a commonality, just finish up on that topic we also drop it into our own kind of little custom plugin that just has an array that sits all the taxonomies and post types and joins up all the relationships. The reason why we do that is sometimes when you’re in testing, it’s quite useful say if you like, hideously break your theme, you still want to actually keep the core content structure together for testing say for certain archive views and stuff like that. Our mentality is that it’s almost becomes a dependency on that specific theme that we have the plugin configures that kind of stuff, that is pretty much along the lines of what everyone is saying here. We’re going have to wind it up really soon, I have now got one minute left. There’s a certain question, we’re going to have to whip through this really quick guys otherwise we will be in trouble. But I think it’s important. I am not going to even share my opinion because there’s no time for that I think we would like to hear from the panellists, when considering accessibility, what are the key things you consider. You have got 10 seconds each.
AFZAAL: So when it comes to accessibility make sure they can get through the page just by using tabs, making sure that wherever the users highlighting at that point is clear, so maybe have a visual change in the background colour or box round, it but just making sure the tab feature is really important to get.
JONNY ALLBUT: Time is up.
SUE FERNANDES: Genesis framework comes already enabled with a huge amount of really good accessibility stuff, especially the last couple of releases, so knowing that gives me the confidence that the themes I am producing are going to be really robust in terms of accessibility. Then I just need to concentrate don’t sign side of things, in terms of colours and focus and so on.
SAMI KEIJONEN: Everything you do just keep accessibility in mind. Every step you take.
ULRICH POGSON: Underscores comes with a number of accessibility features in it, so there’s like with Genesis you just need to make sure that when you design it you choose the right colours and things like that but it’s also important to realise that the content needs to be accessible also, not sufficient just for the theme to be accessible.
JONNY ALLBUT: Absolutely. Good point made that’s is for us, we had about another 20-odd questions, which unfortunately we didn’t have time for, so unfortunately I don’t think we have got time for questions either. So, please do feel free to catch anyone of us either at the social tonight, or tomorrow indeed. We would love to share our opinions on theme building and thank you very much. (applause).
ANT MILLER: Do you want 5 minutes for questions? There’s a slight miscommunication, yeah 5 minutes. I will hold this I will do running from the floor you got the things up there ok. Oh, there’s a mic runner, we have got another one there your first question is coming in. You watch that one, here we go.
FROM THE FLOOR: Hello, first of all great panel, and I have one question to ask you. It’s about the amount of code you reuse in your composer elements, visual composer, page builder or custom, do you have some base templates that you use and then apply design elements to those, or do you most of the time build bespoke elements.
JONNY ALLBUT: Anyone feel like answer that.
AFZAAL: Each theme would have its own custom styling so if you are looking at page builder modules where there’s modules are available across all themes you would still want something in the theme that fits with the design layout of that particular theme. So that’s not always the case, there’s a lot of short codes where there is no styling needed at all like video short codes things like that, and it’s difficult to style like a tab short code and a toggle short code but you would try to have some sort level of consistency throughout the themes.
FROM THE FLOOR: Ok thank you.
ANT MILLER: Anyone else have any points?
JONNY ALLBUT: Next question then please.
ANT MILLER: We have got one over here.
FROM THE FLOOR: Hi. My microphone wasn’t as loud as his, I just shout at everybody. So I think all of you mentioned building themes based from frameworks or other themes making child themes, how do you feel about building themes from scratch, because a lot of the themes have a lot of functionality built into them that you might not necessarily need in the themes for your clients, how would you handle maybe a really elaborate theme build and the framework that you use for example, only provides a small percentage of that rather than doing most of it for you, would you build that from scratch or would you carry on with the theme work.
JONNY ALLBUT: Ok well I am just going to give you my 5p worth and pass it down. It’s a kind of tricky question to answer in some ways, because we have kind of got a couple of guys here that actually will use a starter theme to build on, which I would imagine I mean if you look at underscores is basically has no visual design in it. It just has kind of core layout, and there is really hardly any CSS in it, and I presume the same goes for Genesis as well. Certainly, our framework from base install, has a part from the responsive stuff and the grid layout it has no visual aspects. So, from our point of view the way we approach it we are able to create literally anything visually, we’re not limited in anyway shape or form. I am going to pass it on down the line to get some other opinions on this, but for us if you’re framework if you have to override 10,000 lines of CSS that’s a waste of time, highly inefficient.
AFZAAL: When you develop a custom framework even if it starts off with underscore by the time you finish your framework it will have no resemblance to underscore S anyway. In terms of building advance functionality you can do that via hooks, add custom action, filters put all your function in separate file hook it in. That’s probably the easiest way to make sure have a really simple template structure and keep all your complex stuff in separate files.
SUE FERNANDES: Exactly, anything, speaking from a business point of view you need to have something that is going to give you a head start. If you start to think about coding everything from scratch, then the amount of time is just going to eat into your profit margins and especially when you’re a small business it will take your bankrupt very, very quickly so anything you can do to get ahead, make your time work more efficiently for you which means having a structured base theme that is a vanilla, if you like, theme, which you can then build your CSS over the top and add any style and functionality that you want to and means you are always starting from halfway up the track, you’re not starting from the bottom every single time. That can be the difference between profit and loss on a project.
SAMI KEIJONEN: Just one comment I am with Jonny here what he said, but before if you are just starting out, then please do build stuff from scratch, learn from the bottom up, that’s my main point.
ANT MILLER: I think that’s your lot. Thank you very much indeed Jonny, thank you to our panel. (applause) thank you to Jo I in the corner on the desk, thank you Jonny, great works on the microphones. Thank you to our wonder stenographer, transcription crew for their awesome, awesome work. You can put your Twitter link up there again, this just the most awesome thing it’s like having a sort of little mental cache of the moment running through as we run along.
That’s it for Track A, that’s it for the session of the first day of WordCamp London, of course we have the social. 7.30 here for dinner, but the bar opens sooner downstairs. Enjoy it see you tomorrow!
Ulrich Pogson
Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Host?
Shared, VPS, Dedicated, Cloud, Dedicated PS, Dedicated Cloud, Co-lo what does any of that mean welcome to the world of hosting with its bizarre vocabulary and massive amount of marketing spin. It can often be confusing just working out what hosting companies do let alone, if their products and services are suitable for your project.
In this talk Tim will guide you through the world of hosting, looking at what the different offerings mean trying to break down the vocabulary of hosting into terms that are easy to understand. To help you find out what products and services might be right for your next site. He will go through some of the key things to look for and questions you should be asking about any products/service. Finally he will challenge some of the preconceived notions and show how in the right services free can sometime be the perfect solution.
DAN MABY: Ok welcome thank you all for joining us here this afternoon, I just want to say thank you to sponsors, big thank you to sponsors that bought boxes Timpani, WooCommerce and Jetpack. Big thank you to the sponsors in the stalls, HeartInternet, SiteGround 34SP.com, WPengine and SiteGround, oh I am very sorry, GoDaddy. Thank you to all the sponsors in the dress circle and grand circle ace you will find them downstairs as well feel free to mingle say hello grab some of their lovely swag. Big thank you, balcony and patrons. On to next session. Our next speaker this afternoon is a, the WordPress platform lead and developer advocate for 34SP.com which means he is a cross between a dev ops and a project manager. On his personal site you will find a list of platforms and technologies he proficient in it’s a long list, 41 items in fact. He also is the co-organiser of WordPress leads, contributes on the.org support forum, a regular speaker at WordCamps and Meetups, fairly safe to say he’s a big guy here’s here this afternoon to give you talk who is afraid of the big bad host, give a warm welcome to Tim Nash. (applause).
TIM NASH: Afternoon everyone. We’re starting 5 minutes early which is a bit weird but ok let’s start earlier before we go too far, how many people in this room actually work for a hosting company? Ok. Could you all then leave so we can have a proper conversation. (laughter). My name is Tim Nash, you should definitely trust everything I say in this conversation because I work for a hosting company. That is actually there as a warning, you have to take whenever you are doing anything, on the internet you have to take the with a pinch of salt, when it comes to hosting, double check everything, make sure all the facts are correct but do trust me, I work in hosting.
This talk is all about what is hosting, trying to distill it down into something that is not scary. Because we live in a acronym driven world at the best of times, and the guys doing marketing in hosting have taken to it the next level. Everything is an acronym of a buzz term. You never really know quite what you’re getting. So, I am going to try to distill it and make it as simple as possible, and I may take the Mickey out of web hosts just a tiny bit. It’s ok because I work for them.
What is hosting really then? Big finger. That’s my finger. A real piece of hardware. That is important because when we get right down to it, web hosting is simply about hosting sites on physical pieces of hardware. At the end of the day your website is on something that looks like that. If it’s on something that looks like a PC that’s really bad but there are plenty of people whose websites still being hosted on little PC under a desk in a bed r room or someone office. They are the one that are really slow and hard to get to but most modern web hosting will look like this and have a nicely racked beautiful looking service server. In a data centre there will be thousands upon thousand of these servers sitting in large spaces all over the world. Data centres here in London, Manchester, any major city then have a got place like Iceland which is notorious or is data centre usage 11% of all power usage in Iceland is from data centres. So they are absolutely everywhere. That means you could be hosted anywhere in the world. I was trying to find some interesting research on where the most obscure data centre was and I was like well there’s bound to be one in the Antarctic, strangely enough no. there’s racks of servers in the Antarctic but nothing that is actual lie commercial data centre so then I went up to Arctic there’s a couple in Russia which is about as close to I could get, I looked even further I did find a data centre in Sahara desert, when I looked it up a bit more carefully, realised it was primarily used for e-mailing, then I thought bit I got the joke. Hopefully the people in Nigeria did too. So you have got main hardware, this is what we can call bare metal. On bare metal we normally have virtual machines, even if are some sort of the shared hosting the chance are they are not using the bare metal, some sort of virtualisation to put your data on. Virtual machines are exactly that you get an OS for each one of these individual components, that an operating system for each one of these containers. Then if you are on shared hosting, you have something called chroots or, jails these are individual little blocks that build up, and you get effectively one block and that one block might have your site in it so, from the metal hardware, we go all the way here, your site starts to look very, very small. This is scaled for you. Shared hosts can have anything between 800 to thousand maybe, 2000 sites on them depending on the hardware. So you are sharing that piece of hardware and you are really sharing a virtual machine nearly all the way they themselves are split out with 2000 people. When it comes to hosting in general, it’s all about who your neighbours are, so if you are sharing with one or two people, you probably, you might know them, they might be friends they might be nice people, but if you imagined you were going to set up your business in your house with 800 other people. Sharing with one tiny house and all 800 of you piled in there. Do you know everyone? Are they all friendly? I used to, and I am going to use the analogy now and then I will explain why I don’t do it anymore. I used to use the analogy that shared hosting really was like doing business out of your house, but something called, have you all heard of house in multiple occupation, a HOMO, it’s a student homes effectively, you are in a student house you are doing your web hosting you have got you site you go into the bathroom there’s a guy making vodka jelly. Then there’s a knock at the door, because it’s the policeman wanting to find out about the drug dealer in room two. It’s scary, but that could be your house. Now if we take that analogy on the web, somebody on your server, may get hacked, they maybe spamming out masses of email. They might have malware on there or something that is nasty. Now when people do checks, they are not just identifying that malware site they will identify or not other sites attached to that same IP on that individual server, suddenly you could be branded that way. Because effectively you live at number 34, that place with guy who makes the vodka jelly, that might be cool, and the drug dealer that might not be so cool. Or the murderer that would be very uncool.
Consequently, businesses tend to want to move away from these sorts of environment and go into more specialised and systems where they come down to this virtual machine level. With a VM, and they we tend to call these VPSs, virtual private servers. A VPS is your own little world, you can break it, doesn’t matter, you don’t share it with anybody. If you don’t share it with anybody, they can’t affect you. It’s not strictly true because if they can manage to affect the server enough with actual bare metal it fallers over you still fall over with it but you are much more isolated. Is anybody in here is running a business or is doing anything to do with anything where you have to guarantee or have some sort of guarantee, or just care that your website might be up, and that you’re not going to be in a position where you worried about the reputation of your site, you have to really be looking at a VPS or potentially the bare metal dedicated, although there’s many reasons not to and avoid shared hosting. If you at all can.
There are some instances where it’s ok to use shared hosting if you don’t care about the project, it’s your personal project you just want to tinker, that’s absolutely fine. There are plenty of hosting companies that will offer you shared hosting. There are plenty of companies that will call things like a VPS, a container, or they might call it a dedicated virtual server. Which is weird because we call bare metal hardware, dedicated hardware. It’s almost like we’re trying to trick you into doing something ,something. It’s a bit scammy. It’s all marketing, all words, buzzwords are marketing I am going to assume you have all heard some of these buzzwords, I will try to distill what they actually mean. Blindingly fast, there isn’t a web host on the planet that has not said our servers are blindingly fast. I caught one of our members downstairs saying it, and I wanted to strangle them, then I remembered I had this on the slide and smiled instead. (laughter) blindingly fast, high performance, your hosting does make a big difference to performance of your site, but ultimately everybody in this room is responsible for the performance of the site. Getting the best hosting in the world won’t make certain sites blindingly fast. Help might make them slightly better than a snail, blindingly fast, no. Blindingly fast normally is a marketing term but you do want to look for hosting companies that can show and prove that the time to first byte is being reduced, they know they are talking about things like transit provider having multiples, of them they are talking about whether or not they are how quickly whether they have got a link directly to the States, sometimes it’s word looking if they have got data centres in multiple countries and whether they actually distribute to those, it means they have got a copy of your website in the UK , a copy in the States, a copy in France. Because then the local copies might reach people quickly, but on the whole blindingly fast is simply a marketing buzz word. More importantly, what makes it blindingly? If am blind I will probably not be running fast, I might be but it unlikely. My favourite one. Bullet proof security. Again, a term that I picked, thankfully somebody else say bulletproof security I am thinking, nobody shoots bullets in data centres if they do I am not sure our servers will support that. If they have got holes in them they don’t work. But bulletproof security, security in web hosting is really weird because hosting companies need to do two things. They need to keep your site up, they need to keep everybody else’s site up. One of the horrible truth about working in a web host is that you actually almost don’t care about the customers’ individual site. If it’s spamming and it’s hacked, it needs to be fixed, not because they are having a bad day because they are and it’s terrifying and horrible in miserable we want to help them but that’s because suddenly problem with infrastructure. Now, all of a sudden that becomes an issue. If it affects multiple people, that’s important.
So, on the plus side, if you ever do have security issues your web host will want to help you because it affects them. Performance they might not be as keen, well they still want to help you because they are nice people, but they are much more keen to talk to you about security. If you come up to web host and say please tell me how to make my site more secure, they will have someone who will come and talk to you about it. They like you to do that before the hacked sites and most of them will help used at least with hacked sites. However, nobody offers a cast iron guarantee of security. If they do, that’s mental. Because there are so many potential threats out there, hopefully all went to the TLH talk yesterday and have seen security talks in the past. Bulletproof security is something that is a complete utter myth.
Which then leads on to one click thing, one click WordPress, that’s always worked hasn’t it! As anybody in this room actually pressed the one click WordPress button on a host, and it’s worked perfectly. At least one person here built one, so I hope they can put their hands up! Anybody in this room tried to press the one click button on Magento — one, did it work, ooh, he’s smiling, that’s a miracle. Most companies want to give you nice features and ease of use, no one wants to use them, yet you still want them as a feature set, one click anything isn’t necessarily a good thing, you guys are experts at installing WordPress, you will be experts in Magento, Juno, whatever it is, you don’t need the hosting company to do it, people say I love PAL, it lets me press buttons, I love CPAL, I love it you can press buttons, I don’t need to know that, I don’t want you pressing buttons, one click is a bad thing, yes it’s a marketing gimmick that everybody loves, please don’t use the one click installers they are terrible.
My personal favourite buzz word that’s come up time and time again, is server-less, AWS has a server solution, you hear server-less, it’s like, think that through for two seconds how does that work? I think I have an answer. It must be in the cloud. [Laughter].
That’s got to be the solution. Obviously, server-less, when people talk about server-less, it means they don’t pay for a specific container or package, they are paying for a basic usage of some server somewhere else, but obviously, it is not server-less, because that would be magic. If there is a company doing truly server-less work, distributing on to things like a kettle, maybe that’s how they are doing it, if they’re doing it I want to know, that sounds cool, I can then be a product lead of magician, a way more interesting title.
Cloud computing, another amazing buzzword that actually I generally believe that cloud computing started as a marketing term, and it’s now moved into a position where it’s actually now a real term. Way before we were in a position to do it, marketers went, “Distributed applications”, we need a term for this, we’re not actually doing it, we just need a term for it. Cloud. A VPS, it’s in the cloud, shared hose didn’t, it’s in the cloud. It’s on somebody else’s server.
Over time we have actually started to have technology and applications which are using multiple servers, that are clustered together and your site can be distributed across that cluster and those clusters can be in different locations.
So, we have effectively, basically created cloud computing because some marketers said it already existed, which is real sort of right but wrong, but very wrong, yet is now happening.
If you are, if your hosting company is cloud computing, they probably mean your site is on more than one server, maybe. They could just be telling you completely lies, because no one has defined these terms at all, at this point I should have a huge Venn Diagram up, but it’s so complicated I can’t do it, we have shared computing, shared hosting, then we have VPSs and dedicated, that’s nice and easy, bare metal dedicated very expensive. VPS, quite reasonably priced, isolated very good. Shared hosting, squeaky, don’t do that.
Then cloud computing that could be anything, server less, that’s just something we shouldn’t worry about, then we have managed, managed, shall we skip on a couple of slides, oh, fully managed. What does that mean, fully managed, it could mean we have given you a server, well done, happy days, it’s a route login, that’s a way in, oh I’ve got a server. I’ve bought hosting that is fully managed and I’ve been given a route login, so off you go, if you have any problems turn it off and on again, here’s a reboot button.
On the other end of the spectrum have met people who have fully managed where they were actually taking the content for people’s sites and up loading it, they would install plugins and themes for you, they had bespoke stuff that they were doing, you had an account manager who would phone you up and say hey, did you want to make that button blue or red or pink and that’s, that extreme, they’re managing the content, the application, the have become an agency by accident and thought they were a hosting company.
Most people, I think, when they see the word, “Managed”, they believe that the hosting company will do something for them and I would go with that, that’s a good thing, we can get a marketing message across, it means some things will be managed, but not everything. Fully managed is thankfully a term that is disappearing, but we still have it coming back in a different term, managed WordPress hosting, there are no managed WordPress hosting companies here at all, are there? Go Daddy, Heart don’t do a managed… are SiteGround here at all. SiteGround. Yeah, Timpani are probably here, I think I’ve named everybody, 34SP, I’ve now named all the ones that are WordCamp London, there are hundreds of managed WordPress companies. I work for one and I don’t know what it means. I’m the platform lead for one and I don’t know actually what the term means, because it’s so different for all of us, we all have a unique and wonderful platform that have different features and does it mean that because we all have a staging site we are managed, that seems like a weird thing to decide but we all have a staging site, so maybe that’s it. We all install WordPress for you, except for the ones that don’t. If someone said, “What’s is a managed WordPress site”, to me, I would have gone, oh they install WordPress for you. I came across the host the other day, they didn’t, you have to push the button still, that’s not managed, surely, that’s the one click thing that we talked about earlier.
Managed WordPress hosting is a complete and utter marketing name for either shared hosting or a VPS with some extra bits, the extra bits are very cool but it’s still at the fundamental level, either shared hosting of VPS, I don’t think I’ve seen [Inaudible] it’s in there somewhere.
Which, then means that we have to lead on to how do we differentiate these things. Obviously, this is an amazing review, it’s completely genuine I would point out, everyone in this room will have seen reviews like this, I have some of the most amazing reviews for companies, the problem is when you start looking at it more carefully, “I love them, to sign up use this link”, which is always the tell-tale sign, hello affiliate marketing [Sighs], they made a lot of money. In web hosting we love affiliate marketers, we absolutely adore them, what we do is say, “Hey, we will give you x amount of money for every sign up that we get. Please, please sign up with us”, they write reviews and say this company is the most amazing company ever. The highly intelligent audience that you are, three quarters, to all of you, have signed up to hosting at some point in your life for an affiliate link because you thought the person who was writing it was being truthful. I’m willing to put money down that in most of those cases they had never actually logged in to that hosting company’s control panel, but I entirely, our entire industry is driven, partly by these pound signs, but driven by affiliate marketing on the whole, that makes it to find really trusting reviews and really trusting information, which is so frustrating. If we can’t actually trust what people write, then it’s very hard to make choices and decisions. If you can’t trust the hosting companies because they are using marketing buzz words and trying to fool you into doing things, who do you end up interrupting you end up going with personal views from the affiliate, let’s face it once you have signed up with a hosting company, the first thing you do, where this is an affiliate link, I’ve just signed up for it, I better go and get my money back. I wish had a clever answer that went, ding, here’s a chance, here you go, everyone will have individual needs and requirements, it’s so frustrating. I really like that photograph.
Affiliate marketing really does do everybody’s head in, it really does my head in, I look down and I read articles and I get really excited about new products, new hosting company’s products and see the affiliate link and then I die inside because I know nothing of what I’ve read is true. Oh God, that’s terrible.
Hopefully you can see what it says… no… okay, we are going forward any way. So, let’s start, actually drilling down a little bit, oh another buzz word just to make sure I’ve got that, the fight between managed and unmanaged, an unmanaged service is one where you do all the twiddling, that’s how I define it, I define unmanaged as you get given some sort of access level, Plesk, Panel, whether it’s off you go, you have managed, you have a hosting company doing things for you, they won’t give you route access, or if they do, they give it into some sort of way that they can do restores in some way quickly, they provide the extra features if you want a managed fight [Inaudible] create the sites and do it that way, in a managed service you probably press a button. Managed solutions are brilliant for companies they are better for people who want to set up their website and want to do nothing else with it, they’re brilliant for companies that want to set up a website and run their website. They are not necessarily brilliant for developers’ personal websites who want to tweak every setting, ever. An unmanaged service is perfect for those people and when they break it they are screwed and they can be left that way or the can reboot if they are really lucky they remember to take some back-ups and they can back up and restore. If you are needing a special need and you have something specifically that needs to be done and there is no other way around it then you might have to come down the unmanaged route. On the whole I think most people in this room should be using some sort of managed service at some level, the thing is that having just said that, most people if I say, oh you should be on a managed VPS would go, “That is so expensive that’s hundreds of pounds”, it’s like, it’s £10 a month, from most hosting providers, they start roughly witness a managed VPS at around £10 month at some sort of level.
An unmanaged one you can probably get for about £8 month, if you go on to some of the more interesting parts of the web, £2 a month, or my personal favourite £1.50 for two years! [Laughter] In Taiwan. It was weird because when I started looking at it, it wasn’t in Taiwan, it moved to China, but given that there is a big firewall — at this point I started getting scared about the whole thing I’d just signed up to and was pretty sure I’d just been hacked my Russians. So…
If you are going to spend any sort of money, spend it on the management services unless you really, really want to tinker. Hosting — how many people in the room are devs and developers? So many of you. We love to tinker, it’s great. You want to make the changes, you want to use the grant, gulp, power thing, no JS, PHP module, PHP7, bleeding edge version with all bugs, we should really stop doing that and remember we are going to hand the project over to someone else who doesn’t want to curate this if you are a dev and you really want to, you hand the project over to someone, please use managed hosting, please don’t use unmanaged. What happens is when you use unmanaged you say things like — this happened, I want to change the max post limit to 30,000, so that’s sending 30 that’s post items at the same time. They got the response of, “No”, we’re not going to do that, “Why?” And we showed them. That’s what happens when you send 30 that’s posts at the same time. You, it causes a safe fault and everything dies. The application was wrong and you need to fix it, they still tried to blame the hosting company, no you just badly develop something, stop fiddling with stuff. If you are developer, please try and stick to general things, you can use a spectrum of companies, it’s great fun, once you have done that for a little while come and join a hosting company and become a back-end system dev.
When you are looking at evaluating hosting, actually look at communication, there are still hosting companies that provide telephone support, actual support where you can phone up and talk to someone, it’s scary, but there are people who absolutely love live chat, that’s how they want to communicate, that’s great because there is a hosting company who will support live chat for you, some people will only communicate via email, so that’s great, there are, I think every hosting company at some level supports sending email.
There will be others who will let you phone, there will be some I am sure some hosting company somewhere has accepted a postal request, has opened a letter up and gone is this a support query, it will take a long time to get back. But when you are actually evaluating your hosting company please, I am not going to say phone up the support team and ask them random questions, because I would be killed if I suggested that actually publicly, but talk to their sales team, ask them about support response times, ask them how quickly they turn round, hold them to account a little bit. Check that that what they are saying is actually matches up. A lot of hosting companies will use third parties like trust wave, who and similar sites so they are sites which are taking the testimonials and putting them and giving the star ratings. Some of the third parties are obviously either affiliates or are linked in such a way they can only put up the positive stuff, but there are plenty that are, do a balanced set of reviews. Look at those sites. When it comes to support, I think this is the number one differentiator and the number wing thing to be caring about when picking either a managing or unmanaged host is how good their support is. And whether their support model fits your lifestyle. Or your work ethics, and your how you work and communicate. If you do not like using the telephone, you do not want to start working with a web host who only has phone support. If you are using email only, you probably ok anyway.
Which leads us on to the wonderful 24/7, 365 days a year myth. It’s something that I think everybody would like to strive for, what really happens unless you are a humongously large company is that the guy who’s on at 3 in the morning, who gets almost a woken up because he was actually probably sleeping, when you ring through saying I would really like to talk to you about email will go, that’s great would you like s to submit a ticket. And at 7 or 8 in the morning when the day shift come on and actually deal with the request, very few web hosting companies really have support that you are active and engaging with you at 3 in the morning their timeline. They might have a first tier support level the advanced support the people who can deal with more complex queries are fast asleep. But that said, every hosting company I hope, I think, I am going to say every hosting company then I will be proven wrong, very hosting company will have people looking after their infrastructure 24/7. If something goes down they will have some sort of monitoring going, get up, get out of bed whether it’s ager system or whatever it is they will have somebody monitoring the infrastructure. The difference is to look between, read between the lines of when they are offering 24/7 support are they actually offering it or actually offering you 24/7 ticketing support where you can submit a ticket for tomorrow morning. If your web host is based in the States, you’re in the UK and they only offer ticketing support it becomes incredibly frustrating. Vice versa if you are a UK based web host you have US customers you are not answering phone calls at 3 in morning they get really frustrated as well. So make sure that the support hours are matching your, the place that you actually want to go to. So if it’s primarily going to be calling support 9 ‘til 5 Monday to Friday, make sure that’s when their support team is actually there.
But, make sure to also ask the people are engaged and are doing the infrastructure support, they will say yes. I can’t imagine a hosting company doesn’t have someone looking at the infrastructure if it breaks, but who knows. They might. Look for other, I am really upset my slides are not coming out the way I wanted to, so that really is hidden. If they after involved in managed WordPress hosting make sure they are part of the community, people you have met a bunch here, but find web host you actually know and the best way to find and engage with them is at events like this. A good and fun way to differentiate, phone up the sales line and ask them who Wapuu is. (laughter) because if they don’t know who Wapuu is, well wow I am boring him he’s fast asleep. Oh dear. I will wake him up in a minute. But if they don’t know who Wapuu is, perhaps they might not be the right company to support your managed WordPress. Maybe they are more a Drupal shop who knows. Phone them up and ask them who Wapuu is if they tell you it’s a giant chicken, and when they watch this talk and we will not really tell them what it is. Just a random goat, I thought I would put other in, I thought at this stage people would be bored, there wouldn’t be any jokes. I am known to be entertaining and very jokey, this has turned very serious and dark, I put goat in just for it. When I started doing this I asked people what do you want to know about hosting, it’s all based on that feedback, the one that came up over and over again it’s something that always said, SEO and hosting. I am there going, oh I know something about this. Because in SEO you need to have all your sites on different IPs they have got to be really fast, and this ticks lots of boxes and Google will come and you will make millions from your Googles. Told you I know loads about SEO. It’s all a load of waffle. SEO as far as I seen in any actual real research, the IP you are on makes very little difference to your search results, other than the following two factors. The geolocation of it which is become less and less as we have become more distributed anyway, so does that IP resolve to a UK based company or to a US based company, that may match through to whether it’s UK based or US based hosting. The second thing has other sites being hacked on there and that’s primarily to avoid the big red malware warnings. Beyond that, the actual IP makes very little difference. Whether your sites are in consecutive IPs or not, there are much easier ways for people like Google to try to work out whether what you host and what somebody else hosts and the connections between them than looking at the IP which is a very boring way to do it. If you’re still buying lots of bulk IPs go do some research because you probably can save useful some money. It’s normally when you phone up and say could I have 5IPs, hosting companies say yes £25 a month extra. IPs are in really supply and demand, that’s £25 extra a month. Save yourself the money don’t actually pay for them. Making your site really, really fast making it high performance, if you are doing this for Google you are doing it for the wrong reason. If you think that your customers don’t matter about the fact your site is not loading, but a Google searchbot is going to care, something is disconnected and wrong with how you are thinking. So, when it comes to SEO and hosting, I don’t think there actually is a connection. But it ends up being a very large chicken.
How many of you do some sort of server monitoring, do you up down IO, up time robot, Jetpack to monitor your sites. Come on? It’s like audience participation 101. Cool. Do you get regularly that your site is down and when you go to it it’s up? Yeah? We have all had that it’s so frustrating. So irritating you know that your host is to blame. Can’t possibly that the monitoring site just fell over. Or didn’t make the connection. The thing is that actually the internet is really complicated, it’s a distributed set of servers and between them there’s lots of various hops and places for things to go wrong. Just a hint for you. Use two monitoring services. I was going to say use a monitoring service to monitor the monitoring service but that’s way more meta than it really should be, but if you are going to use monitoring please use two services, and talk to your host to make sure that they are not black listing the IPs of the monitoring service. Or that the monitoring service is not doing something weird. There’s a one of the big monitoring solutions, for ages the way that our fire walls were set up, we were checking the validity of the host name to make sure it was matching, and they had their set up in a really bizarre and weird way, which meant that they were inadvertently being resolved back as IP address because the host name was their internal IP which all sounds very complicated but the upshot was that it seemed to be that it was resolved coming from our network not from theirs, as we didn’t have anything there on are network in those place it went that’s strange, that’s wrong we’re going to block it. We used to get email, after email of people saying my site has been down for two days, you’re on it right now! How do I know that? Because you have sent it from the support button. (laughter) so, make sure you use two monitoring solutions if you are going to do monitoring, do, do monitoring and hold the company to account. From a support perspective it gets really annoying and frustrating when someone e-mails in and says my monitoring solution says this, and you go well did you see that they go, well know I was in bed obviously it was 3 in the morning. But my monitoring solution says, it but do do it because it will trigger someone to go and investigate it and there might actually genuinely have been a problem that can get fixed. So have monitoring in place but have two sets of monitoring in place really only ask the host to check when both of them said it was down.
Ooh, we have got to almost to the end I will do a quick recap. Hosting makes you load of money. No, hosting could make you and all of you loads and loads of money because pretty much every major host at some point started as a reseller. Quite a few of the really big hosts are still resellers. In the grand scheme of things, hosting is a big pyramid scheme. Oh no I have gone and said that thing I shouldn’t have said. Hosting is not a pyramid scheme at all, but you start off with the guys who have data centre and infrastructure in place, and then you go and some VPSs off him you can put your own sites on the VPS then put your clients site on then put some more on all of a sudden you can start branding yourself as a hosting company. I am pretty sure obviously not the very first hosting company did this but pretty much every hosting company since then started that way. Then there will buy themselves out buy the hardware, they will get their infrastructure in place, some don’t. Some rely on suing using the service instead. They think actually rather than worrying about infrastructure, and building out all these complicated systems, what we’ll do is just concentrate on given a good service, and relying that the police next down the chain will do that work for us. Ultimately, ok, ultimately there is going to be someone who is stuck that who will be at the end of the chain will be a name you will have never heard of. So with that, don’t be afraid of saying hello to hosts here, we’re all really nice. If you have not looked at doing managed WordPress hosting please do, hopefully you have enjoyed the photographs even if you couldn’t see the words. I hope I have time for questions, because we have run through them. Cool. Anybody got any questions? (applause).
DAN MABY: We do have time for a couple of very quick questions.
FROM THE FLOOR: Hi Tim, thanks very much that was brilliant. This maybe a stupid question.
TIM NASH: There is no such thing. Silly but never stupid.
FROM THE FLOOR: I run about 20 plus client sites, and I am a reseller for a company that’s an off shoot of a bigger company. This is all on shared servers. Is it possible to have a VPS managed server, and put those 20 plus sites on one?
TIM NASH: Yes, there are plenty of companies that do that. There are several, there’s at least one downstairs that will do that for you. Yep, just resellers can come in many forms you can have a reseller that is on shared, but there are plenty of hosting companies that will do reseller VPSs so they give you the VPS put Plesk or some sort of control panel on there for you it’s in the VPS you have got photographer site you add to that are yours and no others. Plenty of companies do it.
DAN MABY: Thank you. Got any more questions?
TIM NASH: Wow. If you do have questions you can come the find me, ooh there’s one.
FROM THE FLOOR: What is 9 across?
TIM NASH: Good question. What’s 9 across. What’s the clue I will see if I can guess it.
FROM THE FLOOR: The clue is computer error that the OS cannot easily recover, 6 and 5.
TIM NASH: Oh I know what it is. Kernel panic.
DAN MABY: Thank you very much, Tim. (applause) if you have got your luggage stored it’s suggested to pick it up sooner rather than later, but other than that please again there’s more T-shirts, help as you go, thank you.
Mark Wilkinson
Lightning Session
How do we deal with a global client base? How do we get projects done with a worldwide team? I will be sharing some best practices for working across long distances and differences in time and culture. You can expect stories of this going wrong as well as stories of this going well, how to set-up expectations, timelines and deliverables.
In 2013/2014 the UK government made major changes to the ICT curriculum, most notably removing a lot of the traditional “how to use” content and replacing this with a Computing focused curriculum. As a former teacher at the time I went through this transition.
In this talk I will outline what is now taught in UK schools at the moment along with some of the techniques and software programs used to get these skills and knowledge across to our youngsters. The talk will touch on the role WordPress could and perhaps should play in the curriculum. This talk with be of interest to anyone interesting in learning what and how computing is taught in schools. In may be of greater interest to agencies recruiting from the pool of up and coming talent.
VINEETA: We are starting in about two minutes. We are starting in about two minutes. Thanks again for joining for the lightning talks we have two today firstly from Denise VanDeCruze. He has building sites for over 20 years. She is very passionate. She has spear headed mentorship programme for young people as well. You are the leading organiser for Paris WordCamp.
DENISE VANDECRUZE: No Vienna.
VINEETA: And she builds sites through a company called Girlbot. Today she will be talking about working across different time zones.
DENISE VANDECRUZE: Hi everybody. We had three lightning sessions planned, now we have two, so it means I get to go a little bit longer. About 15 minutes and then I will be taking questions for five minutes and then a talk after me. So I will be talking about working across time zones. At the last few years I have been working on the go systems. WPML and tool sets and it is an entirely remote company and I love to travel. So this year no last year 2016 I spent the entire summer in the Caribbean. South America and have IT I and the to mini can republic I am in Scotland a lot and Copenhagen a lot. This is something near and dear to my heart, wherever I go I have to work my full day. So today will be talking about working across time zones not just for your company put your clients’ sake. How many of you work remotely? Good that is great. I think that is one of the great opportunities that jobs within WordPress create. So that is the slide about me, you can reach me @solchica on Twitter. So let’s talk about structuring a remote project. Your remote island and you want to work with collaborators to get something done in WordPress. What do you have to make sure happens. So the first thing that you have to think about is your legal structure. How will you set yourself up legally to work with people all across the world. There are different models for doing that. Some people organise in a particular country that allows them to do that is contract with other people other people do it so that people are actually recognised employees with no fixed place. It really just depends how you want to organise yourself for legal and tax purposes and it depends on your particular situation. This is something you really need to think about. Specially within the EU we have pretty strict labour laws in Austria and Vienna particularly, you want to make sure you are not running foul of that. Another thing that needs to happen your version needs to be clearly defined. How many of you have gotten asked to do something and some one talk to you for about two hours or so and at the end of the two hours you weren’t quite sure what you were just asked to do? That happens a lot, that happens a lot. Sometimes we get really fired up about doing something and we get people on board, but we are not really sure what we are asking people to do and this is very very important specially in this ecology of WordPress, because you are dealing with people with multiple skills. So someone who could be a developer, maybe they could be a supporter, or a project lead. They need to know exactly what you needs for your project. So that is key you have to define your vision and where you want people to come in on that vision with you. And in accordance with that the roles have to be spelled out, what do you do in the project? Are you just the guys that has ideas or will you be working alongside everybody else. That also has been to be spelled out. The thing about remote projects is that they cannot be as nebulous as projects based on a physical location. If we are in an office I am unsure I say hey I am unsure about this what are we doing. If we are working remotely and perhaps we don’t overlap the entire day, those opportunities are not as plenty full. So a lot of time may get wasted in a lack of clarity. And the last thing I would say that is really important here when you are structuring remote project is to think about culture. Culture I think people think culture is something that you can only really influence if you are in people’s presence. Even when you have a remote team you still can really determine what your company culture, what your project culture will look like. That has to do with things like how you communicate with people. How are you asking people for things. What does it look like in terms of are you talking to them every they, do you have a daily check in, or talk to people months and you see them in a month when the deadline happens. So think about how the culture is going to play itself out and if that will meet your needs. So I made a little tool kit here if I knew I would be taking up this much time I would have done it much more bulleted. I love slides, but, at first I had so many slides and they were like you have to pair down the slides, so I have to tell you a lot I would love to give you bulleted points for. I have a lot of recommendations about everything here I am sure that you guys have recommendations too since so many of you have worked remotely. If you are working remotely and across time zones what is important. One is a scheduling system. If you are in Asia and I am in Europe we need to be clear how we are organising our times so we have at least some overlap. In my old position I had to on board people coming in from all across the would. That would mean if I had to deal with someone in Asia for example I would have to get up early and they would have to stay late a bit, so I can walk them true certain things. So scheduling system is really important, specially in the beginning. There are some companies that don’t really allow remote employees until they have been working at a company for some years or for a significant amount of time. And the reason that happens is because when you have this overlapping time you are able to establish certain things with people you can pin them for questions and orientation and do training with them. This is a really important building time. Specially in the beginning of a relationship what I would recommend no matter where you are in the world that you find period of time and you both sort of meet halfway so that you can have some significant overlap. Even if that significant overlap only happens for a period of weeks or the first couple of months. And another thing that is important is a project or bug system. So who here has used base camp? Jack brains right. Whatever it is it has to be consistent and with your needs. What the system has to do is to track issues. And to track accountability of those issues. So who is working on it when and how long are they working on it, what AA are the important resources that need to be logged with this issue whatever tool you use it has to have those things. Another thing I recommend is a document bank. A lot of people use Google docs for this. You can use whatever works Dropbox or online cloud source system or even a host system. There has to be a place where you have your virtual file cabinet. Chat tool. Live conferencing, so that can be Skype, that can be Slack for the chat tool for example. And client management and back up information. So what kind of tools could we use for client management? Can you guys? What kind of tools do you guys use for client management.
NEW SPEAKER: TRELLO.
FROM THE FLOOR: Confluence.
DENISE VANDECRUZE: Okay cool. Some people use asylum, I have just started using TRELLO it is a great tool. Back up is essential. You don’t want the bulk of your data to be sitting in anyone person’s computer. Anything can happen to that person’s computer. So when you are hiring remotely and you are dealing with remote collaborators one thing to realise is the most essential element of dealing with these people will be trust. These have to be people that you can trust and they need to be able to trust you. And how does that happen? It happens through accountability, following through and making sure you are very clear with each other and about what needs to happen. So when you are hiring and looking for someone make sure that there are people that have a proven tack record and the next part of that is that you have to have to have to allow them to take ownership of what they are suppose to do. So one thing that is very hard to do with remote team is micromanaging. You would not want to do that anyway. But it is specially hard to do with a remote team. So this all kind of leads into managing expectations, that getting to know you phase in the remote relationship is as important as anything you will do afterwards that is the period that you clarify how you are going to be working wit them and how they are going to be working with you. This is something that is important for your client relationships as well. If you are dealing with clients outside of a time zone that you have full support of they need to know what window within their time zone can they expect immediate support. So managing expectations of your clients and of your collaborators is a huge part of successfully managing a remote team. How am I doing on time? Okay good. So the happy ending. When all of these things are done you should have a mutually beneficial relationship and look back on it and have freedom that you would not normally have within a physical location. And I think I am out of time because it is a lightning session. Thank you so much for listening (Applause) does any one have anything else to add or questions?
FROM THE FLOOR: You mentioned scheduling time zones have you got any tips on how to schedule the work of the remote team.
DENISE VANDECRUZE: How to manage the work load of the remote team.
FROM THE FLOOR: You can’t see people so you don’t get a sense when they are stressed or over loaded, or similarly when they are twiddling their thumbs and don’t have enough to do.
DENISE VANDECRUZE: The first thing is because you have this tracking system or bug system or ticket system everything is very transparent. One of the things you should think about you are dealing with very smart people Bob in Utah knows how much work his counterpart in Egypt did. It has to be equitable and feel fair, when it starts to not feel fair you have other problems in your company culture. That its first part. Then again not every one may have equal capabilities, you want to make sure they are supported and there is adequate train in and systems in place so that when they don’t feel like they have the tools that they need to do their job that they can get those tools.
FROM THE FLOOR: Thank you.
DENISE VANDECRUZE: Welcome.
FROM THE FLOOR: My question is quite similar.
NEW SPEAKER: Any other questions?
FROM THE FLOOR: How do your clients feel about you being on the beach when you are working?
DENISE VANDECRUZE: Yeah how do you focus do you mean.
FROM THE FLOOR: That as well but how do your clients feel about it and how do you deal with it.
DENISE VANDECRUZE: In my position I did not do a ton of video chat the video with our internal team, they were like great send pictures, every one understood. We had team members that just travel the would they did not have a fixed place they lived, they would spend a month here two month here’s. One thing I would say about being in different parts of the world the summer I was in places that I was in for the very first time. What that means is that I ran into odd situations where my Internet access did not always work the way I needed to it work. And that is the hardest thing. Always try to go into a situation where you have some certainty around what your access is going to be, even if that means that you find a relationship with a hotel whether you stay there or not that you have a relationship with them okay I can use you are internet or possible a business with a high speed internet connection. Because I was there during hurricane season and a strong wind I was like oh no, that is the only thing I can warn against.
FROM THE FLOOR: And discipline to get a full eight hours day.
DENISE VANDECRUZE: For me the way I dealt with it, when most people travel if they are having a nice vacation they would sleep into say ten or eleven. The way that I would deal with wanting to go out and see new places yet at the same time needing to get some work done was I wake up very early and start my day at like five Am and in the afternoon I could actually just go and enjoy things. So it really just depends if you are a morning person use that to your advantage. Figure out when is this town sleeping. Not only will it be great for you to do your work because you can focus and everyone is quite and you don’t have a lot of noise around you, put then you still get to go out and explore. Okay. I am going to pass the mic. Thank you so much for listening. (Applause).
VINEETA: Thank you Denise. The next speaker.. I will not start to introduce you yet. This the last talk of the day so stick around, don’t go anywhere.
DENISE VANDECRUZE: While we are waiting for the second lighting round does anyone have a particular remote working challenge they want to share? Like what are the hardest things for you about working remotely?
FROM THE FLOOR: So yes so one of the problems that I have had both working for myself on my own and working for a partner is the focus and just being able to stay focused even though I have got a separate room operate from the house it is still quite difficult to stay focused on one specific thing, specially if it is a bigger company with a lot of communication. That is one of the issues.
DENISE VANDECRUZE: I have a couple of tips about that. You have to have a work pace that works for you. If you live in a place where maybe at home it is not so conducive work you might want to think about finding a coworking space and working from there. Another thing that is important there is a lot of communication coming from you at all times is to channel communication, maybe it does not make sense to have steady streams of emails, so maybe at the end of each hour I will check emails, otherwise you get caught up in this series of try doing put out fires, so instead of focusing on your list of priorities you focus on priorities that people give you and the squeaky wheel that comes in front of you. And who has ever read a book called The power of habit? It talks about the way our brains are set up, we can hack our discipline by developing habits. If we know 10 to 12 is project time, decode time that is what you do. But you have to develop that habit by not doing anything else and really kind of treating through it for let’s say I think how many days was it, 30 days, about 30 days, those first 30 days will be really hard, after that you will find yourself doing it from 10 until 12 and you will not even notice it, it will come from our sub conscious brain and so we will just be moving through it. So discipline is something you can hack.
VINEETA: Any more questions. It is something you talk about discipline. My husband Tom hates bananas, he taught himself to eat bananas by discipline, you can change your mind set to do anything, you can learn to like things if you eat them every day. Literally eat vegetables every day and you learn to like them, it does work. It is discipline. Are you happy to go? Shall I start introducing Mark I am hoping it is not long. So Mark is a former geography and ICT teacher and started using WordPress in 2005. Now a WordPress developer and business owner of high rise digital. Fun fact of the day that Mark and Keith, Keith Devan Mark’s business partner they both are really tall people, that is why they called them self high rise digital. So Mark is going to talk about how computing is done in UK schools. Take it away.
MARK: First of all apologies it is a all a bit rushed, apologies if it is not as polished as it would be. I am also having to present on this different screen.
I am going to talk about computing in UK schools and maybe about what WordPress’ role in that could be. As you just heard I used to be a teacher. From 2002 to 2014, so I have experience about what this is about I am now a developer and business order I have been using WordPress for quite a while. Why is it important that you guys want to know about what is important about it being taught in UK schools or schools around the would in terms of computing I think obviously as the web gets bigger and starts to grow we are going to need more and more people working in the web and those people are going to come from schools and colleges, what they are taught there now is of good interest to most of us in terms of what can they do, what skills have they got coming out of skills and colleges and how we can use those skills for people look doing employ those people etcetera. It is important we have a broad knowledge like we do with other objects. The reason why this might be important particularly now is that there has been a massive change with the ICT and computers and the way it has been taught in UK schools in the last three or four years. So pre-2013 the actual subject was called ICT information and communication technology. There was very little computing in that curriculum at all. Essentially it was like using computers and using software to solve problems and do different tasks. So previous to 2013 this document was the government document the National Curriculum which told teachers what they had to deliver in those lessons, so a very pretty design, very old now. These are the things that ass teachers we had to deliver. It was split into key concepts and sigh key processes. So how we communicate with each under tools we can use to do that. And manipulating information, and spreadsheets and using spreadsheets and formulas and functions. So a lot of Excel stuff in there. The impact that technology has had on the world. When this curriculum was designed it was in the mid- to late 90s when technology had really just started in terms of computers and the Internet, so teaching what impact that might have on society and that is still relevant today but slightly different ways in which it is relevant. And the key process was finding information so we had this vast new web we had never come across before and how on earth do we use to it find information and stuff we want. So how to search for things, relevant stuff I guess. And then communicating information is twice never mind. And then developing ideas, so the ideas of things using different pieces of software. And it came to about 2011, 2012 a lot of discontent with this curriculum, so a few quotes from some people, from Ian Livingstone who was I don’t know if he still is, has his own games workshop company and also a government and business adviser on technology. He wrote the flight and fantasy books, you used to roll a dice and fight different things with it, with Steve Jackson, so he had good experience this. “Children have been forced to learn how to use apps rather than make them.” So we are training a lot of people who can use things rather than make them. “Slaves to the user interface and totally bored by it.” Quite a bold statement, I think what he said did have some merit and we are teaching kids to use Microsoft office and these pieces of software rather than thing about how they are built and can we make our own and what can we do with them. This is a quote from the Head of computing. There is much greater need to develop for the future. Problem solving skills. Create software and not just use it.” So instead of using these pieces of software to teach them the skills to create things for themselves to solve problems with. That is how the curriculum has changed really. So we have moved from ICT into computing and you will have to bear with me, I have to catch up on this laptop for my speaker notes. And obviously that raised some challenges in schools because we had a set of staff that were delivering ICT, a lot of the time a lot of those weren’t particularly ICT focused they were from other subjects and all of a sudden they were being told you need to know how to programme and how to teach this, that was a big big shock for a lot of people including me. So we moved over to a computing curriculum, so we completely changed the name of this subject it was no longer information communication technology it was now computing and even today you get teachers still calling itself ICT when it changed its name four years ago now. So it just shows how long it has to change to become engrained. This kind of what the curriculum now looks like. It is actually much simpler. Less documents about what you have to do. It goes through some of the things you need to cover as a teacher. So key stage one on the left. That is from the years of four to six years old. Key stage two from six to eleven. Key stage 3 is eleven to 14. And key stage 4 is from years 14-16. That gives you some of the ideas about the age of some of the people learning these things. You see the stuff here and some of it is quite surprising. Algorithms is key stage 1. You are four to six years old and looking at algorithms, that is highly customised for those kids. They are teaching them to debug simple programmes, so getting that engrained and using technology to create store manipulate and use things safely. So we are try doing deliver that early on which I think is a good idea. Key stage 2 more advance variables inputs and outputs, logical reasons to explain algorithms, not just using them, trying to get them understand what they are. Understand how networks and internet works, between the age of six and eleven. The later stages of primary school. And effective use of search technology. Some of the things have remained. They have not got rid of everything. And safely using a range of software in a range of devices, e-safety and they know what they are doing online. Moving into key stage 3. Design and use of modelling systems things around the world what happens if you do this so forth. And understanding algorithms, sorting and selecting and they have to use in key stage three two programming language. Like we do with Java script and PHP. One of them has to be text best, proper coding in a text editor which is quite unique and different. And sometimes when we first start teaching this the reaction of the kids was what, you want me to do this? This is something that people far more important and intelligent than me do, no no you are going to do it they got through it quite well. Procedures and logic. Boolean logic. And a bit of binary as well. And then key stage four. Like your GCSE type years it is a bit sparse, they don’t stipulate very much. Computer science, you have to do computer science. You can take that in lots of ways. Digital media, linking to the web. Computational thinking and problem solving, online privacy, so they are fully aware of that all the time and how technology changes and impacts us over time. I think when that first came into the curriculum it was the introduction of technology, now it is how technology is changing over time and how it will impact society and social media in the last five or six years and how that has changed everybody’s lives. So that is what they are teaching at the moment. So I have mentioned the challenges this faced in staffing in particular and a lot of money was spent on retraining staff, getting new staff into teach this curriculum and you have got people going around schools asking does anybody know how to do this and they were brought into teach those things. And also software, schools had basically a Microsoft licence to run Microsoft office, they had other software as well, which actually costs quite a lot of money. And a lot of this can be taught open source stuff and free. We had to find out what software there was, would it be installed okay on a network in a school. So a lot of change and the problem of expertise, do we know how to teach this, that took a long while to solve in schools.
So let’s look at the tools and software they use now to teach the coding aspects of the course or curriculum. So I don’t know if you have seen this scratch, it actually an online tool. It is to teach the principles of coding to young people it is actually quite good fun if you have never used it, have a go and create in games it is quite good fun. It is an online tool, you don’t have to create an account but you can’t save it if you don’t create an account. It is all free under, the creative commons licence, so this is scratch. I will show you what some of it looks like. It tries to teach coding by showing code blocks like this and these are split into different groupings, as you can see like a jigsaw puzzle they have got to put together the pieces of the jigsaw to build up a game or something a maze game is popular where you have to navigate around a maze. And you have ifs and loops and if else and repeat and some of the general coding things you will see in other languages, trying to make it intuitive and get them to understand what is happening more easily. So that is some of the examples of that. The way it works is like this, a graphical interface where you build your game, this is a game to get mouse from the red screen to the blue screen if you touch the walls it will take you back to the start. The code is on the right hand side using the different blocks and they are split into different parts, events, controls operators and stuff like variables and put things into functions that run more than once, a really nice little tool and they found this fun, go create a game and they can pretty much do what they want. This is a tool called flow rule. Flow charts with code and you have got your flow-chart symbols and essentially they have to process through the different things to make the wheel go round and let everybody through the gate, there is like a traffic light one where you have to work the traffic lights, which is surprise singly difficult, particularly when you have more than two sets of traffic lights. So flowol is quite a popular one. And the last one, I mentioned they had to use a text base language. Most schools have opted for python, I am not entirely sure why, there are quite easy tools you can install which is pretty good to install and runs. So I don’t know if anybody has coded in python, in year nines and tens key stage three and four are using python to build things and solve problems and a lot of this comes into GCSE courses where they have to produce something. I would love to see them use Java script. All you need is a browser and a tech editor that is something they can have a look at in the future and I think that would help. So the last part is WordPress’ role, what sort of role have we got to contribute to this, that is a tricky one, getting kid toss use WordPress is quite a barrier a therapy up from using these tools. But getting kids to have a go with WordPress. There is really nice stuff in the customiser in CSS if you teach them basic CSS. But also things like code clubs you can get involved with if you want to help out your local school. They would snap your hand off if you said you would run a school code club. So maybe our role as the community to try and get involved and help out teaching the up and coming stars of the future in our industry and Inspire them to become the next us lot sat in this room perhaps and going for that career. And that is me. Thank you. (Applause).
VINEETA: Any questions?
FROM THE FLOOR: Hi our eldest daughter is in year one at Primary school, she is already using scratch junior on the Ipads there. What its best way to support her at home to encourage it as well.
MARK: Good question. My kids one in year one and one in year five, they haven’t used that, you have a good school that is pushing it a lot. I think for me ass as a teacher it was showing the kids the end product first of all, so because I think if you just show them like look at a load of code, boring, but show them the end product and say do you want to make that, do you want to do something similar to that, or change it to pink or blue and get them to understand how to do that. That could be a way of encouraging them to get involved and delve in to the code and say you can do this, this is how you do it. That is something to think about, good to see they are using stuff like that so early on. Any others? You all want to rush off to the party. Cool thanks a lot. (Applause).
VINEETA: I will check what the time is for the after party.
NEW SPEAKER: Go down for six o’clock.
VINEETA: Go down for six o’clock to the main room. Thanks again for joining the first day of WordCamp.
Wendie Huis in ‘t Veld
Lightning Session
Have you read the Code of Conduct? It’s mandatory when you buy a ticket to any WordCamp so I guess you (should) have. I have been to several WordCamps but I never really understood the impact of it until WordCamp Europe 2016:
The Code of Conduct is not just a set of rules, it’s a declaration of love.
In this talk I will share what happened in Vienna, what it did to me, how it impacted me personally and how it changed my view on life. I’ll show you how I implemented a Code of Conduct in my business and in my life and why you want to too.
WordCamps are a fantastic opportunity to get to know the WordPress community better, make new connections, start new business opportunities and elevate your personal or company brand. Yet, as they get bigger and bigger, navigating WordCamps, especially for first-time attendees, might be challenging. In this talk, I’ll be covering 4 key steps that will help both individuals and business owners on how to prepare for a WordCamp, what strategies to implement for the best results and how to take the most from the event after it’s over.
Using both recorded video and live broadcasting are HOT ways to increase your visibility, share information and solve problems. All this can lead to more clients and more dollars in your pocket.
In this talk I will share examples from multiple social platforms and give specifics on tools and resources to make it simple to add this into your business plan.
ANT MILLER: So I am Ant Miller I am your MC for Track A this morning going all the way through to lunch. We have Carol at the back, Carol you will have noticed holding, wearing the localhost T-shirt, Dave at the front is time keeper, then Q&A session at the end of the other sessions, these guys are mic running, watch out for the microphones, we do ask when we get to Q&A you use a microphone, helps enormously for these guys doing the transcription and also for accessibility purposes, and the video that gets recorded too.
Are we there, or thereabouts? We might get a video clip, you guys are okay with aspect-ratio fan-dangling, you are a tolerant bunch.
This is a really great start, what we have got is a couple of very quick sessions, introducing you to WordCamp as a whole, WordCamp London is a first for a lot of people and an explanation of the value of codes of conduct, real world examples, how to get the most out of WordCamp, WordCamp code of conduct, then an example of the classic WordCamp presentation, how you can use specific technology in the business, in the way you use WordPress as well, three fantastic speakers coming up, before you know it they’ll be here on the stage!! In fact they could wave and say hello now, so here is Wendie Huis in ‘t Veld, Wendie will be up first, then we have, Marco, the pronunciation has gone again, Marco Calicchia and Heather Dopson, will be up with the video piece in not very much time of course, everything I’ve been saying is being relayed by the lovely, people the transcription team, they’re fabulous, they will be hammering away on their keyboards all weekend, their value is amazing, you can check on Twitter, check up on the last few minutes of what has been said on the stage, it’s rather subliminal, fantastic. Gosh. How do we think we are doing? That’s about the patter for this time in the morning. Is that all you needed to do, press, “Play”, okay, so that worked! [Laughter] — great then!! No, no, that’s fine. If right well then, welcome to Track A, [Applause].
First up we have Wendie Huis in ‘t Veld, who is going to tell us all about the real value of codes of conduct with some real-life examples, some harem-scarem examples, we will do them all together at the end, with all three lightning speakers we will be a little bit squeezed for time on those, just to give the guys Tom to get them out, we will try and finish on the dot so everyone can get to and from the session. Wendie, would you like to join me on the stage and away we go with Track A, thank you Wendie. [Applause].
WENDIE HUIS IN ‘T VELD: Great, so this is awesome. My name is Wendie, my talk is going to be about love, I hope. Let’s see if this works… it’s not going to the next slide… which would be nice. This is my name, Wendie Huis in ‘t Veld, it’s Dutch name, well I am Dutch, so that’s logical. It’s a full sentence, I translated it for you, it’s ‘house in the field’, if you translate it. My company is called websiteclub, I teach people how to use WordPress and build their own websites and nowadays I usually use page builders to do that, my Twitter handle is called @dolgelukkig, I tried changing it to websiteclub, then it didn’t feel like me, so I kept it for the English-speaking people, it means ‘extremely happy”, or ‘ecstatic’, it’s a Dutch word, it’s untranslatable, I like it so I’m keeping it.
Today I want to talk to you about the code of conduct, the code of conduct is a piece of information which I assume you all read, buying a ticket means you have to agree to the code of conduct. The code of conduct is a big list and t mainly says this, “Our community should be truly open for everyone. As such we are committed to providing a friendly, safe and welcoming environment for all.”
So why do I talk about the code of conduct? I read it, I’ve been to several WordCamps, I read it, every time I thought oh well, great. It didn’t really, the impact of the code of conduct, it really didn’t hit me until I was at WordCamp Vienna last year, WordCamp Europe. Who was there? Was it great?
FROM THE FLOOR: Yes.
WENDIE HUIS IN ‘T VELD: It was such a great event, I had such a great time, I was one of the volunteers, like these guys, you see them at the back. The day before the event we had a meeting to get all the information as volunteers and we also got these awesome green T-shirts that, like the localhost T-shirts that you have here in London and the set crew, so everybody knew who to talk through when they had a question. There was one, tiny little problem, I didn’t fit in the shirt. The sizes they had were not my size. So, I had a different shirt. This is me, in the middle. I am surrounded by Wendies because there are three Wendie volunteers in Vienna. As you can see my shirt is quite a different colour. Did it bother me I had a different shirt? Well, kind of, did I share it with anyone? No, when you are more size the world tells you, the voices in my head were more ruthless, it’s my own fault, I shouldn’t have got this big, I should have been more aware, suck it up, take care, laugh about it and just move on. So that’s what I did. Together with the other Wendies we had lots of fun, we had fun about three Wendies being there, we had fun about the T-shirt, because to be honest I was the only one in the light green T-shirt and it’s still touching me. Every time someone asked about why I’m in the light green T-shirt, I said, “I’m the only special volunteer, I am the special one”, as you can see it did show quite a lot, I made fun of it, I had a great time at the, at the event and then something happened, so what has this got to do with the code of conduct and what has this got to do with love?
Well, thereafter first day of the event, Luca, came to me, he said, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry you have to wear a different coloured T-shirt, I’m sorry that we didn’t take care of it to have a same colour in your size” it made me cry. It made me cry because, his apology made me realise how vulnerable I am and it made me realise how fragile my confidence is about my body, but it also made me realise how awesome the WordPress community is, because I was the only one wearing the shirt, I was aware of it but nobody at WordCamp Europe, nobody, there were over 2,000 people there made me feel uncomfortable. No one. So, it made me cry, big time. I don’t cry. All right, it started in Vienna, I’m still crying about it. Usually I don’t cry, I cried. Someone took over my afternoon shift, I couldn’t stop crying. Him noticing and taking the time to tell me, it touched my heart.
After I stopped crying there was a ball, he was there, we had a party it was great.
When we went home I thought about what happened, it was like a tiny incident, but it was a big massive thing for me. I cried some more, I really, really, cried a lot. Then I started talking, I started talking to my friends about what had happened and how do I make this, all those tears into something that was worth sharing? The best thing I learnt about Luca, the T-shirt there are three things when you want to create a safe, friendly environment for all, I wanted to be like that. I wanted to be like in my home in my work, in my own environment, I wanted to create that. I brought it down to three things that you need to do to create an environment like that, first of all you have to care, you have to care about people, but to start you have to care about yourself. You have to care, if you don’t care it’s never going to happen. Second of all and this is where the code of conduct comes in you have to write down your intentions. You have to write them down, because if you don’t write them down you are just, they are just flying in the air, if you write them down you know what is expected to be a person who cares and… something else, which comes with writing down, you can make yourself accountable, did I care? Did I do the right thing? I expect myself to be someone who cares, I wrote down the rules for caring as I want them to be and I can check did I do it. Last of all, you have to be aware, what makes it so special and what Luca did for me every time life gets in the way, I start yelling at my kids yelling at my computer, I’m upset because there is a line, I’m aware that that is what happens and I’m aware that I want to be a person who cares, so I go back to my list and I check, all right, I want to be a person who cares, how do I do it? Then I can go back to being a person who cares. Bottom line for me is that I want to be a person who loves. I love WordCamp, I love the people who are in WordCamp, the code of conduct gives me a guideline to be the kind of person that I want to be, the kind of person that I would love to be and a kind of person who loves to be around you guys, and the bottom line for me is, after the T-shirt incident, what I learned it’s not about making someone feel special, because that is the easy part, it’s about taking responsibility to make everybody feel normal. Thank you. Thank you. [Applause].
ANT MILLER: I now have something in my eye. Thank you very much Wendie. What a marvellous way to start these things. I am not going to waste much time keep cracking on, so questions at the end. Marco, take it away.
MARCO CALICCHIA: Everyone hear me, can we get another round of applause, it touched me that was amazing. (applause) I guess I will just take it continue from where you left it off, this is pretty much what we’re here for. To present myself, my name is Marco Calicchia, I work for SiteGround, enterprise manager, that’s better, I live in Sofia at the headquarters, actually grew up in Greece, I am Italian American but my parents grew up in US I have travel Ltd. round the world, I attended my first WordCamp back in October, and now I have been to three WordCamps. So, I mean it’s a journey, it’s quite a journey. We’re SiteGround we’re 430 employees we sponsor over 40 WordCamps, this is why we attend a lot of them, we try to contribute back to all the events and to make what Wendie just said to try to grow this love. So, what I want to talk about is the things that you miss if you don’t really research well for the WordCamps. I mean I have come from a corporate background I used to work at EventBrite, used to work at Samsung, Sony, I have a then attended a lot of expos. This is going from corporate events and coming to WordCamps, there is certain things I want to teach you how to make the most out of, how to do it before, during and after WordCamps and how to contribute back to these events.
So, the first thing I want to talk about is researching the schedule, we’re here like we, this is a very cheap event – I mean it’s a very expensive event given us to at a very cheap price. You want to make the most out of it you spend three days coming here, you want to make sure that you research all the leads that you research all the sessions that you want to attend so there’s a lot of conflicting sessions, so even this morning I have my session with Wendie and Heather, but there’s another three sessions going on. So, you want to make sure that you see which sessions you want to attend and which ones are most important for you. Usually the schedule is up two months before the event, we were confirmed I think back in January, which was already a little bit on the verge, a little bit late, so you want to make sure that you go online and see what the schedule is like, and select the sessions that you want attend.
The other key things are the side events, yesterday we had a volunteer event, there’s also a lot all the major sponsors through after parties that you want to make sure to check on Twitter, see what’s going on, ping people, make sure that you want to see all the events that you want to try and attend and meet all the community, this is what we’re here for after all. We want to try to meet everyone that is attending here. It’s also the contributor day sometimes it’s after the event sometimes it’s before the event, the actual WordCamp. So, in WordCamp London today so it was yesterday. So you want to make sure that you arrive before the contributors day because it’s actually really important to be there, the community gives back to WordPress a lot so you want to make sure that you try and attend, meet a lot of people, see what’s going on. There’s a lot of insights anything, I would say try and fly in either before the contributor’s day or if it after the WordCamp, try to fly out the day after and attend it for a few hours, even for an hour makes a big difference.
The next thing is attendance the attendee list is really important it’s usually online, the organisers will put it on you can see who is attending, but there’s also lectures, you want to be certain see which lectures are important for you based on the knowledge, I have already spoken to a lot of people this morning, who are here I prefer developer, or in my case some people are here more for the business talks to try to get more community involvement also with volunteers.
So, you can see exactly who is talking where to attend your event and try and also schedule meetings, and that’s my next point. The next thing you want to do is to try to schedule meetings, there’s always something going to happen. I mean I have a massive list of things that I want to do and people that I want to see in sessions that I want to attend, but it’s not always the case that I get to all of them. What you want to do is try to schedule the meetings with people that you want to see, the sessions you want to go to and try to stick to that. It’s not set that you have to, but it will keep you in line with the sessions and the people you want to talk to.
During the event, I would like you to engage in conversations, so like I said you will have a list but don’t stick by it. This is just guidelines, I would say this conduct of the guideline that you want to follow. But you will be going to want to engage with everyone. This morning when I was sitting down having a coffee at 7 o’clock in the morning, I was already talking to all the volunteers, all the organisers, they are here from 8 o’clock in the morning until 6pm, so we’re going to get stressed out pulled left and right you will want to engage with everyone that comes and talks to you, everyone has something interesting to talk about. Like Wendie says here sharing love, this is what we’re here for we’re not here to stand out or to trying to be insecure to anyone else, we’re trying to give back to community so engage with everyone that comes up to you asks you any questions, give them some time, some people are first timers. Some people have been here for over 10 WordCamp if not more. You want to make sure you are given them your time they also give you the time back.
Last but not least, drink before and after the event. I would like you to all be on Twitter. And also keep in touch. So, the best way we all have handles, Twitter handles so I would like you to keep in touch on Twitter if you don’t have one, make sure you create one. The WordPress community is there it’s not a convention it’s a community and this where I think most of us spend our lot of our times it’s on Twitter. Already posted 5 tweets, everyone from this morning that I have seen the sponsors has been on Twitter, already posting you can check out pretty much all the news who is giving out swag, who is talking about any sessions that are gone on, organisers, post the latest news on Twitter you want to make sure to be there. Then you want to follow a lot of people, once you do the event you want to follow up with the people that you spoke to, so you spend days and days meeting with people, preparing yourself for this event, so you want to make sure that you follow up with that person. You know it’s going to be time lost, you have come here for several days talking for hours and hours, about partnerships, collaborations, making friendships, and all of a sudden you go home and forget about it. You want to keep in touch with people, either have business cards – that’s another point, bring your business cards keep in touch of Twitter, ping them, let them know you had a good time you would have love to meet with them at other WordCamps. We always keep in touch, and pretty much everyone I have met at WordCamps we always talk on Twitter or Facebook we try to organise trips, I don’t know, well I have a lot of people from Serbia, Greece, Italy, Spain, US, I have met people that grew up in my same town, who are from California we all grew up in Greece together. You meet people you actually never knew that just lived close to you and so the world is really small. You want to make sure to give back to the community what they give to you.
Be more involved. So, I am very glad thank you for accepting me to be a speaker I am very glad to have this opportunity it’s great to give back to community you can apply with as many talks as you want. Mine is a very light one, it’s literally ecstatic for me when I heard I was accepted for WordCamp London I am really pleased so this one way to give back join the contributor day as I mentioned and also try to be a volunteer. If you want to organise your next event, the best ways to volunteer to this, and so you can apply to any event that you might want to attend so when I spoke to Petya from Human Made she said Marco we have over 200 people we need at WordCamp Europe it’s a good opportunity, then once you volunteered, you are more likely to organise your next event in your town so today might be London, tomorrow might be Brighton, I might we might do one in Sophia I might do one with the guys in Athens next year, they have the first one last year it was awesome, they had 400 people, gives me an opportunity to go back and relay I have the experience, we all have experience do another one.
That’s pretty much it. I hope next time I might create one for volunteers and speakers, and just keep growing, but I hope to see you all at different WordCamps from now on. Thank you. (applause).
ANT MILLER: Thank you Marco. Next up, we have Heather Dopson, this is if you like, transitioning from what is this all about the meta of WordCamp! And the code of conduct, now I believe this is kind of we’re into the meat of it now, this it. Brace yourselves how to use video in your content, and why you should be doing it as well. So please welcome to stage, Heather.
HEATHER DOPSON: Good morning. Thank you so much, this is Manny our mascot, I’m going to sit him up here he’s my good luck charm. Good morning my name is Heather Dopson I work for GoDaddy I am what’s called a community builder at GoDaddy, so Wendie and Marco amazing way to open the session this morning because I love community and what you just said it’s not a convention it a community, really touched my heart. Wendie you made me cry first thing in the morning, I don’t like that. But thank you. Seriously, fantastic.
So, what I am here to talk about today is how you can be using video, both live and recorded video, not only in the marketing, but also to use to build your community as well. One of the things that I do in GoDaddy I host a weekly live show on our Facebook page, that is designed to help people understand all of the elements that go into building a business. I don’t talk about products, I talk about how you can quit your JOB and find your JOY. We talk about what are the elements that should go on a website. The most viewed episode so far has been one with an attorney, belief it or not, because we talk about all of the different rules and regulations that you need to abide by. So we’re going to talk a little bit, very quickly today. This is a 60 minute session it been distilled to 10 minutes.
So I had some interesting conversations last night at the ping-pong place which by the way, how lucky are you guys to have a ping-pong place here it’s amazing. A few people said to me, I don’t understand why I need to be using video I am a developer or website professional, I don’t understand why I need to be using video in any capacity, especially live video. My question is, do you want to make money? Are you doing the things that you are doing to create income for yourself? If the answer is yes, using life video is a fantastic way to build a foundation of trust. If you can become a trusted authority in your field, you can absolutely create community, that trusts you and comes to you to find solutions for problems or to find information that they need, for themselves or to share with other members of your community.
When you get on a live video, you can create emotions, and those shared emotions are very powerful. I am not going to lie, Wendie, last week I was on Facebook live on my personal profile, and I was very tired after several days of work I don’t know how many days I have been gone now from the US on a trip, and I cried. I was so tired I cried. It creates this deeper bond and trust between you and your community. We do business with people because we know them, we like them and we trust them. So, I am going to challenge you all to get out, I am from Texas I am going to say y’all, to get out from behind your computer scientist screen and get in front of your computer screen and start using video in some creative ways, you can start doing it right here right now while you are at this great event.
One of the things I love the most about live video whether you are doing Facebook Live, Twitter Live, also known as Periscope or YouTube Live is you get instantaneous feedback. The difference between live and recorded video, is that you are actually having a conversation with the people who are watching you. It’s phenomenal because you are learning how they are reacting to the things that you are sharing in real time. How much money would you pay to have real time feedback for every single thing that you are doing. Real time feedback is so powerful, it also allows you to ask a question and help understand what your community needs from you, how you can improve the content that you are creating, not just from a video perspective, but what you are writing your blog posts or what you are writing in your social media posts, if your community is asking questions, you know that that is content you are creating, right there. The feedback is one of my favourite parts.
Consumption, so if we just look at Facebook live video only, in one year the amount of videos that have been consumed in only Facebook Live has almost doubled to eight billion views. Just on Facebook Live videos, eight billion views in one year. That is a massive amount of views. There is a very low barrier to entry to use any of these live platforms, all you need is your phone, provided you don’t have a flip phone, I don’t think anyone in here is using a flip phone anymore.
So, it’s important that you have a plan, you know, you need to have some type of guard rails, instead of just waking up and saying am going to make a video today, have some sort of structure, to discover what my audience wants, needs or if I even have an audience. Somebody said to me last night, “I don’t know if anybody would even watch, I don’t know if anybody would even care what I have to say”, I guarantee you 100% that people care what you have to say, I promise you, they do.
What there are ways that you can use video is to educate, so we all know that there are things that are far too complex to be understood if we are just typing them, or only using text. So, video is a fantastic way to be able to explain to people how to do something, how to create something. You can also share your screen when you are doing live videos, you can share visual aids that help your followers, your community, understand exactly what you are talking about.
FAQs, every website, every website has a FAQ section on it right? We know the questions that people are asking, this is a great way to create the videos, to create the content. If you hear at this event, you keep getting the same question asked multiple times or you get a very interesting, intriguing question where you think, I never thought about that, that’s an opportunity for you to create a video around that particular piece, that particular question. If one person is asking it, there are more people thinking it but just afraid to ask it.
One of my favourite uses of live video is for special announcements. So, if there is some hot and breaking news in the WordPress community, or in your community, or if there is some kind of ruling that impacts your on-line presence or the on-line presence of businesses wherever you are, using Live is a fantastic way to get on, really quickly, get in front of your community and share with them before anybody else does. This deepens your level of trust, you are becoming a trusted resource, sharing information, not selling, got that, share information, solve problems, stop selling.
Also, live events, so, there is a tremendous opportunity for you, here, while you are at WordCamp London to start using some live video. I don’t want you to record or broadcast the entire sessions without permission of the organisers, but snippets of sessions, or have a conversation with Wendie, find Wendie and have a conversation with her, because what she said was so compelling, do a live video with her. Go to the different sponsors that is correct here, use that as a live video, when you are using live video it save to your phone or to whatever platform you are using you can use it later and chop it up and repurpose it for different types of content, I’m going to challenge you all out here to do some sort of live video while you are at the event for two days, any questions, concerns or problems find me, I well be mostly be at the Go Daddy booth I’m happy to help you, we’ll get you up and running really quickly my challenge to you is to be brave, okay, I’m going to use Wendie as an example, getting up here and being vulnerable and open and sharing her heart and fears with us today, okay. If Wendie can do, everybody in here can do it! It’s true, Wendie said, it’s true.
So, get over your fears. Okay. Get over it usually use the word BS, fears are BS, dangerous, real fear is BS. Everybody out here’s, everybody has something that they don’t like about themselves, I don’t like voice, my face, my hair, my weight, my clothes, I don’t have anything to say, nobody will care about what I have to say, it’s all bullshit you guys, it really is. Get over the fears; brave, take a risk, take some risk I want to see everybody do a bit of live video while you are here, I’m here, if you need help, guidance, I’m happy to help you, you guys have a fantastic WordCamp, thank you for welcoming me to London, it’s my first time to London, I’m having such a blast, thank you for inviting Manny and me to the event, you guys if you need anything I’m here for you.
NEW SPEAKER: Thank you very much Heather I’m going to invite all our speakers from the lightning talks back up stage, we have a couple of mic runners, we are a little bit squeezed for time, can we take questions from the floor, do we have questions from the floor for our presenters this morning. Oh yes, her we are, we have a question from the floor. Yes Sir, can you just say who the question is for.
FROM THE FLOOR: For Heather.
HEATHER DOPSON: Yes.
FROM THE FLOOR: Just wondering, with your live broadcast do you just, are you just using your phone or do you have other platforms to use, Go Live, are you more website based?
HEATHER DOPSON: That’s a great question for the weekly live show forego daddy I have a studio and software that I use, live streaming software that allows us to do some lower thirds and all of that, however, I’m not in the studio this week and I’m not in the studio next week, when I’m not in the studio I use my phone, I have a Galaxy S7, I use a RDE microphone, you don’t need high level production levels for your videos, when you are starting out just use your phone.
NEW SPEAKER: My first ever WordCamp was WordCamp Europe in Seville, massive, very daunting, I used, sort of interviews and stuff as a way to sort of get into it, now I have a face for radio, I do podcasting, I did, I just took a little audio recorder, each speaker that I found very, very interesting came off stage, I said can I do a piece with you to put on my podcast, on my blog I put together a podcast series from all the talks in Seville, video can be daunting, it’s a medium that people get, these technologies don’t need to be a barrier, they can be a door to have the conversations you want to have and share the conversations wider, you are being really generous when you do this, if you have a conversation with one person at WordCamp, you absolutely should as Marco says, you record that and share that wider that makes the whole community benefit even more from the meeting, so, it’s kind of good thing.
HEATHER DOPSON: Right if you have a follow-up come find me and I’ll answer your question.
THE CHAIR: There is a chap, just another one band. Oh, and then.
FROM THE FLOOR: Hi, Paul, I just wanted to ask you something, how much you prepare for each live video, because you probably don’t do it on the fly.
HEATHER DOPSON: So for the weekly live so I prepare a week in advance I generally know who my guests are going to be a month ahead of time, I do one, one hour show per week, I take about three hours ahead of that to prepare that and I take two hours afterwards to do post production and some other things, I’m about to turn to the show into a podcast as well, I also go live on the fly, I do that, but when I come to an event like this, I do what Marco suggested, I look at who the presenters are, what the sessions are and make a plan, an outline of what I’m going to do, so I kind of have an idea in my head, I have moments, ‘parking lot’ moments, I’m in the parking lot, I’m going live right now, I do both from Go Daddy Facebook as well as my own personal stuff, so it’s a mixture.
THE CHAIR: One more in, yes, I think.
FROM THE FLOOR: Hello, yeah, I know all three of you and I like you as much I’m going to ask a super short question for each and every one of you. Wendie, let’s start with you, I’ll just ask my questions: was it hard for you to share, we spoke about the volunteer stuff and everything, was it hard for you, I want you to, your talk encouraged everyone, was it hard for you to just share what you felt.
WENDIE HUIS IN ‘T VELD: It still makes me cry, of course, it’s hard.
FROM THE FLOOR: I tried, again.
WENDIE HUIS IN ‘T VELD: It’s important it gets told, it is what this community is, so I wanted to share and I was praying last week, I shared it with a friend and I was crying, I was hoping not to do it today, I just have one nice tear, so that’s okay.
FROM THE FLOOR: Heather for the first episode and to help to encourage people to start using live, what should it do, what should it talk about, as you said, no one knows how to start, I don’t have anything to share, what do you suggest.
HEATHER DOPSON: So my advice is in the wisdom of Nike, just do it. It’s getting past that very first one that helps you to move on to the next one. Think WHO your audience is, think about what you want to talk about, what would you sit down and have a discussion with me on over a beer, what would you talk about? Just do that. Be casual, you don’t have to be presenting and presenting, be casual, have a casual conversation.
FROM THE FLOOR: Marco, your favourite WordCamp, your favourite WordCamp so far?
MARCO CALICCHIA: My favourite one…? Umm… yeah, it literally just started, so I’ll give it a few days, I’ll let you know tomorrow, so far, I would say Athens it was the first one for them, they put a lot into it, it’s where I met you guys as well. It’s my, I grew up there, it’s in my heart, they did an awesome job for the first event, big round of applause for them, definitely for me it’s Athens, if London takes over…
THE CHAIR: We have a lot to live up to, okay, okay, cool. Thank you for all are speakers for the lightning sessions getting Track A off to a fab start this morning, thank you for sharing, thank you for encouraging us all. We get a break now, we get half an hour to switch around, we will be continuing with tales from the client side with Tom Chute from Pragmatic, how to create and foster loving client relationships, it’s all about the love today in here. Track B if you want to head over to Track B will be getting your plugin ready for the new WordPress Plugin Directory, things are changing fast in the plug anyone directory, here Alexander track, object oriented user, we look at the editor and customiser over the next 18 months, this approach can be crucial as well, we’ll see you back here in about 26 minutes, with Tom Chute. Thank you very much.
Using Varying Vagrant Vagrants 2
VVV 1 is a popular local developer environment, but VVV 2 is now available with significant improvements to site setup.
This session will walk through the new features, and how to migrate to VVV 2
ALICE STILL: How is everyone going? Good.
We have got Tom Nowell talking now. Tom is a VIP … at WordPress.com, community moderator, project lead for the WordPress, the right way e-book.He is also the lead organiser of WordCamp Manchester which is happening when?
TOM J NOWELL: Sometime around October, November we don’t have an exact date at the moment. Keep your eyes peeled.
ALICE STILL: Tom is going to be talking about using Varying Vagrant Vagrants, talking about the recent features.
TOM J NOWELL: Hello. Before we get started, hands up who has used VVV in the past? Okay, who is already tried VVV 2 in the last few days either by accident or? Okay.
Who here has never used vagrant or any of this at all and is curious and is just looking to — okay, fair number of people from all sides.
So, this talk will say what it is, what changed from version 1 to 2. Moving from 1 to 2 and then setting up a site, moving sites from VVV 1 so they work in VVV 2.
VVV is a local developer environment, lets you instead of using a server somewhere far, far away, use the machine in front of you. Why you want that? So something you might be an obvious question for you some of you.
For example, every now and again I like to write code I might be on a train or I get asked, can you change? I have just gotten on a train, going through security, not internet for the next 3 or 4 hours, I could have done the work. If I have a local developer environment that is not a problem. I can turn my wi-fi off and put staff in aeroplane mode and it still works, no worries about up loading files it is all right in front of me.
So there is a lot of projects that do these things, some of you maybe more familiar with mamp, that do similar things, but are more primitive and have versions. VVV it is completely free and anyone can use it.
So, it gives you a lot of things out of the box, which is one of the other things which is useful rather than just handing you a web server and letting you loose and letting you set everything up yourself, gives you a life, so you don’t have to go through the process of figuring out to install php and how it should be configured getting the right database in the right version, setting up with users and access, all there for you. Gives you an object cash, not every host has it. Sometimes you can write code and not realise the object cash is there.
There is nginx, and site provisioning, which will set up sites for you, so when I run VVV, I turn it on rather than going to my local website,.local or whatever it is, that the people built it have determined I might have my own site and it might have my own domain in it. It will put it in the host file. It will do a lot of other things I am not aware I need. When it comes to that points it is there.
At the same time it is a standardised system, if you are working on a server, if you are working with mamf or other environments that doesn’t use virtualisation, something might work on your machine, but might work differently on your machine, trying to figure out what is going on, when you don’t have a standardised set up is different. With vagrant based systems when you turn it on, you end up with exactly the same system it is always, something that you can expect and rely on in the sense that my VVV will be the same as yours as yours as yours and so on and so forth. I don’t need to worry about whether you installed something last year or whether there is something interfering or something causing problems. Simplifies a lot.
You will need SSH client, install git for that, if you want to install windows. You will want vagrant and then you will need virtualbox that host it is environment, install the 3 things, make sure they are the latest version at the moment. Sometimes people have out of date versions, best to keep up to date. Then down load a copy of VVV, you can do this several ways, do a git clone, you can click the down load zip button and it will package it up. Put it somewhere on your computer, I would recommend somewhere in the home folder so it is easy to get to.
Then run the commands, vagrant plugin install, … host updater is a plugin that does the host file modification, so you are not editing protected files and adding IP addresses that happens behind the scenes. Trig. …
Then finally vagrant up-provision, when you do this, this is the beginning where you have a brand new virtual machine and it needs to fill it with stuff, it is going go away and down load the software, install php and configure it and put everything together and figure out where word press will go. You will see lots of stuff go past on the screen. Just go away and come back and as long as the message at the very end is not a red line saying something went wrong, then you are set.
At that point you go the VVV.dev in your browser and you can have a nice screen or run vagrant status and you should see something like this, every time you run a VVV, you will get the nice logo as well as documentation, that might be expanded in the future, but you will also see current machine states powered off, so there is a bit of terminology. When we, when we talk about things like … and stuff, they have an interview with a little button, turn it on or off. Maybe a few status lights to say is the database working or not.
Vagrant up, to turn the machine up or off to stop it. There is two other commands I will mention later, these are the ones you will use the most if you are not comfortable with the terminal. You have the benefit that you only need to remember these two commands and but, if that is too much for you and you are not comfortable with that, there is a piece of software called vagrant manager. That will put a little entry in your system trail or your menu bar which will let you actually click vagrant stop and vagrant up and it will tell you there and then in the graphical user interface, that I have never had much use with that. You may prefer that.
So what changed in VVV 2? So the big change is this file. So VVV 1 you had a www folder, inside that, a load of sub folder with websites, it would go through and do a great big search of all the folders and files and trying to find a possible thing that could possibly be a VVV site, so it can turn it on.
That worked for a lot of people, it has some advantages that for example, I had a project where I took about 40 different websites and the piece of work was to measurement one big site. But then I would be asked, we need the small change on let’s say (INAUDIBLE) then I would go in there and turn it on, before that, it has to go through all 42 other sites then the one that got merged. At which point I have been waiting for about 40 minutes as it has been setting up hundreds of different sites and running all the scripts. If you wanted to get around that, you had to go into file explorer, move the folder out of VVV and wait for it to copy the hundreds of mega bites of files it was a nightmare.
But, this config file represents a list of your websites as VVV sees it, which allows you to specify a lot of options. So this is the default minus one or two comments. It shows you exactly what you get out of the box with VVV.
So you get a copy of WordPress, standard, latest version of WordPress, no bells or whistles, standard install local.wordPress.dev, and a WordPress develop install. You can see the different url’s, you can add more, change them around. This file is for you to edit. If you don’t want the installs just delete them. That is all you need to do. Remove those lines and it is done. If you want to add another one, add another one. You can see here there is a section example site and a few other examples in the main file you can use if you down load VVV you will be able to see and see further examples and further slides in a moment.
Also down here, there is a utilities section, you can see here for example, if you don’t want phpmyadmin, remove it or copy it out. If you want to remove it or add it back in, for whatever reason you can do that as well.
You get a hand full of tools which is really useful. But one thing that is important is that if you are using git and you make changes to this and pull it down, and maybe I or someone else made improvements to the file, you will maybe have a few conflicts but they are easily side stepped. So copy the files of VVV-custom.yml, that is no longer an issue, I know some people use a command line tool called VV. I have disagreements over that kind of approach. That will automatically copy the file now as well. It is an easy step, you can copy it over into the file explorer.
So, a lot of people have VVV 1 sites and they will have been going through and thinking, I will pull down the latest changes and then surprise surprise surprise, they see the VVV 2 logo, first thing, back up the database. One of the things that the triggers did for you, every time you turn off a vagrant machine, backs up the data and puts it in a folder for you, does it any time you run vagrant halt or destroy, does other things as well.
But once you have done that, you want to throw away the box, this destroys the copy of VVV, you still have all the files there and the database, then run another vagrant up position, that capital V is there because Google docs tried to be helpful but this will do the initial fresh build again, down load the operating system and nginx database and figure that out again, do it in a fresh clean copy that has everything that VVV 2 needs. If you don’t do these things, all the things from the previous versions come along, some people with VVV 1 has a subsystem on there, that has been removed from 2 years ago but it is still there for backwards compatibility. At the this point, make a cup of tea or coffee, or whatever your thing is.
Yes, at that point you want to move over your VVV 1 sites.
But one thing to note is that if I go back here, and it backs up your database, there is something that it does if when you start vagrant up and it sees that there is a database but it is empty, it will automatically restore from the back ups. So, you may not need to restore your database at all, it might do it for you.
Let’s say I have a VVV 1-site, I have been working on this site for a long time, upgraded to VVV 2, if I don’t do anything, I do my vagrant up position, I will get the dash board, VVV hasn’t been told about this site. It is not in the config. So you need to tell it. We do that by adding an entry under the site. So, I simply give it the name of the site, VVV 1 site and I tell it what host it uses. Then vagrant real open provision, every time you change the config file, VVV needs to know about that, you need to reprovision, at any point you are unsure of whether it is something that is taken effect, run this command and it will run the provisioner automatically.
So at this point now it knows that my site is there and it will load it. But, maybe I want a brand new site. So, again, you add it to VVV custom y ml, I have called it a new site. I specified a git repository there, this automatically creates a WordPress and allows you the have multioptions, it saves a lot in the past with VVV 1 you had to write a provisioning script that creates the database and installs WordPress. We have done that for you now, that can be a fork of that repository or something of your own creation, it could be an existing VVV 1 site as long as it is mentioned in this file and VVV knows about it. It will go off and do what it needs to do. In this case, this is all I need to do the make the change.
When I provision VVV will see, we have a new site, never seen it before. There is no folder for this. Let’s do a git clone, let’s check it, let’s pull it down, we know what the site is called, put it in the host file, once this command is done, the user will go to new site.com and there it is, a brand new WordPress theme and default user and they can log in and make whatever changes they want. I can do this many times. This is an example of what it looks like in a full config file, you can see I have list of files there. I have inserted it there and I can add another one here and keep going and going and add as many sites as I want.
Or remove them or change their names or whatever, it is entirely up to you. Again always vagrant reload provision whenever you make a change, as I say you might want to change changes and realise you have not run the command, and VVV doesn’t know what you are on about but maybe you have an existing site? My recommendation would be to do something very similar to use what you have just seen again and then use that as a starting point and then fill that particular site with the content and the themes that you want. Once it is done the vagrant reload provision, you can add in themes, using the themes or just on the files system you are just moving folders over and copying and pasting it is up to you, you might want to import using (INAUDIBLE) or my sql, you have those options, first reposition, copy of files and database over and at that point it is a standard migration as if it was from one server to another or but, instead of a server it is your own local machine. It has done a lot of the steps for you, if you really wanted to, you remove the repo line and it will create the folder, but you need to fill it with stuff. I will get into that later but this, this is a good example of setting up site scaffolding and WordPress install. Again, always vagrant reload dash dash provision.
So, I will talk through a handful of more advanced items, things that maybe new to you if you have only worked with VVV 1 and things that might not have known full stop.
So, where I was talking earlier about git repo, there is a folder and has files in it. VVV, … sets up the site. This is what tells it how to install WordPress and all the other steps, so for example, I have a developer environment that has a custom repo, in that installs WordPress and then a load of plugins, it has a check, if WordPress is installed, instead of installing them update them and do a few check outs as well. I can put anything I want in there, I mean technically it doesn’t have to install WordPress, it could install a static html or even something like Drupal or Droomers – I don’t know why you want to do that. There is VVV-nginx {inaudible} 95 per cent of people. This file shouldn’t be changed; there is no reason for them to go in there and change things. And, so, for a lot of people it would be a copy paste but right now because of that repo you don’t need to bother with that; and if you are ever trying to do anything that wasn’t related to PHP you might want to change that or you might have other options you needed but that option is there.
VVV 2 prefs, they’re in a provision subfolder but backward capacity, so VVV 1 site still works, you can keep them in the root folder. There was also VVV-hosts file you can still use it but it’s for legacy reasons and that may go away in the future.
You also have per site options, so when I mentioned before add a site to the conflict file and it had the repo option and had the host there are a lot more options than that, so I can do skip provisioning. So, earlier when I was talking about my 42 multi-sites and spending ages and pulling my hair out because it was taking so long moving folders; I don’t need to do that any more. I just need to skip and provisioning is true. VVV says I know about this site, now you told me not to bother; I am going to gloss over and go to the next one, so you might have hundreds of sites in your conflict file but you have skip provision and true, so maybe only 4 sites out of 100. You can save a lot of time.
You may not like the main master branch of your git repo, you may have something else and you have the option with the branch option to change to say develop another one if you choose to. You might want to have the same site multiple times, but you have one for master, one for feature branch, one for hot fixes, table experimental; it’s entirely up to you.
There is also custom folders. In VVV 1 everything was in the www folder and it looked in there but now you can put the folder anywhere you want. You have to define both keys so you can set where it is on your machine and you can also set where varying vagrant vagrants things it is inside the virtual machine, so you might not want forward slash SRV www; you might want forward slash {inaudible} instead, or you may need something set up in a special place so you can set that at the same time.
You can have the actual site itself when you are editing in may be in your mind document folder or pitches or somewhere else or in other uses, this helps a lot when it comes to things like sim linking which aren’t followed. That’s not necessary now. You can have multiple sites running out of the same folder if you really wanted to.
And here is an example of that. These are absolute paths, so in this case I’ve put it as a subfolder of my documents folder, then I’ve put it in a different place on my server.
So here I might have something different from examples that I could call it moomins or banana or cats; it’s entirely up to you and you have this flexibility and you can do it for multiple sites. I could have example sites in that folder but then I’ve my test site in another folder; I could have them in the same folder. This is something that is quite useful.
And here is an example where I have done it in a full config example so you can see the context.
You can also have custom PHP versions and not only that this isn’t – here I’m not telling VVV to use PHP 5.6, I am telling a specific site to use 5.6. At the box it will use PHP 7 but you can also say I’m going to have the same site 3 times, I’m going to have the site this is running 7.1 and then again running 7 and then again running 5.6.
So you see here I have changed my example sites are on PHP 5.6 but I’ve also set WordPress default to use PHP 7 so that I can compare and contrast. The only thing to note is if you do add another PHP version you will want to add this section here. So VVV knows to install that version of PHP and make it available for any of the sites you have.
There is also – if anyone has been to a contributor day and tried to set VVV up or any other vagrant or any other local environment, sometimes you can run into problems and a lot of these problems are pretty common in terms of they’re not a wide distribution. So here for example if VVV decides we need an IP address that the local machine can contact us, need to know where you’re going when you’re in the browser so we picked this one but someone else on the network for some other reason has exactly the same one they’re going to clash. It’s easily fixable. There is the documentation that goes with that but it can take a while to figure out exactly what the problem is if it happens. It’s very rare but it does happen.
If you make a typo in VVV custom YML it will tell you and you will have to go in and fix it before you can vagrant up provision or it won’t finish.
If you are doing a vagrant up or vagrant halt and your machine lost power may be there is a power cut or your battery is rubbish, bad things can happen that can ruin your operating system without any VVV stuff. I’ve had windows XP machines that have been crippled as a result of that, maybe someone forgot to put a thing in the electric meter, but it can happen as well with virtual machines.
If you have out of date versions of vagrant and virtual box sometimes that can cause problems and there is an easy fix for that. Just up-date them.
If you downgraded from VVV 2 to version 1, not sure why you’d want to but it’s not supported and you shouldn’t do that. You might end up with all sorts of strange and wonderful problems. Don’t do it.
At the same time again if it’s all messed up if nobody knows what the problem is and it’s completely lost cause, run vagrant destroy to get rid of VVV and restart from scratch and always have database forward slash backups and database named at SQL, so if you decide you don’t want VVV fullstop you can take these files and take all your backups and stuff and take them elsewhere and this may be useful for other reasons. You might decide you want to use this and take that SQL file and put it on a production server because you’ve been messing round with your computer and are happy with the results. Or may be there is a copy of the content on your machine that you are happy with but your colleague wants a copy as well, it might be easier to send them this file and for them to do their own thing importing. You have that option. You can do whatever you want with those files.
So, I would recommend that you look at the documentation if you have any problems with the documentation come find me because I wrote most of it. There is also the main web-site and of course there is Loreli over there who wrote half of it.
I’m Tom Nowell. I am at Automattic. I work on the dot V team and I deal with big clients who have millions of page views every week, if not billions every month. I blog at Tomjn.com and you can see me on Twitter at tarendai and if anyone has any questions, thank you? {Applause}.
I’ll admit that my eyesight is not the best so if you start waving your hand I may not see.
FROM THE FLOOR: Hello, Tom. With the custom YML file in our case when we create a new instance of our local work flow just our client work we would ideally want to add in, we might store the site settings in the repo that we pull down then want to add that into custom YML file programmatically. How do you recommend that? Is there any native author party tools to do that or just append that to the YML file through shell command or something?
TOM J NOWELL: You would need to mention the site in the YML file for VVV to know about it there is some flexibility depending on how good you are with servers and bash scripting but you can do some of this stuff in the VVV-init. Ideally – you can do some things for example host with VVV-host but ideally you would do all of your provisioning in your VVV-init that’s – and try and use any variables you can from the YML file. I know there is a handful of things that different provisioners try and do, for example, custom site will try and predict what the database name and what the URL will be if it isn’t there based on the name of the site and I’ve written things that do a lot of stuff like that like trying aside from the name of the site URL of the site, the database name a lot of things like that it will try and figure out. So I think, I know, it’s somewhat of an open ended question. There is option you can add your own conflict options to the YML file. I can go into that if you want after questions and walk you through that.
I’m not sure if that really answered your question? Okay. Next question?
FROM THE FLOOR: Hi Tom, can we specify databases like MySQL versus MariaDB?
TOM J NOWELL: You mean if you don’t want to use MariaDB but want to use a different version? You could but it’s more involved. If I go back and see along here. This utility section you can add things there but it’s not something that is well documented and it’s a little more involved and once you add something there you have to add to an extra section of what mentioned there and then mention it by name and it will check it out and there is a provision dot SH that runs but after that you’re entirely left to your own devices on that file so it might {inaudible} wrap or get updated whichever it’s kind of left errors a task for you to do rather than any recommended guidelines it hasn’t much structure. That’s how you would do that but in terms of replacing MariaDB I’m not sure that’s possible at the moment. I’m not – sure you could install another database but haven’t it play correctly I don’t think I know enough to really say the steps involved. Sorry.
Next question?
ALICE: Any other questions?
FROM THE FLOOR: Hi, Tom. Does VVV 2 play well with other virtual machines? VM ware or anything like that?
TOM J NOWELL: At the moment virtual box is recommended mainly because it’s free and everywhere but you can use others. You can use VM ware, you can use some of the – I don’t know very many providers of virtual machines although I know VM ware is one of them and I know one or two people who use them; I would recommend them although the problem there is that virtual box is free and those might not be. So it very difficult to recommend something that you’d have to shell money out for when it works in virtual box. So, I don’t know if you have any installed on your machine that you’ve been working with? But at this point we’re moving outside of the VVV realm into the general vagrant realm and there is a lot of support for a lot of different providers out there some of which are experimental, some of which are quite well-established and virtual box one is the one that’s probably used most. So I recommend starting with virtual box and if you have problems with virtual box then move somewhere else or if you paid out money already.
FROM THE FLOOR: If you’re using with VVV it’s using nginx but if you are using Apache are there likely to be any compatibility issues moving from one to the other?
TOM J NOWELL: So I think the question there was this uses nginx but if your site uses Apache would there be any issues? That depends. I know with Apache you can use modern re-write rules and can put re-write rules in there and some people do that. My personal recommendation and this isn’t a VVV recommendation, it’s just a general thing, if you are doing re-write rules in WordPress you should use re-write rule APS, not Apache re-write system otherwise you have no way of modifying thing that run time; it might have other consequences you’re not aware of and you’re kind of stuck with Apache, whereas I know some plugins like simple redirects will work on nginx and Apache just because it’s not a server specific thing. If you do have custom rules for whatever reason and I can’t possibly guess at all of the rules that could possibly be in there you would want to modify vvv-nginx.conf. I’ve added a rule in one of my own custom repositories there which implements something specifically for WordPress.com testing but for the most part that’s not going to be an issue. If you have a standard WordPress install the nginx rules that come with VVV will for the most part do you perfectly fine. You won’t notice. It never caused a problem for me going for it. As I say can’t counter every edge case.
Any other questions? If anybody has any questions or they want to work with something and they don’t feel they can come up and do it in front of everybody and be recorded I’m going to be around the rest of the day and I’m happy to work through things if you want to go in depth on something and try something out. Come find me.
ALICE: Thank you very much. {Applause} Thanks, Tom. So it’s lunch time now and back in again at 1.30, so see you all later.
Nevena Tomovic
The Art of Empathy in Customer Marketing
Customer Marketing is focused on understanding customer needs. Who does your product need to talk to? This talk will address how to empathize with the customer, it will touch on how UX research, journalism, and psychology form the basis of Customer Marketing. You can expect concrete product examples, but also get ready to participate in the discussion.
DENISE: Has everyone had lunch? Yeah? Everyone is good? So I want to give you a friendly reminder that if you haven’t already done so, please pick up your tee shirts downstairs. So you don’t automatically get your tee shirts but they’re down here in the registration so if you haven’t done so already, get your tee shirts. My name is Denise VanDeCruze, and I’ll be your MC for the afternoon, and I’m sure you’re just going to be sitting here for the rest of the afternoon for all of the talks, because they’re all really fabulous. The talk we’re having now is the forgotten art of empathy and customer marketing from Nevena Tomovic.
Nevena is amazing and very humble. She can basically answer back in any language you throw at her, which is amazing. She works now for GoDaddy, originally trained as a simultaneous interpreter, which makes sense. So we’re very excited to have her here, to give her talk. One thing I’d like to mention right before she comes on, is I’d like to thank our sponsors. We have box sponsors, Timpani, Woo Commerce, Jetpack, we have style sponsors HeartInternet, SiteGround, WP Engine, GoDaddy, and also thanks to Dress Circle and Grand Circle sponsors, and they’re also exhibiting as well in the Rocket and Graduate Centre. And balcony and patron sponsors. Now if you have not discovered this, our sponsors, many of them are giving things away, and I’ve signed up for everything, and in my head I’m going to win everything, because there’s a Timpani is giving away a coffee machine, there’s a Nintendo something, iPad mini. So visit our sponsors, sign up for everything, and enjoy our talk from Nevena.
NEVENA: Thank you. Thank you. I’m going to record this. Sorry about that guys, I just promised I would screen record everything for the audio guys. Is that okay? Okay. Wicked. All right, so thank you very much for having me. I’d like to start my talk by telling you a little story. So, when I was a little girl, my dad used to tell me bedtime stories every single night. I would get really excited, I would run and put on my polkadot pyjamas, grab my cat, who was named Hermione after my favourite character, snuggle under the sheets and wait for the phone to ring, and it would ring every single night without a doubt. My dad would ring up and wait on the other end to tell me a story.
Now the best part of the stories is that I could actually co-create them. I could be a part of them. So my dad would say to me, pick anything you want, any object, and let’s do a story. So I’d pick things like a toothbrush, a sink and some soap, and my dad would create this huge story how the toothbrush was jealous of the soap because it was closer to the sink, and I got to know the characters. But was really important was I actually learnt how to understand and empathise with toothbrushes, which obviously later on helped me understand people. That’s actually one of the most important skills I use in my job today.
I ended up studying a bunch of languages, but the thing learned when I was 5 years old is something that really helps me every single day to be better at my job and understand people and connect with them. I’m going to share that with you and show you how you can actually get more clients and increase your client acquisition and retention by adding a tiny bit of empathy in your marketing.
Right, so before we do all of that, I want to talk about what is empathy? So there are a lot of definitions but I’ve broken it down into three things I think are understandable and digestible. So it is a sense of self-awareness, being able to distinguish your own feelings. A lot of us are not so comfortable with that, so it is really important you get to tell yourself and understand what you are feeling. It is taking another person’s perspective, so being able to sort of put yourself in someone else’s shoes and look at the world from their point of view, and thirdly, it is being able to regulate one’s own emotional response.
So I’m going to play a little game with you and I hope you guys, I know you’ve just eaten, but I hope you’ll be willing to participate. I want to show you how you can actually learn how to empathise, because it is important to know that it is a skill that all of us have, so every single person in this room can do it. It is like yoga. You just have to practice it. I’m going to ask you to practice it with me. One of the ways you can do that is by imitating someone else’s emotion. So for five seconds I’m going to smile at you, and I’m going to ask you all to smile really wide, smiles back at me. Can we do that? Yes. Okay. Right. You can I say ready? Is everyone ready? All right. Ready? Smile. You see them? Excellent. Amazing. A really good job. How is when feeling? A bit more positive? Yeah? A little bit? Okay. This a proven theory so it was actually first of all suggested by an American literally critic, and it was later on proven by two neuroscientists and one of them was French, and Philip L Jackson, and they basically say that by imitating someone else’s emotions we can boost our empathy skills so we can connect to people. This goes all the way back to the real explanation that empathy is something we all need to survive, so we all have it. It is hardwired in us and we just have to practice it.
So we, as people, are genuinely social animals. What does that mean? That means that everything we do, all of our thoughts and desires, we produce in response to someone else’s reactions or we direct them towards someone else.
So that ties in perfectly. But you can’t go around smiling at people to get them to buy your product, right? That would be a little bit creepy, if you said sign-up and smile, right? So how do you take empathy and with intent put that in marketing? How do you connect to people without scaring them away? We’re going to look at two ways. One of them is how you add it to your copy, so make it high converting copy, and the other way is how you do it through storytelling. Okay. Okay, let’s have a look at high converting copy … have a look at this one. Is it familiar? Sort of? Okay. So roses are red, violets are blue, donate to a teacher with the same name as you. This a campaign that donorschoose.org did for their Valentine’s Day campaign and it was a really exciting and novel way to solicit more money to get teachers to have more money for their projects, and the way that it worked is that they were able to connect people with their names. I’m going to show you what the response was.
Jason French said, “Just received a donors choose to bring to the class, well played, done and done.”
So people literally just saw their name, and thought: I have to do something about this. I have to give them money. And because they’re talking to me, they’re not just talking to anyone out there, but they’re actually talking to me. They’re saying: “Hey you, I need you to give me money because we have something, we share a name.”
I know it sounds a little bit, you know, funny or silly even to just think that calling you out on your name you’re more likely to give them money, but this proved a huge spike in their donation. In fact, it is interesting because 60 per cent of sales are actually lost to inertia. So when you’re sat there thinking, and writing your copy, you’re not actually competing with other competitors; you’re competing with the fact that people can’t be bothered to do anything about it. So they will receive your e-mails, text messages, Twitter, they won’t take action, because they will look at it and think: nah, it is not for me, or this is not relevant.
And that’s natural because we as humans need to feel relevant. We seek lots of signs of relevance and this is because we want to connect to each other, which brings us back to empathy.
So simple tricks like this, when you stop being vague in all of your marketing and you start getting specific, really can bring in new clients, and can increase your brand awareness.
I want to show you a few more examples just so we can get them concrete, so you know exactly what I’m talking about. So this is an e-mail subject line: saying goodbye is never easy to do, so we thought we’d give you a chance to rethink things.
I mean, it is a little bit long. Who here thinks they would open this if they saw it? Put your hands up. Okay, not that many people. Okay. Interesting. I wouldn’t either. But look at what they said, what they’d do here. They said — they talk to me by my name, so they say “Nevena”, so I think okay, this is relevant to me.
“You haven’t been opening our e-mails in the past few months and the last thing we want to do is come across clingy. So if you still want to stay connected then just press ‘don’t let me go’ below and we promise we won’t let you. Otherwise we’ll take you off our list in three business days. No hard feelings.”
And the CTA “Don’t let me go”. So what’s interesting here is that they’re very specific, and they are very personable. So they are saying “We don’t want to be clingy”, that is something we’ve all heard or our friends say: oh, my boyfriend or friend is very clingy, it is very personable. It is something we use every single day and that’s what is so interesting about it. They’ve taken something from conversation day-to-day and put it in an e-mail us asking us not to unsubscribe with a very powerful CTA, “don’t let me go”, so they could have put something, “keep me posted” or “don’t unsubscribe me” or “yes or no”, but they’ve put that out there to get an emotion, to get our response.
I have another example that my colleague showed me last night, so I’m going to share it with you because it is excellent, and it is from Native Deodorant, it is an all natural deodorant and when you order they say this: “Heather, you rock.”
“It was just another mundane day at the office, when suddenly Jackie took a look at the computer and her eyes widened, “We did it” she exclaimed. “We got an order from Heather Dopson”. Laura jumped out of her chair and ran to Jackie’s desk. She didn’t even read the entire e-mail, she just saw “Heather” and started screaming in delight. OMG. Laura shouted “This is real. We have an order from Heather!” The entire office erupted in applause. “Party in the USA” blared from the speakers. Jackie is a huge Miley Cyrus fan as confetti rained down from the ceiling and champagne bottles were popped. The entire Native team is thrilled you’re a customer! Thank you so much for your support and for giving us a reason to cheer on another champion of health!
As soon as we’re done exchanging high fives, we’ll send you tracking information so you can track your package. If you have any questions or concerns, please reach out to us.”
Now I need an honest hands up. Who has seen a better copy than this? Anyone? Yes? All right. So this is not a lot of people. I think this is one of the most fantastic copies when you order a product. Why? Because let’s break it down. So “Heather”. It is very specific, right? It is her, and she rocks, so we’re praising her, telling her she is cool because she has ordered our product. Then it goes into this huge story about what happens, how they’re so excited and there’s confetti and popping champagne and can’t wait for her to use their product. So it is very personable. Now Heather is in the audience, I’m going to ask her, Heather, do you still use native deodorant?
FROM THE FLOOR: Yes I do.
NEVENA: What does this mean? They rock. This means that it works. It really does. It is taking that extra time and thinking in your head, okay, what is going to make my customer feel so special? Well, making them feel special is showing them how excited we are that they’re part of our team, and the best way to do that is by telling a story. Getting specific, just calling someone out by their name is so important. Getting emotional really brings in the results, and being to the point. So a lot of people think that emotion and empathy means you have to write essays about how the leaves are falling and the tear dropped down someone’s — that’s not it. That’s a great novel, but this can be very emotional by just being personable, and you can do all of that in your copy and be to the point. It doesn’t have to be a long copy.
So, I said at the beginning that I would show you another way you can add empathy. So we’ve talked about how you can do it in your copy, how you can adjust all those things, but I want to show you another, I think a powerful way you can empathise with your customers, and that is by introducing storytelling. I told you a little story at the beginning on presentation about my dad reading to me, telling me stories. Does anyone here remember what my cat’s name was? Hermione, you remembered my cat’s name. I can promise you one thing: you can go home, six months will pass and you will remember my cat’s name, and that’s why stories are so great because you will remember them, you will no longer think of me like this, but as a chubby little girl in bed with her cat waiting for the phone to ring, because you can visualise what I used to do and what I felt.
There is a little bit of signs in storytelling, I want you to believe it, I want to get into why it is so important, because when we hear stories, two things happen. Our brain releases two important hormones, one of them is cortisol and what this does it grabs our attention so it alerts us. We suddenly start paying attention because it is a story, something we’re interested in. But the other one I really want to focus on is oxytocin. So yes, there is such a thing as a hormone which actually increases your empathy, it makes you emotional. I’m not sure if any of you have heard of Paul Zak, he’s a neuroscientist and did a fantastic talk about oxytocin, but he talks about different ways of releasing it and what the effect of it is on people.
So he says that oxytocin is actually a trust molecule. What does this mean? So we get a surge of oxytocin and we feel more connected to people, we want to help them. We are more inclined to do good things. He in fact calls it the moral hormone, which is really interesting, because when you listen to a story, you feel like you get to know the person and you then decide if you like them or you don’t, right? So if you like someone you’re more likely to help them. And this is exactly why it is so important.
Now, Paul Zak also talks about different ways of releasing oxytocin and he says he has got a great nickname, it is Dr Love. And he says that essentially, you can hug people, and by hugging someone eight times a day, they become a happier person. So if you haven’t hugged anyone today, please do. But again, it is very odd because you can’t, we’re already talking about it you can’t just smile at people and then go to hug them and get them to buy a product. That would be very scary if you just went up to people trying to hug them, so you’ve got to try to find a different way of getting that oxytocin flowing in someone’s body, and it is by storytelling, so I’m going to play you a little video which will show you exactly what it is like to tell a great story, at least in my opinion, so it is a good example of a story. So if you don’t identify with it, just listen to the storytelling.
“I suppose my story starts like anyone else’s. My parents wanted what was best for me and not to have to experience the struggles that they did, so I pursued a business degree, and then afterwards I planned to pursue law school. Then, when I was 21, my life changed. I found myself hanging upside down by my seat-belt, my family’s SUV had flipped over several times before coming to a stop. Both my parents were taken from me that day. My mum was killed instantly, and my dad died hours later in the hospital.
“I knew that saying goodbye to two people I loved would be hard, but what I wasn’t expecting was how hard the aftermath would be. Everyone was wondering what I would become in light of this tragedy, there is a lot of pressure, a lot of noise. I’ll never forget the last words my mother said to me. She was sitting in the passenger seat of the car and seconds before the accident happened she turned around and she said to me: “Where do you want to go?” The next moment was chaos and she never got to finish that sentence. But her voice, that question, where do you want to go, is forever frozen in my memory. I decided the best way to honour my parents is to find the answer that worked for me, for Jennifer Paige, not for anyone else. Soul Carrier is the manifestation of that, every handbag I design is created to serve as a daily reminder to ignite people to do what they’re meant to do. I don’t know where to be when someone asks you that question, where do you want to go, or if you will have to ask it of yourself. But when that day comes, I hope that soul Carrier can be a reminder to tune out the noise and choose the path you were meant for.”
What did you guys think?
Did you think it was a good story? No? It was okay, it was okay.
Did anyone identify with it? Yeah.
Does anyone know what she was selling? Do we know?
Handbags, but was it obvious?
Was it clear straight away that she was selling handbags? No.
Did she ever say what the handbags were made out of or what they cost?
Okay. Any women in the room, would you buy that handbag? No?
FROM THE FLOOR: I’d consider it.
NEVENA: You’d consider it, okay. This was a release video. So what does this mean? This was the video that talks about the origin of the story, and they worked on the copy and it actually showed that after telling the actual story, it, the conversion rate was increased by 36 per cent, which is interesting. Why? Because she focuses on the feeling of the bag, she doesn’t actually sell you the bag, or show it to you from all angles or models and how you can wear it or what it goes with, but she tells you why it is important to her. It is important to her because she’s following her dream and she wants you to take the handbag, so every time you have it and look at it, and you say, you know what? I’m going to follow my dreams, and I bought this handbag. So she’s asking you to cancel out and take away all of the white noise and focus on what matters, and what is really effective about it here is that she sells the handbag through her own story.
Now, it is important to remember, it is not about the magnitude of the story. So yes, she has a tragic story but you don’t need that in order for her story to be effective. You need to be able to tell it, to have the skills to tell the story. So it could be anything. It could be like a toothbrush in a sink and a soap, right? So it could be anything. I am going to show you where you can find your story, whatever product you’re selling, whatever thing you want to sell, including WordPress management, which is what we do. So finding your story, one example is the one we’ve just seen is the birth of the idea, so the origin story.
So what was it that propelled you to do it? So for her, it was this tragic event, but it could be anything. It could be the fact you felt it was the right thing to do, that you wanted to do, and any type of birth story is very powerful if told well.
Transformations. So what is this? It is before, then comes your product, then it’s the after. So it is a case study. Talk to your clients, find out how their lives are different, how you’ve improved their lives and that’s a fantastic story.
Objections. So this is a slightly difficult one because it’s all the reasons that people have said to you: “No, we don’t want to use your product.” Go and talk to people. If they say “You know what? We don’t want to use your product because we don’t like your customer service”, find that, change it, and tell that story. Say why you’ve changed it, how have you changed that no to a yes? And it can be very effective.
Finally, what makes you different? There are so many products on the market today, and it is all — it is very hard to find a blank space, so you need to find what makes you different, what makes you unique. So when you’ve found your story, you need to be able to craft your story. How do you do that? You focus on one moment, or one person. So it is very easy when you look at an origin story, you think: oh yeah, there were ten of us and then one person came up with the idea and then we all sat in the pub and then this happened and that happened, but focus on one thing. It is that one moment that makes all the difference, or that one person. Don’t put too many people or moments in there.
Set the scene. So make sure you’re vivid. Make sure you use your language, use the emotions, take your opportunity to really describe what is happening, how you can really portray that story, bring it to life.
Okay, this is an obvious one, because we’ve been talking about emotions and empathy, so make sure you include them. It is so easy to allude to a story, to allude to something that is happening, and it is so much more difficult to really put the emotions and tell it, but make sure you do, because it will be that much more effective.
And finally, offer a directive. It is a CTA, basically. Make sure your story has a direction that people take action. So she ended her video, if you guys remember, with you know, the words on the video when she was telling you: every time you buy your bag and every time you look at it, I want you to remember, follow your dreams. So she is giving you a directive, but telling you to follow your dreams. It is very clever. So make sure you do the same thing.
Finally, this might be very obvious, but a lot of people forget to do this: tell your story.
There are so many different ways you can tell a story. And they’re so beautiful. So you can do it with video. Again, we’ve just seen this example. You can do it on your website. I mean, really work on the “About” page, don’t put “Oh, this company was founded in this and this year, and this is who works here, and this is what we do”. Get behind it, tell the story. Who are you? Who are the people behind the company and why should customers come to you?
Testimonials. They are great. Talk to your clients, get them to give you a quote, what they think is the best thing about your company, include case studies. They’re a brilliant way of showing your product in a real life example.
Social media, Blogs, e-mails, tweets, Instagram. Any of those. I know that a lot of you are probably thinking oh, you know, social media is so overwhelming, I don’t want to Tweet all the time, but you can tell great stories.
And finally, presentation. I mean, presentations are a great way, because you are right there in front of the people and you can really change someone’s mind if you’re passionate about what you’re doing, about your product, who you are, you can stand there and change someone’s mind, and people take presentations for granted because there is so much material online. I mean you can watch Linda courses and YouTube videos but they’re so powerful because you’re right here, people can ask you questions and really understand you, so take every opportunity you have to go and present.
I mean, WordCamp is a great way of doing that because you get a great supportive community. So make sure that you take advantage of that.
So what I want to do is I really want to conclude by saying that, in essence, it is important to make sure you understand people. And one of the companies that have done such a good job at it is Airbnb. Who here has ever used an Airbnb? Put your hands up. Who here has seen it in stories? All right. So not a lot of people. But it is a new thing that they’re trying, and I promise in a year’s time you guys are going to be all reading these Airbnb stories. Why? Because they transform travel. No longer are you going to stay at someone’s apartment or staying in that city; you’re living that story.
You get to meet Michael, who actually — that’s a great one. I mean, if you’re going to pick one, read that one. He talks about his experience as a marathon runner, and you get to meet all these people, and it is no longer I’m just going to Berlin, or I’m just flying to Florida, but you’re going there and connecting and living with someone else there and experiencing what their life is in that city.
So that’s what is so important about it. It can transform your opinion.
So just to summarise, because I know I have given you a lot of information, but I’ve tried to give you as many concrete examples so you can really see the power of empathy. In essence, one of the most important things that we’re all born with, which is empathy, and that we all need to survive, we have completely forgotten in marketing. Technology has come, and we have all gone on to the technology island and are sending tweets and using lots of cool new stuff that’s helping us be more efficient and effective, but what it has done is cut down all of our interaction time with people, so if you bring it back a little bit and take a step back from all of that white noise, as Soul Carrier calls it, and you focus on what it is important, why you need to talk to people, why you need to connect with them. I promise you, you can do that very simply by reevaluating your copy and telling the story. And you will see an increase in customer acquisition and customer retention.
And if any of you want to try it, you can always think about the toothbrush in the sink, and the soap, and how they create one happy family. Thank you very much. [applause].
Are there any questions? Or do I …
DENISE: Thank you so much.
NEVENA: You’re welcome.
DENISE: Does anyone have any questions?
FROM THE FLOOR: I’ll just hold the microphone. In this kind of modern world that we live in that people are starting to call post-truth era, do you think there’s a kind of a risk that some of the robotic empathy that can come from these sorts of things can be seen a little bit simply, and what do you think is going to be the future for this sort of approach?
NEVENA: I think you’ve made a good point. I think it can easily get very cynical, especially when you call out things like just putting someone’s name, because you code that. So you can do that so people recognise what your name is, and they put the name down, so that’s what I mentioned earlier, being specific. I think you need to look at it a little bit more behind that, and that’s why I encourage people so much to focus on actual stories and to focus on the emotions, because everyone who started a company or works for a company, what makes them good is because they really believe in it and believe in the product, and that’s actually the most powerful thing that any company has, essentially, is people. It is the story behind it. And then everything else comes, because the people make the product, they do the customer service.
So I think there is definitely a little bit of a chance of that happening, and I really hope that — or I’m going to do my best to make sure that doesn’t happen and that we can really take it back a little bit, and go back to the 16th century and really just tell those stories with the candle and really make it work, so I hope that answers your question as well.
Any more? Anyone else?
DENISE: Anyone else?
FROM THE FLOOR: I suppose it is kind of related to that we’re kind of losing the professional register of speech, do you know what I mean? This dispassionate means of communicating on business, and that is just kind of slowly receding now into the past. And I wonder if that’s — if you can endorse that wholly as a good thing, because I find it exhausting, the fact that I’ve got, you know, 100 e-mails in my inbox and each one of them is trying to make me feel something in particular, and I mean wrenched from: ah, joy at this, despair at that. Ah, it is just so tiring. Is this something we need to use in moderation here? Is there a downside here?
NEVENA: Absolutely, yes. Totally, absolutely. It is exhausting because the lines are getting so blurred, right, like you said. Before, it was very — business was very professional and businesslike, and you would talk differently when you were at work and when you were at home. So I get that entirely. It can get too much and people do go overboard, but I still think we get way more e-mails that are just like sign-up, do this, do that, but just go into my spam that I don’t even look at. I still think I would pay more attention to something which a little bit sparked my interest. I think the problem there is, as well, that a lot of us get a lot of irrelevant e-mails that we don’t want. If someone e-mailed me something about planting a new flowerpot, I mean I’m terrible, every single plant I have dies. I only have a cactus. That wouldn’t interest me. They would sell me cactuses that were dancing and it wouldn’t interest me, so I think it is important to also be relevant, which is one of the difficulties, I guess, in marketing. So stay tuned, I’ll tell you what I do with that.
DENISE: And there was a question here?
FROM THE FLOOR: Hi. I was just wondering whether you have a different approach for men and women. Because I can see how some things are — women are, to me, seem kind of a little bit more empathetic than men are. So do you have a different approach, or do companies take a different approach?
NEVENA: Yes definitely. We were talking about this recently. So my colleague is laughing because he is very touchy-feely, but that’s really a good point, and you’re right. There is definitely a different approach. It is important to remember that you’re not your user and this is something that we talked about again recently, and you need to identify who your users are. A lot of the users — I write, and a lot of the users are developers, and I write for them. I’m not a developer. I’m not a guy. You just have to identify. So what I do is I get to interview a lot of them, I chat, I go to these events and talk to them and think: okay, let’s see what clicks, what are they interested in? What’s really fascinating to them? Then I try to introduce that. That’s the whole idea of trying to take somebody else’s perspective and putting yourself in somebody else’s shoes. I think every good marketer needs to be able to do that. It is a really good. Thank you.
DENISE: Any other questions? I wanted to say that sometimes with the fresh eyes you tell a story really differently than a developer might themselves be able to tell it. Have you noticed that, when you approach a story, that the way you craft it and frame it is somewhat different than how other people may tell their own stories?
NEVENA: Yeah definitely. I think it is important to take both angles. Sometimes it is really good when the person himself or herself tell the stories, because it’s the personal touch but other times it is important to be able to tell it from someone else’s perspective, because there are a lot of eyes and everyone sees things differently, and maybe you’ll be able to relate to someone else. But both are really important to incorporate in your marketing.
DENISE: Do you feel sometimes that when empathy is invoked, coming back to the question over there, that there’s somewhat of a feeling of deception? Like: oh, I thought you were telling me a personal story, and now I see you are trying to sell me something. How do you avoid that in storytelling?
NEVENA: I think you do have to remember that when you do e-mails and blogs, and things like that, they can’t be for every single person specifically. So I think the Native Deodorant did a good job because they told this cool story and everyone gets excited in the office, but at the end it is like we are tracking. So there is a paragraph which says, “but remember we’re going to track all your progress, we’ve high-fived and we are going to track your product and send it to you.”
So there has to be a break. You have to go back to reality. A story is a story, but you have to remember it is for everyone.
It is the same thing with novels. We all read them and visualise them differently, so each person will interpret it in their own way, which makes it so special.
Yay. That makes sense?
DENISE: Any other questions? I just have one more comment. Sometimes, or a question for myself. Do people often feel reluctant to share of themselves? For example, with the Soul Carrier, this was a very personal story. Do people often feel like: wait a second, I don’t want people to maybe know so much about me personally? And how do they work around that?
NEVENA: The video I showed isn’t actually the one on YouTube, because this is the original that we worked on. So because the first time the video was told, exactly what you said: it was a little bit different. It wasn’t so personal. But I think it is important to explain to people that, especially in this case, that it is you that’s created it, so you were the best thing about that product. So it is difficult to open up, but once you take that first step, or break the ice, whatever you like, then it becomes much easier to tell your story. But it is a challenge, and I think it is very difficult to encourage people, but if you get someone very passionate, you’re more like to tell them your story, I hope. Yeah.
DENISE: Any other questions or comments?
NEVENA: You guys are really making me sweat. I like it.
FROM THE FLOOR: I was wondering what you thought about other people’s stories, you spoke about Airbnb, but those in my mind come to people who have bad experiences and being on the news, and the PR side of things.
NEVENA: That’s a really good point. I don’t know if any of you keep up with them, they did a whole campaign about diversify. Have you seen that? Because apparently a lot of hosts, there was some discrimination and so they did — they have great PR, and they did a great campaign talking about how they’re trying to diversify. I actually think this is the first thing Airbnb has done, because it is great, because it is coming from the people, because they’re the ones writing the story. It is not actually anyone behind Airbnb, but there is lots of stuff where people try to cover with stories and try and shape things differently. I mean, that’s always going to happen. People are always going to do that, you can’t avoid that you just hope you’re not one of those people and you’re doing the right thing and telling your story the right way, so to speak.
Any other questions? Last question, as I’m told. So if anyone has a last question, this is your chance. No?
DENISE: I do. I just wanted you to elaborate on that focus for a moment. I’ve seen a lot of people trying to — or companies trying to tell stories that were a bit too diffused, and you didn’t know where it was going. So could you elaborate on that focus on a moment?
NEVENA: Yeah. Just to keep it short, but basically I studied languages and literature, and I’m a bit of a bookworm, which I’m sure you guys have already guessed. So the key to having a very good story is people try and tell everything. You can’t tell everything in detail without it being, you know, thousands of pages, which some very famous people, very great writers, have done. But there’s a very small amount who can pull it off. So my advice to people who do, if you’re attempting to write a story, is focus on one thing. You can play around with it. You can take a banana and try and describe a banana and why it is so great, and the first time you tried banana. Anything. Really simple things, try and tell it, and you’ll get better at it. And then you’ll learn how to focus on that particular — on the banana and the first taste of it, for example. And you’ll get better at it.
It is just practice. I did say empathy is a bit like yoga. You do have to practice it for it to become sort of — become better at it. Yeah.
DENISE: Thank you so much. We all learned a lot. [applause].
Thank you for coming out, and remember, once again, we have extra tee shirts. So if you want to go collect one for your children, you can collect them now. Thanks.
Tom Chute
Tales from the Client Side: How to Create and Foster Loving Client Relationships
It’s incredibly easy to blame a client when a website project comes off the tracks. This creates negativity, animosity and ultimately an unhappy client – something we all want to avoid. Through telling stories and delving into the learning I’ve gleaned from many client projects, this session will explore the psychology and methods behind a loving client relationship.
I will talk frankly about client relationships that turned sour, how I salvaged them, and how I am now happily loved up with these clients. Think of it as a public relationship counseling session, where the audience gets to listen in on the couple’s most intimate secrets!
While weighted towards managing client relationships, the talk will cover how every member of the team, from design to development, marketing to HR, is responsible for fostering a positive and loving relationship with clients.
ANT MILLER: Hi everyone, hi, hi everyone, welcome back to track A, if you are near the back and people might be coming in, we have got loads of room on the end don’t worry make yourselves at home, no-one has to move it will be fine.
Hi welcome back this session is client tales, oh, I remember this, sorry what?
NEW SPEAKER: Tales from the Clientside.
ANT MILLER: Tales from the Clientside. This is Tom Chute from Pragmatic where he is an account manager will be exploring the highs and lows and best ways of dealing with clients keeping business on the road on the track. This is a 30 minute or so talk, there is 10 minutes for questions at the end. Your mic runners will be Carol at the back and Dave who will be doing time keeping I am running around too. Think of the questions coming along. WordPress is a business for most of us here, and business is more than just technology. It’s definitely, definitely about people. So please join me in welcoming Tom to stage and hopefully, educating us and sharing wisdom in how we can get the best out of the relationships with the people we really care about our lovely client. Tom. (applause).
TOM CHUTE: Thank you. Thanks ant. Welcome everyone to tales from the client side. The reason why it’s in this slightly scary, horror font is because sometimes client communication, client relationships can be a bit scary and strike a bit of fear into us. That’s the last we’re going to see of the horror font this will all be about how we can foster and generate loving and happy client relationships and I am going to tell some stories, because it’s the best way to explore those ideas.
So, who am I? As Ant says am an account manager at Pragmatic, my role is looking after 20 and 30 accounts, which means that I work very closely with the clients to put together new projects, come up with ideas for new programmes of work, and basically just I am the interface between the clients and our dev teams and our design teams.
Previously to my work at Pragmatic I was a client of Pragmatic’s, so about 7 years ago I ran an environmental charity, we needed a fast, good, cheap website and I know that’s the Holy Grail but we got most of that and it was through WordPress, and I fell in love with WordPress then. And looked at ways to use it more, and a few years later, a bumped into the Dave at a Christmas party, managed to get a job working with WordPress which is great. Previous to that I was working for an environmental sales company, and it was selling carbon footprint off setting, and it was a very different role. It was hard sales, it was very cold sales, we were using techniques like neurolinguistic programming to manipulate our clients. When we were ringing up it was really hard sales, getting people to do stuff that maybe they didn’t want to do we could use these techniques to get them to do it. Felt weird, I am happy to say I don’t do any of that anymore, I only lasted there a few months before moving on. What that did give me was a really good insight into the way I don’t want to do client relations.
Why do I care on a personal level, I love my job going into work part of this is working with really lovely clients who I get on with and have a really, really good relationship so by generating, keeping happy, loving relationships with my accounts, it means it’s a good place to work. So, because it’s all about relations, I realise there’s a lot of similarities between client relationships and relationships outside of work our romantic relationships and relationships with friend and family. Those of you under 30 who don’t watch early morning Channel 4 programme, this is Fraser, he’s a relationship counsellor on radio, he’s a pretty good he’s quite funny we will be using Fraser to analyse and look at some client gripes and moans they might have and try and address them in a relationship counselling kind of way.
So welcome to your counselling session. (laughter) here’s our first gripe. You don’t understand me anymore. In loving relationships, this is a real end of the line sort of stuff, you have got to do a lot to claw it back, but why is do clients say you don’t understand me anymore? So, this story is going to be of a non-techie disappointed client, they didn’t have a very technical team, we didn’t see, we were misaligned we didn’t see eye-to-eye on certain brief, we were always saying their briefs were poor but that was because we didn’t understand what they were trying to say, they said you’re not understanding us. They had bigger partners which meant there was cascading pressure, they were getting a lot of pressure from their partners, that trickled down to us and we were at the end of the line so we got the brunt of it.
Two years into the relationship, still slightly unsure about what their goals are not really understanding them. So how can we dissect that a little bit and try to understand what they really want and how we can better service them. Well, this is an actual phrase that one of the people used there, it one of the best miss phrases I have ever heard on the phone ‘I am on a burning platform I don’t want to be the one left carrying the baby with the bath water being poured over my head.” I don’t think that’s right at all. It’s quite funny, what it’s telling me as account manager they are really upset. Let’s break this down. I am on burning platform, they were feeling pressure, they were running out of time, expressing they were not in a comfortable place. I don’t want to be the one crying the baby, carrying the baby, this the individual at the organisation j they felt that they could be the one that was to blame for this when the big partner started cascading down the pressure. I guess no-one wants to get bath water poured all over head. How can we break that down and address it? When we try to understand the clients we try to say we know them, we no their business and actually what we really need to do is delve a lot deeper than just knowing the business or just knowing the project you are working on if you have got a brief for one project don’t just look at that thing in isolation, look at the reason why that project is being briefed into you into at the business competitor’s, their market if you can get back to them with rather than just saying yes we’ll do that work saying actually maybe your competitor are doing this do you want to try this, or come back to them with some consultancy rather than just responding to a brief. One of our clients recently used the term, leapfrog experience, so what they have done is talk about a competitor, we looked at that competitor and said we want to do this. We said well can we do a bit better, they came up with an expression of a leapfrog experience we see that an we leap over it. Trying to bring leapfrog experience to your clients by knowing their market and their competitor and knowing about them.
Continued discovery so something we do a lot of at Pragmatic at the beginning of each project is discovery and definition phase which help us align with the client, help us under why they are doing it gets all the background out if you only do that once for that one project you don’t keep it up, you’re not earning about them you’re not growing with them not understanding what they are going with this business, you are sort of just staying static. If you are in a romantic relationship that you didn’t learn or grow with the person for 6 months maybe it would get stagnant that’s not a good place four relationship to be.
Look at the individuals in the organisation. Look at who your point of contact is. What are their performance indicators, what are their goals. So, while they briefed in this project that might be a massive one for the organisation, what are they trying to get out of it because if you can work out what that individual wants and what they want to present to their boss or, you know the board or whoever it might be you can help them they will come back you to and say you really helped me out with that here’s another project here’s some more work. Work out their individual goals you can really get back to them with some good stuff. In idea that has been suggested to me recently is about going to that individual, understanding their goals and giving them 10 ideas a month. Saying to them, here’s 10 idea’s there’s some wacky ones in there pretty boring ones but pick a couple, if you keep doing that month on month they are going for 1 or 2 that are great you will keep them hitting your target they will keep coming back to you.
In romantic relationship, if someone comes to you or your partner comes to you and says I am really upset about this you just go, ok just do that. That’s not really understanding what they are coming to you with a problem for, they might just want to talk it through. Understanding doesn’t just mean finding solutions it means understanding where they are coming from and why they might be feeling that you might have a completely different solution are after you have talked it through with them. Create time with the clients to have an informal chat, let them moan at you for a bit, let them unload what they are thinking and really get where they are coming from.
Next one, have you met someone else? (laughter) dangerous. This is where the client is feeling or your partner is feeling a little bit shunned. They might be thinking why am I not getting the love I used to get from you, why are you not caring about me as much as you used to you’re not doing the things you used to do for me. This is a really dangerous situation to be in any relationship. So, this the shunned client. Indicators they might be feeling, they might ask you how are things over there, house your business. If you go back to them with yeah it’s great we have got these mega clients, lots of good stuff coming in, they are having a pretty shaky experience with you or they feel like a small client how do you feel they are going to feel? Pretty bad, they might get small client syndrome. When you talk about these shiny new things you are working on it might not necessarily be with them if you are talking about all the cool new things, the great new project they are saying hang on that’s not my stuff, so the shiny stuff for us but not for them.
How does Fraser deal with this? How do you maintain positivity round the smaller accounts when you have got other thing there are taking up more of your time. It’s really quite simple, it’s just understanding what that person needs at a personal level, what that account needs at a personal level, it might be like I said quick phone call once a week, we’re not doing much work for you at the moment but how’s it going. Some people like to be taken out for a drink, lunch, just a chat to show you love them. Some people do like to moan and some people will bully you and say, look you are talking about this other client but what you are doing for me, let them unload, work out the opportunities when they’re unloading, when they are meaning some clients do that, keep them positive and keep new projects coming in from that.
So, the trickle-down effect is a really good way to talk positively to small clients about the big work you are doing, rather than just saying we are doing a big shiny project over here, don’t worry about it, we are just doing it, it’s cool, wait for the launch, you actually say, look we are doing this really good project, there is some really interesting technology at the cutting-edge it’s a big budget this project, once we have that learning, once we understand how it works with that client, there might be stuff you can do with a smaller client a bitesize version, you have lots of opportunity to share the knowledge with a smaller client, give them ideas, it might not be that week or month, next year when they have a bit more budget, give them some good ideas.
Be honest about the pressure on resourcing that big clients take, so, if you have got a mega project coming in, let the smaller clients know, don’t try and hide in, sort of when they come in with a small request and say, “Actually guys we are stacked”, let them know in advance, look we have a big project coming in, you need to let us snow six weeks in advance to schedule in, be honest, don’t try and hide.
You never want to do anything with me, anymore, it’s about availability, at the start of a relationship you might have loads of time for each other spending every minute of every day with each other as it moves on it starts fiddling out, one half or the other might feel you are not spending as much time with me as you used to, it’s when relationships start fizzling out, this is an actual client story, I’m censored it we were working for a Christmas Wonderland, we have seen them every year, they pop-up in car parks they never to seem to be a success, this was an interesting project it came to us very late, probably October, they had sold thousands and thousands of tickets for it via their website, they were in big trouble, the site was very, very shaky, of course, as it got closer and closer to the event, there were a few news items, Santa behind the shed drinking tequila, the car park was a flooded mother site, the thousands of people buying the tickets, that were very expensive, all came through to do a refund almost instantly, the site collapsed. In terms of availability, it’s a tenuous link, we had supported that client, but it definitely didn’t cover 11.30 on a Sunday evening you know, that wasn’t part of the deal, mistakenly I took the call and basically got a shouting at from this client, he did swear in front of his wife, it was not a pleasant experience, that was us just not agreeing, aligning expectations around availability, what we said that beginning, we was probably a bit lose, we didn’t say it would be in office hours, you can contact us, just setting expectations about availability, when you will be there it helps avoid these kinds of situations.
So, probably the key point is understanding what you get involved in, we definitely didn’t do enough on this wonderful Christmas car park we ended up supporting! [Laughter].
You feel like you are hiding stuff from me, this is when one part of the partnership is hiding their phone, doesn’t want the other half looking on their Facebook, we’ve all seen it, it’s never good. So, in terms of the client we have had this, you get the panic calls, you get the questions like where is all my money going you are not being transparent enough, we started this project a few weeks ago and I’ve not seen anything, you often get a phone call, this is a quote now, “Have been left in the dark”, what we then might do to address that we might start over communicating, going on coffee breaks, we’re going for drinks after work all the stuff, right down to the minute detail.
So, this was a direct quote, so, “I’ve been very interested to read your company’s Christmas internal blog and can offer some advice around the team issues, however I don’t think I should be on the distribution list.”
It was a great example of over communicating by mistake, we didn’t need to go in to that much detail. So, understanding what level of communication the client needs, so rather than just guessing it why not ask, if you have got a client that needs a lot of attention and wants, throughout the project, daily updates, if you included in the budget why not. Just make sure you have it covered and the expectation set.
Stakeholders, if you are working with a client that’s got hundreds of stakeholders and you have one Project Manager or you are just a freelancer on your own and you are trying to communicate with all those stakeholders, we have had examples where the Project Manager spends all their time up dating fifteen different people, that’s not cool, you need to work out the right levels and understand that from the off. Don’t build a wall, if you have got, you know, stuff that you can share be transparent, don’t share anything if it’s not in your interests, but you know, where you can, share it if it’s not going to muddy the waters or anything like that, just share, you know, if you keep people up-dated and maybe not fire e-mails at them, but let them know where they can go to see stuff, just share.
I need some space. So, this is actually a bit of a misleading one, because this is about space to share, so one of the issues we have, working with lots of different accounts, lots of different projects, each client might have a specific area or a… umm… a web tool they use to communicate, so if we used all of our client ones we would probably have a few hundred different logins for lots of different services, it’s a nightmare with the logins, lots of tools doing the same job and it’s really hard to refer back to the decisions that have been made, they have been made in lots of different places. So, something that we have really tried hard to achieve in the last sort of, umm… few years at Pragmatic, is working out the best way to share information with clients.
So, I just wanted to share some tools we use and how we use them. We use software called Confluence, that ties in with Project Manager software JIRA, Wiki, if you have had to answer a question more than once, add it to the Confluence and refer the client back to the shared space, the Wiki, that’s been a really improvement over the last year at Pragmatic, clients love it. We use Google Docs, whatever you agree it, stay firm, if you get a link to Dropbox and you know you are using Drive, kindly and fairly just say, “We are using Drive, please put it in there”, soon as you start being helpful and let them use other bits of software that you didn’t agree, it’s a recipe for disaster.
Project management software this is a bit of a bug bear of mine, I think we have used probably ten different bits of software at Pragmatic over the years, getting it right, once you have agreed to it stick to it, work with the foibles and make it work for you.
Slack at messaging, Slack has become used by everyone, it’s great. We have got clients on our Slack, also great, but what it can turn into is an open-ended meeting all the time, unless you have got that in the contract you are going to run up the hours just responding to their Slack messages, so use it carefully, use the integrations carefully, make sure you have the right comments going into the right channels, make sure you keep private stuff private. Drive and Dropbox we have already mentioned.
With all these bits of software and the tools, just right at the beginning of an engagement with the client, you know, a new project or a new programme of work, have a way of working meeting, sit down, go through all the tools, go through how you are going to use them, the frequency you will use them, answer any questions they might have about, you know, the different, the different tools and how they use them and then agree that, get that signed-off, that’s the bit, that’s the deliverable in the project you can say, “we agreed all this, signed-off”, then if someone starts deviating from it you can go back to that point and get them back on track.
Our final tale, my favourite one, “You said this but you mean something else”, it’s where you try and communicate something, you might be trying to protect a client’s feelings, I’ve been in many meetings where designers have had their feelings hurt by the client who said — you know [Inaudible] sometimes you have got to tell a hard truth to clients too.
The example I’m going to give is a client that mixed family with business. It was and friends, and we were getting a lot of pressure from this client around the delivery of the project and they were asking, you know, “Why is it late, why is there a hold-up?” I knew it was because the copy writer was slow, we were getting stuff that was not accurate, the information architecture wasn’t great it was just a bit of a nightmare, the issue was, the copywriter and the copywriter was… his son! [Laughter].
So, I was wracking my brains this client would fall into the ‘bully’ category a lovely guy but when he wanted it done he wanted it done, for a couple of weeks I was wracking my brain thing how to have the conversation, it’s your son that’s the issue, he’s really not good enough, we are getting all this rubbish coming through we can’t deliver. After a few weeks, not months, that would be a disaster, after a few weeks I said I’m going to have that phone call, I rang him up and said, “It’s your son that’s the problem it’s the copywriting… “, I didn’t say it’s all bad, this is where we need to improve. We can get a copywriter into help and support your son. He went, “That’s great, brilliant, when can we start?” The build up to the conversation we had had, I was probably shaking, I had this call and he said, “That’s great, where can we start”, in a couple of days we had a copywriter supporting his son, it was beautiful, we got the site love, I had the completely wrong assumption, being honest and dealing with it immediately, other than lingering on, it will only build up, sometimes you completely is understand or guess what they’re going to say.
So, to summarise, understand your clients, not just the projects. So, understand the background, understand the context for their work and understand the individuals you are working with why they’re doing it. Be transparent and honest, it’s a thing that I’ve learnt and it’s been the most effective thing I’ve learnt, is being honest and having those tough conversations immediately, soon as you spot, you know, an issue, be honest, be open, be transparent. Tell a hard truth, sometimes it’s… what’s the expression, you have got to be cruel to be kind, sometimes this is definitely very important.
Thank you very much. I would welcome some questions if you have got any [Applause].
THE CHAIR: Thank you Tom, I’m sure we will have some questions from the audience, do we have any hands, just yet… ah, yes, down that front. Yes Sir?
FROM THE FLOOR: Yeah, hi, thanks I really enjoyed your talk. In regard of corroboration, there was quite an amount on the market and it can be probably confusing, including the client not giving them access to, far too many of those communication tools. So, what we use, actually, in the old days we had a project site, just a small website where we provide all this information needed for the client, really and it was just a better relationship, if you have other ideas, we could hear more about them.
NEW SPEAKER: So you created a many website.
FROM THE FLOOR: Just for the client to see the progress.
TOM CHUTE: That’s definitely—
FROM THE FLOOR: One point of call really.
TOM CHUTE: With WordPress, it’s got comments, it’s got the blogs, everything you need for communication, why not create a subdomain or set that they can use, it’s got all the stuff built in, yeah, definitely agree with that.
THE CHAIR: Another one just there, Kim over there, down from Leeds for the day.
FROM THE FLOOR: Define your perfect client.
TOM CHUTE: If we are being open, honest, communicating that what I expect from my clients, if we get those basic principles down then you are on the steady footing, the client then understands your business as well — so, you know, I talked a lot about us trying to understand the client’s business and getting all the background we can and doing the due diligence, if the client has done that about us, they know how we work, we get the ways of working agreed, they understand that we have got a business that we need to run to and we have got to make money, that’s a pretty good client.
THE CHAIR: I kind of do this too, I’m loving this talk it’s great, the kind of — I get the phrase, “Trusted partner”, it comes up a lot when we start a relationship with a client as well, there is a sort of two-way street to that, trust is the bit we talked about as well, the idea of partnership with a client is a really important one as well, I don’t know, do you…
TOM CHUTE: Definitely.
THE CHAIR: Do you have ways to sort of get to that, you touched on your discovery bit as well.
TOM CHUTE: So continue discovering, you build trust by being honest, open, soon as the client thinks you are being dishonest or you are hiding stuff, built a wall between your team and theirs, who wants to be in a relationship like that, so yeah, continuing discovery is a really important thing, not just doing one project but working with them to continue to find out more about them and their business.
THE CHAIR: Another question down here, from the floor, then one over at the end of the aisle as well the other side, at the back.
FROM THE FLOOR: Dow do you manage the client who wants a website, now it’s immediate, got to have it and you design the website and they insist on providing the content, and they don’t? You know you are almost finished you don’t have any images, no content, blogs, they have got to have their website, now.
TOM CHUTE: If there is someone in the room who has had the problem, I’d be surprised it’s getting the Risk Register at the beginning, we know it’s a tight deadline in order to get this to go live in the schedule of work say, “If you don’t provide the content the site will not go live”, so there is nothing they can do to come back to you and say the site isn’t going live if they haven’t done their side of the deal and it’s clearly articulated that beginning of the project, in the ways of working, discovery sessions, highlight it there and make sure that they stick to it, if it’s not it’s not your fault.
THE CHAIR: It’s the roles and responsibility piece, designing the team, when we talk with the client and sit down, what we are doing, we are not necessarily describing a service we are providing to them, we are working up a definition of a team that include them, once that goes along if you have communication at the right level and build up that trust, typically a good client that is engaged with that, will, will realise the part that they play in that, communication is sometimes about making them aware of that context, as much as it is about answering a specific question, it’s, you know, don’t, that is sometimes, that’s slightly spammy, that over-communicating bit, don’t overdo it, just give it enough so they get to hear the hum of the factory floor and get to hear the drum beat, drum beat and the pace of a project is something you have to work on. It’s rare, I think, that people work on-site with clients, you tend to be working remotely, if you are onset with a client you can get that drum beat and get the feel for the team quite easily. If the remote, took like Slack come in, it keeps the pace and lets people know things are going along all the time, it’s a balancing act, but it’s part of it. Sorry, it’s your talk.
TOM CHUTE: You do a lot of client stuff as well so …
ANT MILLER: We have got one over there.
FROM THE FLOOR: When you start working with a new client how do you know how much support they are going to need, how many updates and what do you do if you have not allowed that in your budget, so you’re building that site for them and then they need a lot more support, than you have allowed for time wise?
TOM CHUTE: That’s a really good question because that often happens but I think what you can do is avoid getting dazzled by a big project and say can we take a small byte at the beginning, just have a calibration period, get to know the client a little bit, maybe do a couple of sprints of work, then that’s all we will agree to at this stage then assess how much communication you need and how much feedback rounds you need. But taking it not being afraid to take a bite knowing it will lead to something bigger, allow a month or two for calibration it’s challenging.
ANT MILLER: The client that ‘growed’ like Topsy. We just want a thing then two years later then this thing you just wanted, takes a team of 5 to keep lights on. That’s it. Keeping clear assumptions I think is worthwhile doing. You always make assumptions at the start of a project, those are well worth documenting, certainly putting in front of the client but even put in front of yourself. You could be 18 months down the road and go you have just lost track, where did the assumptions I had about the amount of support this was going to need, come from at the beginning we were talking about one site, it’s a multi-site network got some static page generation and this bizarre integration to a command line thing that runs on a VT300 terminal,.
TOM CHUTE: Those assumptions should be documented and not he down way in e-mails, have a got a place to put it.
ANT MILLER: Email is the worse place. Just because something is an email it’s good for some things, it’s that it’s like knocking on the door and serving, here’s the thing I need to give you but a week later you won’t be able to find it. There are some tools which are better and worse than that I have fallen out of love with Basecamp for finding stuff, it last about 6 months but beyond that it’s not good for finding stuff.
I really need to stop talking, we had another question I think over towards the back as well. One there and there’s one there. Ok. Then we’ll take another one over there.
FROM THE FLOOR: Hi, so you have done all the best practice, followed all those very excellent rules, you have got a really lovely relationship with your client, and you have built a website that is really gone the extra mile. Then, maybe, three, four five months later the first you find out that something may not be quite so nice, is that you get a call from a developer who has instructions to take over the site, the maintenance and move the hosting. How do you deal with that? I always suspect a hidden agenda but how do you find out?
TOM CHUTE: Yeah that’s a really tricky one. I guess if at that point, it’s maybe too late. They have, you have not communicated enough post go live to check in with them, you have not had a retrospective of how the project went because hopefully if you had a chance to get negative views and stuff that has not gone well out you can look at ways to improve that, because if they have got another developer that means they have got more money to spend on the website if you can’t work out a way after a retrospective to use that money for good, yeah unfortunately it’s a bit too late once they have developer in, my goal is always even if they have got another developer just got an speak to someone and just see why. You might not lose that bit of work they might have something in the future because you go and have a chat the them we’re really sorry we did drop the ball there can we stay in touch, have you got some more work down the line we would love to show you that we can deliver again.
ANT MILLER: It’s not always a bad thing, it doesn’t have to be a bad thing, so it’s not great but maybe you did the work, maybe you did the build and they want someone to just to seep the needles wagging, to keep the wheels turning. Maybe you build a bit more because you can do the awesome design bit and really get value and somebody else comes in. At that stage you have still got a job of work to do, you can still make a really good impression now you have got an opportunity to make a good impression to two people. You do that transition really well, to this next person who’s coming in they go, wow they were awesome people to deal with. What a brilliant place. Next time I have got something that I need to do, I am going to ask them for help. If they are on up and coming and just able to do a little bit less technical stuff than you do, they need to know a good Big Brother partner, big sister partner. Someone who can help then I other firms. They can be another lead generation for you as well. The client for whom you do a good hand over and help them transition their site to another thing, you are showing that you understood their business. You are showing that you understand they want to get a different sort of value and need to make a different level of investment to support their thing, so that builds more trust as well. It’s a door closing but leaving two others slightly ajar. That’s how I look at it as an account manager. Yep?
FROM THE FLOOR: Great talk really enjoyed it.
TOM CHUTE: Thank you.
FROM THE FLOOR: Just a quick question in terms of stakeholder management, I have had it a couple of times on projects where maybe the day-to-day contact might leave or the marketing manager might leave during the period, I just didn’t know if you had any techniques or suggestions on how to manage that process?
TOM CHUTE: That’s, that can really screw up a project if that happens. Again, going back to there’s a technique we use called pre-more mortem, you act as if the project as tied, you get the people involved in the project into a room and say what are all the situation that could happen that could take this project off the tracks. That is one of them. If this person leaves, that’s the main contact, what is our back up plan by again bringing it up to fore of the project having that chat then you can say if that person leaves who will step in. If that happens we may need to revisit the scope of work we might need to train that person up, we might need, just building it in at the beginning of the project and then making sure you have got mitigation if it happens around training and on boarding and make sure your deadlines are not tied to a fixed scope if that person does leave.
FROM THE FLOOR: I have just a question like on a couple of the last weeks I start to work with other I freelancers I have too much work I have to give work to other people. At the beginning I start to communicate that to my customers, they were really like oh I don’t know I want to work with you, I don’t want to work with other people because I got recommended to them, other were like oh is it cheaper. I really want to. Transparent with that but I am really struggle with this point. Also, I don’t know how to communicate for example if there’s a delay in the work from the other freelancer so I can’t hit a deadline, so do you, how do you work with that.
TOM CHUTE: You have got to bring some more people on to a project you are asking how to communicate that to client is that?
NEW SPEAKER: Sorry what?
TOM CHUTE: You have got to bring come more people on to a project you need some extra resource you are wondering how to communicate that to a client.
FROM THE FLOOR: When I am creating a website specific parts I give to other people it just has to be done, don’t has to be like a specific skill, and then I take over and I communicate that because I want to be transparent with the login for example, all the starter stuff, and always like I don’t know if I really want that, and there’s like well I can’t hit the deadline if can’t give to it other people because I am too busy.
TOM CHUTE: So it’s just be transparent, I would if you have got more people coming on to a project because it will make the project ultimately succeed, that’s a good thing for the client, it’s not necessarily a great news it will be a delay, but you have goat good reason for it so there’s no reason not to. Transparent I don’t think.
ANT MILLER: That transition from being like the sole freelancer on something to be part of a team of freelancers is a real phase change. It’s a change in the structure of trust. Because you’re then moving away from one person, 1 individual, you know me I know European Union trust me I trust you, you know, as a freelancer you often get to point where you can almost subliminally know in any situation how the other person in that relationship will behave when the shit hits the fan are they going to duck or stand in the way catch it and deal with it. When you go with sharing that out months other people, you, I don’t think that you are becoming an account manager essentially you have to take on that management of trust. You have got options in as much transparency and how much direct communication the other people have, you can either be a person who acts as a gatekeeper and takes on the project management of the whole thing or more like a shepherd, just managing a group of people who all have direct communications. Bother of them have a lot of communication load, I think you have to accept you will have to, there will be less time building stuff, and more time talking about stuff and accept that. Know that that is an investment that will deliver value, and make sure the client realises that as well. I think the nightmare is when you all of sudden a client goes man you just don’t build anything for me anymore you are just talking about stuff, they have to know that that a bigger team needs more talking. And there’s over heat associated. Even as an agency, we bring on freelancers as well, it’s a little bit different in an agency you bring freelancers because you just extended your team have a got an existing model. That change. As well. An interesting model for this is Dan Mall’s SuperFriendly model, they are pretty high end UX consultants they are all freelancers, he puts together a team of pop-up freelancers, if you have a look at what the SuperFriendly guys do. He did have a podcast until a couple of years ago that’s worth looking at for. I have done it again haven’t I sorry. (laughter) ladies and gentlemen, Tom Chute who knows much more about this than I do I apologise for interrupting. (applause).
Catch Tom round and about, there’s quite a lot of pragmatic, pragmatists around, catch up with them over the weekend. We’ll be back in here, I have gone and closed my phone down, well the next session is kind of full on its defensive web development, it’s Heather Burns who will be looking at what web development and design and engagement with clients really means, in a world of very dynamically changing political context which could have real impact on all of us, and that will be starting in 20 minutes. So, hope to see a few of you back here in 20 minutes and hopefully a few new faces too.
Tammie Lister
Know Your Users
How can you truly create an experience without knowing who you are creating it for? Why does so much get made without user research? Why do so many creating experiences not run user tests or engage with their users at any point? It isn’t a privilege of the wealthy agency or invested company. In this talk I’ll show why knowing your users matters and how you can start truly understanding them to make a better experience.
WENDIE: Hello. This is awesome. Welcome everybody, did you have a good lunch?
All did you like the food? I loved it.
The door is closed we are ready to start, are we ready to start? What is? …
I am in front of the screen? Oh my god! Thank god, it is my first time as an MC so I am Wendie I think that is enough for now. I will be MCing the whole afternoon, I will introduce the speakers and helping out with the Q&A, I try not to be in front of the screen or inside the light. I am going to keep it really short. There has been some practical information I needed to share with you today. We just swallowed our lunch but some information about dinner, it is going to be later than previously announced so it is going to be at 7:30.
Forgot the location but, it is still time to find that out. Today, we are going to start this session with Tammie Lister, it is on the screen. Know your users. I talked to Tammie find out some things, I talked to her yesterday. I she was one of the first women speakers I saw at WordCamp 7 years ago. We are the same age, we have both a very, um, exciting lives and she is going to tell you about why it is important to know your users big, big applause for Tammie.
TAMMIE LISTER: So this is phrase, almost seems like a mantra for most designers. I am sure that non-designers say it of: You are not the user.
Why is that said?
Often when that phrase is said people think, well it is actually creating for users a bad thing? How bad can that be? You are creating a product, passionate about a product, why is it so bad to do that? The thing is it gives a reminder, a note to truly create the right experience, you have to get out of your head space. You have to get beyond yourself and see other people that are going to use your product.
Perhaps a better way of seeing this would be you are not the only user.
But if you are not, how do you actually create for the users for all the users and how do you go about doing that? So that is where the why of user research comes into it. A story that is told in ancient cultures who aren’t visually looking, touching and describing a part of the elephant. Some would touch the head and perhaps said that is the basket or maybe touch the body and that is a granary, or maybe touch a leg and it is a pillar, nobody would be able to get what they were touching would be a elephant, they are touching a small part and then trying to describe it.
Without knowing the full picture, how can you create something? Truth comes from seeing that full picture and the truths only come when you do user research. Without that your frame, design, code at the start code, probably not in the same room as the dart spinning, it might be spinning or circular, you are not going the do it. You are never going to succeed with what you are trying to do.
By doing research, you open up this better way of designing more appropriate design. To me, this Erika Hall, if there is one book that you have to read on user research, and at the end of my talk there is a list of resources I would like the share with you. I would like to say in her book, Just Enough Research, she says this leads to more design solutions than merely asking how you feel or tweaking the current design based on analytics. Beyond your hunches or the surface information.
Whenever the subject of research comes up it is like a carnival of but’s happen. It a breaks the flow, it just rains all the excuses and reasons why you shouldn’t do user research.
Assuming it costs a lot is a fair assumption, there is a lot of media articles say that, user research costs a lot, you shouldn’t do it. There is a notion beyond money that the time cost is huge, barrier, prevents this process and the flow of creating which is incredibly important that momentum of creation.
The thing is, research probably is on a small scale happening right now within the product you are creating or with your clients. It just isn’t being communicated. It is one of the missing pieces of research, communication of the research, all very well on doing it. But if you are not having the communication of it.
Customer support is like daily user research. People are giving responses, people are saying what you know, in the interactions. It is really important to give space and communicate those opportunities of user research.
Listening is the foundation skill of this and listening, it is kind of free. It is something that you can get better at and it is a skill you can improve.
The notion of just doing research is something really important and that is what I would like to get you in thinking about today, do it, test the water, see it as part of that real flexible fluid, easy flow, it doesn’t have to be this heavy burden that oh, now we have got to do user research in this phase or now we have to do this. It should be fluid and free.
There is also this fallacy that one type of research really is the way. People would say, oh user research should be done this way and this process should be done. That is not true.
I would like to dispel that. Adaption is really the key to speed and to prevent blocking the process. It is going to be different for each person doing it for the situation doing it. And we are getting into how that happens in a bit later.
Because I think that is one thing that is said against user research, this immovable mountainous task and it is a bit like doing your homework, you have got to the it. Ugh I have to do user research, it has that weight. So by being lighter on that …
If it is a business you can’t say, yes, these are my users how simply are you going the optimise to make the best solutions, maybe you have a weird divination process I don’t know about but I don’t think that is the case. Doing the right amount; the right type of research; that is simply a smart business decision.
This is something so very important that you get from knowing your users. Your work responds rapidly to the user demand as a product grows as well.
Actually doing the right research is economical and that is a table flip I would like you to make.
We are faced with the but’s about doing research, to response here I think is really apt. John says we remind everyone to say that really waste time and money, all you need to do is to build a service that nobody wants and can use. That is pretty apt I think.
Time, money, energy and reputation all these things can actually break a product and if you are not doing user research, you are opening up to making all the things happen. You are making it inevitable that all the things happen. So hopefully, I have convinced you that community research is a good idea. How you go about doing it?
I would like to move into doing that a little bit. First of all, I have a question, who has ever used revisions in at all in WordPress? Put your hand up? Cool, excellent.
Who here who put their hand up for revisions, who here has actually reverted a revision? Cool, awesome.
So, I just did some user research. I asked a question. Then I documented it. It is really as simple or as complicated as the goal that you are going to do it. It can really be frictionless, I now know in this room in this particular time the amount of people that had their hand up. I have the documentation of that. That is, that is useful information if you look at it in the right perspective as well. That is the key, you have to use judgment with research as well. You don’t need — Scrooge McDuff’s, user research, you can do it.
It is not an exact science, it is something you have to learn as a skill.
There isn’t a clear right or wrong way with research. Going back to that adaption you really need to be flexible with your approach. It is a craft. You know, learn to adapt and I think that is something that anyone can learn as well. It is a craft that anyone can participate in. It isn’t a process, it isn’t something that should be done one off. Whenever someone treats research like a dot at the end of the sentence, it kind of makes me feel that is really the wrong approach, it shouldn’t be a check mark that you do it should be iterative and part of your process.
Research is effective when you have this plan and when it is part of the cycle and as you grow user research, as long as the — grows it is adapting and you do change and you do different type of research as well.
I spoke a little bit about the kind of no right or wrong way. However there is a different approach. I would like to show a bad approach to maybe doing a survey. I have heard people say this, surveys are required for this product because everybody does them. Surveys are a great idea.
This is bad, there is no goal, they are saying that because surveys are the new hotness we should really do them. That is not going to get you anything. What you need to do is to have a goal and make it testable. So something like this, I created a sign up flow, I want to see if users are able to have an easier experience, it is testable, work out how you are going to test and get the results and see whether that is actually happened.
That is really, really important to have that focus on your user research. To be truly effective, user research has to be part of a culture and I have seen this time and time again, user research is allocated to a particular person, that is a limited approach and not something that you will be able to scale or not. Or not something that is used the research the most. It is important that it is something that not just a single role does but because when you do and when you live and experience research it is really important and empathic connection happens. Important not just for designers but important for developers and anyone involved at any stage within the product to experience that have the feeling because there is this thing that happens in our brains we make a connection when we have that empathy and it is very important to do that when you are making that product and to have that connection and remember that experience.
By working on a tool kit you can make research easier. It helps others in the team and it makes things easier to do as well. So, if you have a set of guidelines that people can follow when they do user research, they can pick it up and they can do it.
Maybe there is an outline for user testing or there is this way. It is something we are working with automatic and it is a great way of doing. It ensures that you get valid consistent research and also as researchers then can feedback into the tool kit the experience of the people doing the research. So everyone gets the quick start into research.
One bad approach that I have seen people do is do one of type of research and call that research done. That is, I am just going to pick the one type and that is all the research I will do for this product. P doing multiple sources actually gets you the entire picture. If you think about a painting it will be incredibly minimalistic and rare painting if there was one brush stroke. Normally several, normally a build up of a picture, that is what you do by getting the different research, you get different signs and then mould this into a picture.
Who is here heard of quantitative and qualitative data? This is a part about combining those different types of research. So quantitative data tells you something that people is doing. Quantitative tells you why, quantitive is surveys, analytics anything that can be answered by numbers. Qualitative, something like usability testing you get a lot more feelings.
By doing the combinations you get a more powerful research so, there is lots of different types you can do, there is card sorting, interviews, post typing, personas usability test, so many different things. I am not suggesting you do them all but I am saying is, you can look at the project, you can find the right tools for the task; the project and you and then find these really powerful combinations of research to get the results that you want for that goal that you are testing.
The way that my mind works I often try link things to other things, the thing I think about with research, I think a little bit of a TV forensic program. Bear with me on this. You have the forensic scientist enter the room, looking for that one tiny piece of tiny little crumb of information, because that crumb of information will put the criminal away and or solve the murder or all those kinds of things. That is what you are trying to do with user research, find the crumbs of information that will make the product work for the users.
Going back to the cycle, you have to think about this research, you begin with the needs, then you look at the data resources and validate them and share them. I said earlier, communication was a large part of getting, getting that message out you have got all the awesome user research, but if you don’t deliver it in a way that people understand, then it is just some data here that is not being empathised by anyone. Depending on the situation, you then need to rinse and repeat. So a very quick process flow might look something like this, write down an assumption, define a hypothesis, how to test this? Going back to, you should always have a goal in mind when you are doing user research, not just oh well, this amazing AB testing I read in article media, now I need to do AB testing.
Make the change to the product. Then measure the outcome of the change.
This is like, this is frictionous and you can add this to any part of the process, okay, tools down, do all the user research for the next 4 months. That is not the best way, the way is to fit in with your project and do this.
So when it comes up a lot of times speaking about user research, sample size. So it turns out around about 5 is a good number. But the problem with this is, 5 for good number for usability testing again it is like mm, maybe? The thing is if you get 5 of exactly the same results, then no, doing the same thing again is not a good idea because you are going to get the same results. You know for the groups you are testing, you get the same results, you don’t have to do more than that. If you get varying results of course a larger sample size, if you are doing simple tests and usability test you will need to have different sample sizes as well. So about having a bit of intelligence and noted taking things rigidly, it is about the right goal and testing positions as well.
Don’t get me wrong in saying this. I hope I will be clear, not all research is good research. It is about quality not quantity just because you have done a lot of research, doesn’t mean you know your users. It is how you do it and how you then communicate it. Bad research turns out really easy to do, I have done bad research myself and I am sure a lot of people have as well. Think of it as a skill, to study, refine and constantly learn, respond to users as well and as you do that you level up. I learned so much from other peoples user research as well. Because then I can learn the good and the bad ways of doing it.
Now saying about communicating the actual research one of the big things you want to communicate is the stories because your users are experiencing the products, so these stories are what will become the foundation of how you do changes.
Donna Lichaw I said on the communication side of changes I highly recommend her book “the user’s journey” because she looks at using story arcs to accurately convey the story of users and I would like to pause and show the way she does this because to me this is a really easy and really understandable way of doing it and it’s a way to communicate it so not just someone who has done the research understands but everyone involved in the project understands as well.
And the reason stories work and they resonate and by filtering stories and surfacing them out is important to us; as humans, stories make us connected, back to Palaeolithic times, stories power the human brain. And there are other ways of doing it and I’ll look at other stories after I look at the story arc.
A story arc for her would start with the expedition, have a rising action, a climax and falling action and going to closure. Think of a lot of films. One of the examples in her book is back to the future which us great way of doing that as well. You can see as it goes up you can see how filmic it is as well but think of it in terms of a digital experience, maybe you have record an action, then you have a sign up, then sign up successful and problem solved because sign up can be dicey, problems involved in that, then you go down at closure. So generally at the end of the closure you would be in a different but better situation than the exposition.
So if there was a home page here you’ve gone through a record of action to sign up at the end, you sign up so you’re now using the service. And it’s these visual representations that you can use to communicate those stories that you find in your research.
A common way is also to do story boarding or comic booking; it’s a great way a format universally understood to us as humans. Visually you don’t have to be a great drawer. Do the doodles to communicate the stories of the experiences your users are having and they become real when you do this.
At the time your users come out from the shadows they have these faces, they become people. It’s a bit like developing a photograph out of film. And each data point and each information crumb they add up. And it’s really, really important though that you don’t just freeze personas in carbonite and never go back to them. That’s not going to be good at all. You need to see them as fluid and grow and as you discover more data see that you can iterate those as well. And as your product grows see that you can iterate those also.
Communication is a great skill you need to make sure there is a format for everyone involved and make sure it’s understood otherwise it’s pointless going back to that. If someone delivers all user research in a great big wall of text, that not going to be accessible, it’s not going to get people buying into it, it’s not going to get the stories, it’s doing the stories and users you did the research on an injustice. Adapt the report to situation and audience. Be playful, be open to new ways of communicating that new research.
I think this is really, really an important statement: user researcher’s fallacy. My job is to learn about users. Think we’ve all thought that at some point. The truth is my job is to help my team learn about users, you’re a conduit for those stories, and that’s how you should be approaching this.
When delivering research you shouldn’t judge in the same place that you showed the results because that’s your bias, that is your interpretation of it. Let people make those own connections.
Going back to other people doing user research, when someone does that there is this kind of brain chemistry that happens when they make that empathic connection with a user they’re going to remember that. You’ll see someone developing code and say, well, George feels this particular way so, George, I’m going to do this experience because George is not going to hit this road block that he does. Or Mary always has this road block when she goes to sign up, I am going to add this feature so Mary doesn’t have this. And I have heard people talking about users in this way because they are engaged have that empathic connection. It’s back to stories about relating, they’re real. It’s not just face less avatars that some users researchers created that you didn’t have any buy into and you are just forced because personas are a thing you have to use. That shouldn’t be the approach. Everyone should live and breathe and feel the users. And a huge part of that is enabling and enabling that to happen.
Something I really think is important that not enough people do in fact is snapshots like digestible user research. Maybe it’s a dashboard or may be the people who you only support weekly or monthly do the top 5 support issues and relay them to developers and designers. It’s that frontline easy snackable research that is free. It’s already existing. It’s just about communicating it and getting it out there.
And it keeps that constant temperature. For the users it means people can go, okay, yeah, that’s what our users are experiencing currently as you change things as well and it avoids that burden, heavy weight and mental perception of weight of research.
And data is always going to be the smaller opinion. You need to acknowledge the limits of your sources and that is important with research. All research as long as its got context if you do it correctly and you have a goal can really be understood but it’s about conveying that context of that research as well.
It doesn’t mean without perspective that even the smallest subset isn’t valuable. Opinion is also key to mute yourself in your researches. The users need to be heard not you that needs to be heard. We want to be heard but in terms of user research, you should not be the voice that’s heard.
Interpreting is really dangerous so spreading out the problem and solution is really important. I try one of the methods I try and do at the moment if I’m writing or trying to deliver those stories in the research, I will not comment at all. I will may be add if I do as a post I would may be add that later or I would try and get to have a group to have those thoughts. I really would not try and add my voice to that and I think it’s really important you don’t add your voice right there. You may be see it as more of a discussion or brainstorming or here is the data, here’s what’s come back the stories that have come back, now let’s have a discussion as to those.
I hope what I have shown is that knowing your users is really, really important. Because when you do, you can create for them and that is kind of what we should be doing. You can make the best experience possible. And research is not just a one off process. I want you to stop thinking about that think of it as part of the cycle, make it a habit, part of your culture. Some of the testing happens for data will do for your code as well then do the same for users. How you research and really know your users should adapt, it should be fluid. That approach of a toolkit I think is one that everybody should have that mindset for. And it isn’t, it really isn’t a privilege of the wealthy agency or the invested company. It’s not just me standing here saying, oh everybody should use user research and if you don’t have the budget to do it you’re not going to be able to do it anyone can do user research and that’s important.
It doesn’t cost and it doesn’t take months to do if you have this adaptive fluid approach to it.
And knowing your users matter for everyone involved. Shouldn’t be a single role or just something user researchers do or designers do. It should be developers product managers – everyone should be engaged in doing this because it makes sense. When it’s part of your P process your users become part of your process so of course you are going to be creating for them.
I wanted to leave some space, I wanted to either answer some questions but I also want to maybe hear your experiences of user research as well.
So thank you. {Applause}.
WENDIE: So that was interesting at least for me. I hope you found it as interesting as me. Are there any questions at the moment?
TAMMIE LISTER: So if you don’t want to talk about user research I’m happy to talk about anything at all to do with design. Any questions?
FROM THE FLOOR: Maybe you can share some user research practices.
TAMMIE LISTER: I’m also going to skip forward to this –
FROM THE FLOOR: Can you repeat the question?
TAMMIE LISTER: In a second but I’ll also say these are some resources I’ll recommend as well. The slidex is going to have this but –
So I would like to convey some bad user testing experiences. I’ll use my own because that’s probably a polite thing to do and I probably made all the mistakes I’ll ever make. One of the mistakes I think I’ve made more recently is when I don’t – it’s very hard – you can know the context of your research and I think it’s really important to convey that context of that research to people to say this is maybe a small subset but this is an important small subset we’re doing, it’s just about the temperature and part of what I’m trying to do with this talk is show there are these different types of research, that I can believe in a leaner approach of research but if I’m not saying I’m doing that leaner approach of research, someone is going to go, well, it’s just like a few people.
I definitely think the goal thing is big if you don’t have a goal with your research and I’ve done it it’s just like I’m – I was freelance I went to Automattic and I would be like okay, we’re starting a project, we now need to do user research and I had that mindset of right now this is the user research budget and we do it at this point, why I would pick the beginning and only – now I know it’s better but it happens at the beginning, you do all these changes and don’t iterate. It’s having that making it part of your process and when you don’t then you get the bad things.
So that is definitely some bad – I have made all the mistakes in everything so hopefully I can convey that so people don’t make as many mistakes as me.
Any other questions at all? Or any other research? Are people doing user research at all?
FROM THE FLOOR: Just off the top of your head if you can think of what were really surprising things you discovered in the research you’ve done lately that you could may be share which is interesting or any anecdotes?
TAMMIE LISTER: So I kind of have a bad habit of making an assumption about something that then I find out a user really doesn’t have that. It’s almost like I have the ability to think the opposite of what a user is going to do. I do that an awful lot. So I have kind of assumed – time and time again I have assumed recently something is worse than it is and I would say oh no we can’t do this we need to make this feature easier for people and I have this feature content I assumed users were having a lot of problems with and I spoke to in automatic we call our support engineers happiness engineers and I spoke to someone and they were like people aren’t having a problem with it and I was like it’s a bad interface they must be but they were having problems with other areas and sometimes it’s how the area is delivered and I’m maybe thinking with my designer’s head and say, oh it looks horrible users must be having a problem with this. Particularly in WordPress some subsets of users have learned a particular way to do something and if you radically change something just because of the new hotness or mental model all designers are subscribing to, the users might not be subscribing to that model because they’ve learned a particular way and learned to do a particular thing. So suddenly changing everything, whilst we want new users and old users it doesn’t do new users existing users justice if I read an article and see a new hot way to do something and think oh this all out to do.
There was discussion yesterday about menu buttons and that was one way. All designers used to think menu icon was the way to do it, it was the best thing in the world, turns out users didn’t find it great but the problem is we kept it there for a while a lot of times and then we realised we had to put the word menu and that helped but that confused the users that already learned the icon.
You have to be careful about understanding the mental models of the users and mindsets of users you’ve trained with your interfaces as interface matures. That’s one of the biggest things as a challenge I find that on WordPress.com there is a lot of mindset trained to people. We want new people but already got people using it and WordPress as a project has that absolutely. There is a certain way, might be a really weird way to do things, but someone has been doing it that way for years and to suddenly change that is earth shattering for someone it’s like wo, what did you do?! And I have really bad gut reactions so I try and may be put those out but definitely justify them. I’m very lucky in Automattic that happiness engineers have an amazing temperature that I can just get that gauge and know and I think doing that and testing assumptions. I have constantly been surprised at things and I think that is great and that to me remind me how much I should be doing user research as well.
FROM THE FLOOR: I was wondering in your research process at what point would you find it most appropriate to start running AB testing?
TAMMIE LISTER: That’s assuming every research has to have AB testing because I would say it doesn’t. If your testing is AB testing then your goal would say at what point. Does that make sense? I think – sorry to be flippant but I don’t think every test needs AB testing. I think AB testing is something I’ve heard a lot of people say yes I need to do it and surveys of AB testing are like yes I need to do it for everything. It’s great to put it out there but there can be other forms, similar results to AB testing that you can do which aren’t AB testing so it’s a case of what is your goal, what does AB testing achieve of that goal? Then do it. Just having AB testing at like 80 per cent of your project just because a project manager decided that has to happen in every Agile project development I would not say that’s a good reason to do user research. In your company and product AB testing has proven time and again to work all the time absolutely have it and have it at that point. And some companies and some products it’s going to be 80 per cent – I am plucking a figure – at 80 per cent of our products cycle AB testing has proven so many things and it’s proven so many things of the similar thing you are testing, absolutely have it part of your process, but it’s that flexible mindset. And we’re discovering more about humans. There is a lot of the brain we don’t know about and as we know more about humans we can get better user research and better testing mechanisms as well.
FROM THE FLOOR: Hi, Tammie. Do you ever disagree with your users and what would you do in that case?
TAMMIE LISTER: Absolutely because I am not my users and I am ridiculously trained in my own perception. The way I do it is I tend to not {inaudible} myself and it sounds weird but I really can’t assume that I am a user, I can’t A assume – I am a particular user with a particular experience but I am a designer trained in different ways of doing it so I’m going to see things very differently from someone who is a blogger who is doing a particular thing. I tend to always put the user before my voice. I definitely filter. There are a lot of times in research you can get very varied and some crazy ideas that my designer sense says probably not a good idea we make everything pink just because Vera really likes pink and in her response she has said everything should be pink because pink makes me happy. That’s probably not a time I would listen to the user unless it is proven like a thousand users have said pink is like the way we would respond to this. So, it’s having that little bit of common sense but generally the users win over me. Any other questions?
WENDIE: Last question.
TAMMIE LISTER: I’m not repeating them. If they’ve got a microphone I don’t need to.
FROM THE FLOOR: This is probably petty terminology some of the way you talk about research seems to me what I call testing so can you just explain is testing research, is research testing are they separate things with an overlap?
TAMMIE LISTER: To me when you talk about usability testing that’s research and I think different people will have different opinion, it’s potentially very subjective. My opinion and why I’m saying research is – I feel that that is part – you are getting a feedback from the user. So to me that’s user research. People may not agree with that but to me we need to be simple in our terms. We get hooked up in the community designs in particular on certain terms need to mean certain things and it’s very binary but to someone who is learning this if you say user research and you open it and show the tools and show user research – I am not talking about code tests here. Another person may argue that should be but that’s not what I’m talking about. I see things like usability testing, AB testing all those things they absolutely are part of user research. For me the line is am I getting feedback from my users that is something I can then use to my product? That quantitative qualitative data if I’m using that it’s user research.
WENDIE: All right, time is up. Big applause for Tammie, please. {Applause} One thing are you talking about this WordCamp Brighton?
TAMMIE LISTER: No –
WENDIE: But you are one of the organisers because you told me so I know it is in August so it is a long time until then but if you are interested it’s going to be great.
TAMMIE LISTER: Yes it’s going to be 2 days, we’re going to have workshops, probably some JavaScript and UX work shops and a day of talks and a contribution day. Going to be 200 people, quite small, talks will be open so we’re going to have a call for talks in Brighton is kind of amazing to be in August.
WENDIE: Feel free to sign up as a volunteer, speaker and visitor. If you want to stay here that fine but we’re changing rooms so if you want to go to another room that’s fine also.
TAMMIE LISTER: Thank you.
Stewart Ritchie
WordPress Dev Ops for Beginners
A run through of dev ops for beginners covering some basics to get your started:
SAM: Hi, welcome to track C.
I won’t do much announcements now seeing as we had the opening remarks. The luggage room is still open if you have luggage in here now, that is open before 10:00 o’clock.
You might want to get rid of that first.
If you are tweeting about this session, use the hashtag WCLDN I think that is it.
First up, Stewart Ritchie, the lead developer of Powered by Coffee.
Part of Stewart’s job setting up and managing the DevOps for his company, welcome Stewart. (APPLAUSE).
STEWART RITCHIE: Thank you very much.
So this is dead cheesy, before we get started, can we get a big round of applause for all the volunteers who put WordCamp together? Everyone any other T. shirt has been here from 6 this morning, be kind to them, they are here to help.
So as Sam said, I am going turn on my slides, how do I get this back on?
There we go.
This talk is on DevOps for beginners, I run tiny organisation called Powered by Coffee. We are two people and some contractors, you don’t need to be massive for any of this to apply to you, we use the tools all day, everyday this is how we work.
Furthermore, this is not a tutorial. If you are a dev looking for code samples and examples of how to do this, you are going to be disappointed. This is really an introduction, we will look at the high level concepts of DevOps this is for junior, and managers what want to know what they are talking about with some of these things and for business owners who want to understand the business case around them.
What is DevOps it isn’t a tech knowledge or particular platform it is a state of mind in a concept. It has become a bit of a buzz word since I put this talk together originally. Doing lots of monitoring and skilling elastic, deployments, that is not what we are going to talk about. We will go to the start and look at the basic concepts at the beginning of getting started with this.
It is not a technology, a cure all to all of your problems but it is process. It is a means of identifying problems before they happen and putting processes in place that stop them happening again. Using either straight up management or other pieces of software, to manage the larger development process. The operations that your developers do.
I like to think of it as investment that you are putting some time in now to save hundreds of hours in the future.
Yes so why is it important?
Developers, it is going the make you a better developer, going to help you understand to better collaboration with other developers, and avoid the risk of trying new techniques, the overall quality of your code, as you write smaller and smaller pieces of code across projects and tested in automated ways. So you are saving time writing more code and better code.
It helps you bring new people into projects quickly, a standard set of projects and tools that, so you can bring a new developer on to the project quickly, rather than hoking around looking for tweak that is can go wrong.
If you are a project manager it will help you deliver better work to your clients, so one of the things we do internally is we have an automated deployment system, so when we have something new to show to a client we can go from working on that locally to having that visible to them to display in a staging environment in about 3 minutes should we need to. So if there is a critical bug or a change we want to see, we can make the change quickly and promptly show them. It is great for very, very fast iterative cycles when we work with the clients that they will come back with feedback or a bug that needs changing quickly, can show them and put that in the issue tracking it is finished.
Finally for the WordPress Community, kind of what I am going to talk about today is kind of just really great development practices and development processes. WordPress I think has been missing this in a lot of our kind of agencies for a long time and it is starting to come along and people are doing more and more of it. WordPress developed a reputation of not being a serious content management system, just a little blogging engine sites. Once we put in scalable, more easily testable, we start to become a contender for larger sites and critical sites, DevOps helps us move the community to bigger and better communities.
Overall, how does it help? Collaboration between developers, co-chairing in projects and automation to stream things out when you are working on projects.
So first off, collaboration. As teams grow, more and more developers get added to projects, projects get bigger. But developer collaboration is hard. You know, if you are not using a system to manage this, there is a couple of different ways it tends to happens of varying degrees of disaster potential.
The worst way is a shared FTP server, you have multidevelopers, one is editing — both save the files, single page finishes faster, dev opens simple post, you have saved your work in the meantime, but your work got wiped because the latest takes precedence.
A little bit better, maybe you are doing it operate a shared server in an office, verbally kind of going back and forth, I am doing this, that. There is still potential for disaster to come there as peoples work gets overwritten, time is wasted, bla, bla, bla. But this is a solved problem and there has been software around for years and years to do this. It is called version control. Our particular favourite version is git. It gives us a great way to manage code. Lets us look at an audible trail of code. Yes. Excuse me sorry.
Like I like to do code as a shared resource on a project and it shouldn’t just be changed and messed with willy-nilly. There should be audible trails, looking who made changes to code.
The way git works a process called commit, you have got your projects, local version of it. Make some changes, you produce a commit from those changes that commit consists of just the changes you have made. So over time your project breaks down into a list of commits, when you layer the commits on top of each other, they form the entire project. As you like one on top of another on top of another. Changes editions, changes edition, removing. You get the overall project. The overall code base, so you can go back in time to look at any given point. So as a commit I like to think of a commit as a useful piece of work. Something that you can describe in a single sentence and get it out there and into kind of your central, central repository of it. That might be a big fix it might be adding a small part of a feature, so if you added like a custom post type to your theme, that would be a good commit, that is one discernible piece of work.
Commits are really, really useful because it gives us this time line that we can see. So every commit when layered up on top of each other forms a whole picture, we can go back in time to any one of the commits. If I wanted to go back to here, I can revert to that commit ID, without having to unpick all of the files, if we weren’t using version control and I decided that we are going to work on a new feature, I have got two ways, either create a back up of a folder, do my feature work in there, do all my new feature work in there, decide I don’t like my new feature work and throw the folder away. The chances are didn’t do that. Who has been in the situation where they have been working on some code base and or someone in the team has been working on the code base and they have made all the changes and then it wasn’t working and they didn’t have a back up of the code before they made changes and they had to start going through undoing all the work piece by piece by piece by piece to get a back to where it originally was before they started doing the work.
Version control help us go past that, I can revert to the good commit. We have got the concepts of commit. We have another concept in version control called merging and branches.
It is kind of the real power of version control is that it lets us maintain different versions of a code base, almost everybody here works on websites I guess?
But, how many, how often do you think of the different versions of the websites exist, where you will have a production version of that website that public is hitting. So that is a site that is active, maybe e-commerce store maybe taking orders. Maybe have a staging version of that site that your client is testing, that you are doing your work on to make sure it is all right. Doing your BugFixs in there, probably another version of that site, adding a new feature or continuing to work on stuff that is not ready for the client. They are 3 different versions of your code base, software, 3 different versions of your website. Version control branches help us to manage this.
So we have got a little sort of example in that we have got a master branch and we are doing commits so we commit, commit, commit, commit deploy. That is fine. It is only one developer working on the project, we don’t need another branch, we keep, commit, commit, fine. What we could have done instead is create a new branch when we deployed, we did this to make sure that our master branch reflects what is in production and there is a good reason for that. I will show you now.
So disaster strikes and we find a massive bug in our branch. This is not taking store or payments, that needs to be fixed immediately. So the version control, if it is just a single branch we could revert back to where we did the deploy, we have the commit ID, excluding some of the extra work we have done. Because we branched here, we have that as a saved point in the code. So we can create a new branch from that, our big fix branch, make that BugFix, test it, check it, merge it back to master, so when we merge we take the changes that happened in this branch and push them into the master branch and deploy that again.
So now we have the BugFix code in the master branch deployed into production, the site is taking payments again. We still have a problem in our develop branch where that bug still exists so what we can do is then merge master back into develop. So it has the BugFix, so we can do all the testing we need there, to make sure that our new features work with our BugFix. We continue to work on our new development branch until it is ready, that is merged into master and deployed again. So again, master always matches what is in production.
Then the reason for that is if we ever need to make an emergency change to a branch of something in production, we have access to that code base easily, quickly without having to do other work.
We can add another layer of complexity to this, say we bring in another developer on the project, working on something specific. Commerce example. Perhaps working on a membership to the site. It is a big piece and risky, different ways of approaching it, we want to work on it independently, create a new branch off of develop called future X. The developer work withs on it, commits, commits, commits, commits, misses the dead line we were going for to get it to our major merge and deploy on the develop branch that is fine, keeps going, keeps going, eventually when it is ready to be tested gets merged to the develop branch, QA, tested then that is ready to be approved merged to the deploy branch so it goes on to, on to production and accesses to the world. So I will take a wee drink.
So to move on to code sharing.
Every project has code that people didn’t create in it. Everybody project has code that people didn’t create in it. So all this and it is called dependencies, everybody in the room massively dependencies, how many have …
This is quite an important distinction this is not like a WordPress project, you are building a site of which WordPress is a component. But WordPress has its own dependencies, there is software inside of WordPress that they didn’t create. Using libraries to do particular things. You have got some examples of this, dif which powers the editor, MP 3 tag information, BackBone and underscores, java script libraries that do the interactive stuff on the admin Panel. Those are quite, those are developer ones, libraries and stuff but php mysql, the independent versions of this, they are independent pieces of software that WordPress depends on to run. In turn are written in C, which depends on other libraries on your server to run as well. Dependencies all the way down. We won’t look at the php side of it but software, other libraries of code that other developers putting together. The problem is dependencies, they can change. If you write software that relies on other peoples software it is inherently risky, we have got a bit of a push in WordPress to always be using the latest version of everything, update X, Y always use the latest.
But that is not always a great idea. As versions change and increase, features get added and features get taken away. New bugs get introduced, bugs and things that shouldn’t have been in the library, that you were relying on get taken out and fixed. End up in the group situation where you are relying on a bug. When your versions change, if they change unexpectedly without you noticing, the whole thing can come down. So, what about within your own project? Already mentioned WordPress is a dependency of your project but if you are using, if you are building a theme custom theme for a client that theme probably depends on plug ins. Depends on word press, depends on other php libraries to do particular things. If you are, are doing some XML parsing or some other kind of utility library you are using to make it work. These are all dependencies. But the problem we end up having is that your dependencies in turn have dependencies.
So, again to go back to our theme example, this is kind of a java script one, if you want to use masonry, to produce one of the lovely block layouts in your layout. Masonry, depends on images loads, on jquery and events to run properly, underlying changes in the libraries can screw up masonry JS and which will screw up your theme.
So we have an example of a time when we built our site, debranded to protect the innocent.
So our dependency management completely broke down during the process of building this site for a variety of reasons, what happened was, this site was originally built on WordPress 4.4. Updated to 4.5, no problems, updated to 4.6 and the whole thing collapses. Reverted it back to 4.5 everything is fine.
Go back to 4.6 whole thing collapses again, so something has clearly changed as we move to 4.6. So we could have just pegged the version that it will always run at 4.5 and use the patch updates, the client didn’t want to do that, that is fair enough.
What happened? In WordPress 4.6 there is a new library added, — … is laughing at me — that is fine, introduced into WordPress, what happened was with us, was that we were using a library called twig that does templating with a plug in called timber that controls that. Because our dependency management broken down, all to version control, including the dependencies, they are little things that help us develop the site. The developer dependencies wpci, it also includes the request library, in an earlier version, because it was loading earlier in the system, php was assuming that is what we wanted to use, when it made a request to something it looked for a method that didn’t exist. The whole thing happens.
We had that remove all the extraneous dependencies, it could have been avoided if we had proper management in place.
You might be thinking, this all sounds like a nightmare and you are right, it is, I hate this, I hate having to like be sure that I have got the right version of this library and that library. There is a way of working with this and it is called composer.
Composer is the php dependency management package manager, basically lets you run a few commands in the command line terminal to add new packages to the project, a JSON file, that lists the project and then installs them every time you need to do deployment or want to do a rebuild of the project. Allows you to peg things to particular versions if you do update something and break it you have a logable audible list of here are the things we know this works with. So get back to here, at least get things running again.
Composer and WordPress don’t really play hugely well together we like to break out our packages as composer calls them plug ins, we list them out. All the different libraries on the external tools and things as part of the composer json and let them install it. The problem is it gets something from packagist, some clever people wrote a clone of Packagist for WordPress that lets you install things from the WordPress plugin repository via Packagist so that will let you access anything on WP.org. Maybe you have custom or pre purchase plug ins – some very clever people wrote a plugin for WordPress called SatisPress – our own {inaudible} owns as part of the maintaining team. So that let’s you sort of upload your own version of things you can distribute that and access it across your various projects.
Composer and WordPress don’t play well together at the moment but there are very interesting core tickets about getting an auto loader into WordPress which is part of composer and making it a composer package which I think there is going to be a talk on later on today as well.
If you don’t do a lot of PHP development and are more of a JavaScript person then Bower is something similar. Bower installs masonry, it’s clever, it knows masonry requires 3 or 4 libraries I mentioned, goes and installs them all and manages them and I don’t have to worry about it, I know you want masonry. It deals with the underlying part of that.
Dependency management because it relies on often external internet connections can bite you if you get say S 3 going down then you can’t build your site or if somebody removes something you depend on from public access.
There is a very famous things where leftpad, a node library, got removed from MHM so when people went to build their sites their applications again that day for a new changes and things to get out, everything broke. It is a really tiny library but was used everywhere, a great utility. So always be prepared, always have a back up, always have a cache. A couple of easy ways to get started looking at version control and dependency management start to break your own reusable code into independent plugins and share them across your version versions of those, across your site, across your project sorry via composer. So a couple of examples of that is if you look at the Powered by Coffee hub we have a drop in drop into virtually every project that writes all of our WP mail through mail gun. All you need to do is add WP config variable and that’s fine. We have something that is accessible, XM LPC across projects but we find it preferable to work this way rather than copying stuff back and fore between projects because we can control the versions like in this project we’re using version 2 of our mail gun thing but in this project we need to use version 3 and it let’s us get track of that mental overload and burden of being this project has version 2 so let’s copy it out of there and this project has version 3. We have a stated version, a stated accessible version of that we can use at all times.
So the third thing we’re going to talk about is automation. Automation is incredible. It can cause a lot of problems in the wider world and there is a political discussion but it’s not for today. Automation is great because repetition sucks. If you are a developer, designer, writer, PM, business owner, you are a creative smart person and you probably don’t like to do the same thing over and over and over again. It’s really dull. It makes people unhappy. It’s ultimately part of what can cause people to move away from jobs if they’re unhappy in their workplace because they’re just not doing something that excites them. And mistakes get made. Whereas often times tiny little things can be scripted and things that take a couple of minutes to do every day or things that are easily forgotten to happen can be scripted and make it happen. So need to do it twice I think you should automate it.
A rule of thumb for me is if it takes 2 minutes and you do it twice a day you should look at automating that so that’s 4 minutes a day, 25 minutes a week, 2.5 hours – it adds up over time.
And there are some really good candidates for automation. Deployments, which I will talk about a bit more, compiling assets which is something a lot of you are already doing if you are building your themes using sauce or less or stylist or coffee script you are probably compiling these assets down automatically using something like SAS and watching the files. Image optimisation everyone knows you should optimise images but it often gets forgotten so why bother, just write a script that will watch the folder and do it for you. Setting up servers we’ll talk about in a bit and installing WordPress. WordPress is a 5 minute install. I do it may be 3 times a week for various bits of projects. With something like wp-cli that is down to 35 seconds so a big saving there.
Let’s talk about deployments.
I hate ftp – I hate it with the fire of a thousand sons {laughter}. Every time I open ftp it is a bad day. Something very, very wrong has happened if I have to open ftp. Show of hands who has had a site deployment go badly wrong whenever they’ve tried to do it over ftp? A couple of hands at the front. My 2 favourites is when it only decides to up load half a file and spits out code every time someone uses the page or more insidious half a JavaScript file so you are in the Panel and suddenly stuff stops working. Nothing in your air log but gravity forums doesn’t work and you can’t edit anything. That’s a nightmare.
So because I hate ftp so much that we work to do automated deployments.
No more slow field ftp transfers. It easily ties into our version control. If we make a change to our develop branch that can be automatically deployed on to our staging server without anyone worrying about it. Same as production if we change our master branch deployed in production without anyone thinking about it saving more time, stuff we don’t have to think about, don’t we want to think about, tough we have automated so we don’t have to worry. It’s easy to undo a mistake. If a bug gets into production our deployment let’s us roll back to previous our version quickly so disaster recovery time goes from half an hour to 30 seconds because rather than try and debug it we see what is wrong and roll back.
To do our deployments we use an open sauce tool called Capistrano. Capistrano is scriptable and self installed, written in ruby, and like WordPress it’s sort of set up around tasks. You’ve got these various tasks as it goes through – deploy start, deploy finish, finishing, rolling back, and you can write new tasks that hook into this so you can script it to do whatever you want over time.
One of the things we do is tell it to compile our assets. We try to not commit to our version control our CSS files, we commit the source files our dot SAS files and whenever we set up the server do a deployment it regenerates those in their optimised versions that are all minimised as they need to be.
It is incredibly powerful and flexible and we’ve got a standard set up we use on every project. We just need to go in and tell Capistrano how to log into various servers it needs to. Often production and staging and if you are running it on multiple servers it can set it up to deploy to 100 servers at once if it needs to be.
It’s quite hard to set up. You need some experience but there are alternatives. Deployable, Buddy and Deploy HQ. These are SAS applications where you give them their server logins and it works the same way. All these tools you give them a log into your server tell them to do the same thing, they log in, does pull from your version control to get the code it needs and run the tasks you tell it to run. These are multiple different ways of approaching the same problem. These are nice GOIs you pay for to do it Capistrano is hard to use but very customisable.
So the next thing we want to talk about for automation is getting rid of a whole class of problems through standardising environments.
Who has ever had a problem where they have built a site or a site that their agency or team has built, works fantastically in local, works fantastically on staging then it comes to launch day, you deploy it on to the customer’s web hosting, the whole thing collapses and doesn’t work? Yes. Handful of hands going up around the place again.
We used to have that happen regularly. One that would always get us is MySQL versions changing and there being incompatibilities between them and various versions of WordPress, UTF – MB 4 changes? No …
By standardising environments we can stop this happening.
We want to use a virtual machine to make sure that everything always matches on every environment that is going to be deployed to.
My preferred way of doing this is controlling the hosting because then we can build something tightly integrated and know exactly what we’re building against but sometimes we don’t have that luxury, sometimes the client has their own web hosting and they’re tied in do legacy vendor so in that instance we’ll find out everything we can about their hosting and build a virtual machine that matches it exactly.
So if you don’t know what a virtual machine is it’s specifically a little fake hidden computer that runs on your desktop or lap-top as a virtual version of itself. An example that’s common is something like parallels that runs on a Mac to let you run windows except we use it to run different versus of Linux on our Macs; this one is running 3 separate VMs for the minute for different projects I’ve never got round to shutting down.
So the way we want to run our virtual machines is we’ll find out everything about that system that is going to be deployed upon, come back, match it in the staging environment then match it on the development environments. So that we have these scalable repeatable systems.
So to do that we use a tool called Vagrant. Vagrant is okay. Vagrant exists purely so people don’t have to use a tool called virtual box. Vagrant is CLI to virtual box and virtual box takes care of creating virtual machines for you; you feed it a disk image of the operating system you’d like it to run and it goes off and does that and it can be as quick as Vagrantup. A couple of minutes later and you’ll have a VM running that has most of what you need on it.
That’s only half the story. We’ve got the operating system. We’ve gone to centre west or red hat or whatever we need there but the other half of the story is matching all software versions so if we have a particular version of PHP we need, have a particular version of MySQL we need, a particular set of extensions to PHP we need, we need a way of installing all of that. Because I only want to do it once, I’m going to script that. I’m going to use a couple of tools. We use Ansible but Chef and Puppet are great as well. They’re task based; you feed them a list of things you want them to install and they go and install them, so it becomes re-useable. So if I have {inaudible} running on this Mac in front of me, I can use Ansible to install PHP 7.1, MySQL point 2, running everything, that’s great; we’ll then use exactly the same script on our staging environment to make sure they exactly match and because we base that on the clients version they will all exactly match.
I am quickly running out of time so to conclude this is going to take a while if you don’t know too much about it and you’re trying to learn it will slow you down to start with but when it saves you, it will save you big, you will save hours and hours when this eventually saves you. Take the time get to learn it and know the best practices and absorb it all.
Furthermore, these aren’t strictly WordPress skills. These are professional development skills. Every software development agents in the world kind of works like this and if we pass on that and skip on that then we miss out on helping ourselves be respected as developers but furthermore WordPress won’t be around for ever and there are a lot of WordPress developers in this room {laughter} – yes, fair enough like. A room full – technology comes and goes. Like people never thought that VGA would go away. At the time it was perfect but it’s eventually on its way out everything will go eventually.
Where do you go next? are you going to be unemployed because you learned to be a WordPress developer rather than a professional developer? Think about that.
Finally where to go next. If you want to learn more about this some topics to look into are automated testing, visual regression testing. Visual regression testing if you make SHS change you can {inaudible} BBC multiple screen sizes and compare them visually so you can see if you’ve got unexpected changes. Coquality checks. To make sure people don’t commit bad code and stuff against your style guide and doing notifications and things like that so everyone knows, like pushing into slack and stuff like that, so people know when you are working and when your deployments are done.
That’s me. I’m getting time up notifications so I’m going to stop there.
{Applause}.
SAM: Thank you, Stewart. Do we have time for a question or do we want to go straight to break? Has anyone got an urgent burning question that must be answered?
FROM THE FLOOR: Any hints on syncing database?
STEWART RITCHIE: There are some good tools for moving databases around. My tip is DB Pro. Obviously they have to be immutable; you move that entire database. You can move parts of it but you’re not going to move the changes, but I believe that same team is working on a product that does that like syncing versis for databases, mergebot.
SAM: Any other questions?
FROM THE FLOOR: I think it’s just an addition. Good to know you had the same problem with request. We destroyed the GitHub like with comments when we have that problem. You haven’t mentioned you also can install WordPress with composer so if you search composer WordPress on Google you’ll get the routes of your web-site and there is a way to stop from {inaudible} so when we deploy we don’t have WordPress on the server, just go via composer and everything goes altogether.
STEWART RITCHIE: We pull everything from Composer. We don’t use the roots IO stuff but it’s similar how it does it and there are great tutorials on the internet how to do it if you want to read more Google using WordPress with Composer.
SAM: Anyone else? We’re good. Okay. So now we have the first break of the day. Your nearest drink station is back through the way you came into the graduate centre and upstairs. There is a space called the junction and there is a bar there serving drinks.
While you are up there, there are sponsors up there. Please go and speak to them. You’ve got about half an hour to go and get some drinks. Talk to the people around you, people that are in the queue, get to know some people. And we are back here at 10 to 11 with Crispin Read who will be talking about object orientated user experience. Make sure you come in. Thank you.
Sarah Semark
The Unbearable Likeness of Design
Why do so many websites look the same? As our tools have improved and we’ve been able to do more with the web, there’s been a growing trend toward websites that look exactly alike. Why did this come to be, and what can we, as designers and curators of the modern web, do to avoid it? We’ll touch briefly on the history of web design, and examine how modern tools and practises have contributed to a more homogeneous-looking internet.
In order to answer these questions, we’ll explore on the history of web design, and examine how modern tools and practises have contributed to a more homogeneous-looking internet. We’ll examine the web design process from two perspectives – the designer’s and the developer’s – and discuss how the blurring of those roles impacts the design process. Along the way, we’ll discuss the various merits of following or bucking trends. Finally, I’ll offer some constructive advice to help you – whether you’re a designer or not – add an individual touch to your work.
MARK: I want to introduce Sarah. Sarah is a designer, developer, and self-confessed introvert. She works for Automattic, and designing and building WordPress themes. When she’s not busy making things, she likes obsessing over typography, collecting impractical footwear and going to new places, and she’s going to talk to us about the unbearable likeness of design. So, Sarah.
SARAH: I spend a lot of time on the Internet. Over the last few years, I’ve started to notice something. Everything kind of looks the same. Sorry, technical issues. If you spend a lot of time on the internet as well, which I’m guessing you do, you’ll know what I’m talking about. Websites that look like this. And this, and this. They all sort of follow the same pattern, at the top you have a logo on the left, and navigation to the right. Beneath that, you have a full-width hero header image. On top of the hero image there’s san serif type, usually white, and a big white button that is usually a call to action. Below that, featured items, often three, and always illustrate with an image, photo or icon.
And this looks nice. It works well, but it’s so common as to have become a cliché. These are websites for different things, they’re communicating different messages. Education software isn’t the same thing as a water filter. When everything looks the same, how do we distinguish between them?
So the web didn’t always look like this. We’re going to take a look and see how we ended up here. How many people here got into web design relatively recently? Over say the past 5 years? Okay. What about the past 10 years? And has anyone been doing it for longer than ten? Wow, that’s a lot. Okay, so for some of you, this is going to be a blast from the past. And for others, this will be a chilling vision of the past.
The Internet has been in development since the sixties, but what we know nowadays is the modern web is the worldwide web, and that really came about in the early nineties. And when it started it was just text.
The first website was published using HTML in 1991. It is still up. And it is just text, as well. There are links to other sites, but there are no images, no colours, just text. It’s still very early days here. In November of 1992 there were 26 web servers in the world. That’s it. By mid-90s our browser technology had advanced a bit, and we could do more. No, sorry.
We could do more. We could embed images in our sites. We could use colours. Not necessarily good colours but colours. We could use tables to start implementing layouts.
At this point, the best way to design a website was to build a layout in Photoshop or in design or cork, and then slice it into components images, every header text, every line needed to be its own image, and then you’d put all those little bitty broken up images into tables. Invariably, to do more complicated layout, you’d need to nest tables inside tables inside tables inside other tables, you’d end up with something a lot like code soup. If you think the code looked bad, the designs looked worse. This wasn’t a great time for websites. We still didn’t have CSS, so everything had to be declared manually using HTML tags, so in order to make every link on that page yellow, you’d have to define the colour for every single link individually. It was a lot of work to make something that looked this terrible. But everything at this point was quite new, and even bad tools are better than nothing. So we used everything we could get our hands on pretty indiscriminately. We had frames, animated gifts everywhere, and hit counters. It was a new and exciting time for the web. The concept of building a personal site was completely new, being able to communicate with people on the other side of the world. This is a really powerful thing. In all that excitement we sort of didn’t develop any restraint.
But things moved along, and by ’96, 1 per cent of the global population was online. CSS was introduced. And CSS afforded us more tools to control the way things look.
This wasn’t always a good thing. So you can change the browser’s scroll-by properties to make it three times its original size, and change the lighting effects and make it purple and yellow, and you can turn the cursor into a unicorn and have it shoot out rainbows, there are still multiple WordPress plugins that do this. Let’s not look them up. Let’s not forget the lessons brought to us by Spiderman. With great power comes great responsibility. But at this point usability and accessibility wasn’t a big concern. We just wanted to make stuff that looked cool. Flash came out around the same time, and this allowed us to experiment more and also to have more control. We had a fixed box for our layout, we could use any typeface we had on our computer. We could position elements visually rather than manipulating them in tables, and we could play with animation. So this allowed us to design in a more visual way.
By the early 2000s things started to change again. The web was no longer a new medium, and with increased knowledge and awareness of what we could do versus what we should do, this led to a refining of tastes.
At this point web design starts to feel like a thing. Websites begin to feel like they’ve been deliberately designed, like they’re a cohesive whole. And we begin to see the rise of new and distinct trends within web design. One of my personal favourites was a gringe-grained used textures, pattern and handmade elements to give an imperfect and tactile feel to sites, and the web 2.0, one of the most poorly named trends in existence, was effectively the same idea but different implementation. So it mimicked real-life objects as well, it used shadow and light effects, it used lots of gradients, every button was glossy or beveled or both, and there was always a mirrored effect, even if objects weren’t sitting on a mirror. Both techniques were very image heavy, and again mimicked real-life objects.
The iPhone built on these ideas. The first iPhone came other in 2007, and it presented a new challenge. Suddenly we had this new device that was being introduced to a lot of users who maybe weren’t that technical. So we needed a way to introduce, to teach those new users without alienating them, to teach them how to use the interface. We saw the rise of skeuomorphism, a derivative object that mimics designs of the original and what that means is this: if you understand how a book works, when you read a book, you pull the bottom right-hand corner in order to get to the next page, and then you build an interface that looks like a book. It has pages and a spine, and maybe a ribbon down the middle, and when you touch the bottom right-hand corner of that interface, you move to the next page. That is what skeuomorphism is. It links a new interface with an object you already know how to use, this allows users to intuitively learn an interface without having to read a giant manual.
The popularity of the iPhone led to the adoption of many mobile devices, and we were suddenly reading the web on phones. This led to the rise of responsive design around 2010, and another shift in design practices. Ultimately, as our technology changes, so does the way we design. And we needed now to scale our designs to lots of differently sized devices and different resolutions. We didn’t have that fixed box any more. It was hard to use a lot of images, and so we saw flat design come around. Flat design was actually pioneered by Microsoft with their metro UI which is now Microsoft design language. Metro ditched old gradients, shadows and just used flat-box of colour for everything. This approach makes it a lot simpler to adapt any design to different devices and resolutions, but in testing, they found users missed things — important things, sometimes. If your buttons don’t look buttony, people won’t realise they’re buttons. So a lot of flat design today isn’t totally flat.
Material design is a good example of this. It is mostly flat, but it does use some shadow and light effect to differentiate important objects, like floating action button. Material design is a design language intended primarily for use in Google products, but I’m seeing it cropping up everywhere in themes and frameworks. It allows non-designers to easily make something that looks good, but the trouble is, it is rather prescriptive and it is not intended to apply to everything.
Bootstrap suffers from the same problem. For a long time it was a most styled repo on github. It was originally called Twitter blueprint and it was built as an internal tool for Twitter to use, so if you had an idea and wanted to test it, it would work or not. You’d use this tool to get something up and running really quickly, and if you decided you wanted to go further with it, you could go through the design phase.
You can do lots with Bootstrap, and it is very easy to use it and make something that looks different, and is individual and unique. But oftentimes people don’t take the time to customise it, and the result is you can oftentimes see when something is a Bootstraps site.
So the rise of flat design, and all these new tools and frameworks, gives non-designers an easier entry than ever into design. It is easy to build something that looks good without ever using graphic editor or having a knowledge of the underlying design principles. And while ultimately that is a good thing, it can also contribute to the homoginification of the web. In order to build something great, you need to have an understanding of design.
Now you may think I’m not a designer, this doesn’t apply to me, but if you make websites, if you pick out a theme for your site, if a hire a designer, if you choose colours or typefaces, you’re making the web, you’re involved in design decisions, and design isn’t just about making stuff pretty. It is also about solving a problem. It is about understanding the needs of your client, and your audience, and communicating a message that isn’t any one-size-fits-all solution for every problem. Historically, designers and developers have been very different people with different approaches, priorities, and goals.
More and more, this isn’t the case. It is rare to find a web designer who doesn’t know HTML any more. I like to think of web design and development as more of a spectrum than a binary. Most people in the field fall somewhere in the middle. It used to be that you’d have designers with a print background who would build a layout in Photoshop, and then they’d hand off the final files to a developer who would be responsible for implementation. But now, most web designers are aware of the technical constraints while they are designing a site, even if they don’t do the implementation themselves.
And that prior knowledge of the technical constraints I think might be holding us back. Now, constraints often engender creativity. We devise clever solutions to work around them. But with web design, we literally think inside the box. The technical constraints of the web require box-shaped elements and so we build box-shaped sites.
Modern web design is very literally stuck inside the box.
Now of course, to stay relevant as a designer, you do need to follow trends to some degree. What we find beautiful is very much shaped by our culture and by the zeitgeist, the spirit of the time, and this is evident in all forms of art and design, from fashion to music to architecture. There is a study done where they looked at Amazonian tribes, and scientists assumed we had a biological preference as humans towards harmonic sounds, but when they played music for these tribes who hadn’t heard any western music, they found there wasn’t any preference for harmonic over discordant sounds. So an understanding of the world and its current aesthetics and your culture is vital to remaining relevant.
The flipside of that, of course, is that an over-reliance on trends means a design becomes dated very quickly. Think about the swoosh logos that were ubiquitous in the nineties, or those glossy buttons of Web 2.0, and following those trends really closely is fine if you want to redesign a site every year, but most of us don’t have time for that.
It is worth noting standard UI conventions are not the same things as trends. This is how users find things. It is how they make sense of an interface.
Don’t rewrite convention just for the sake of it. The Nielsen Group found that if you moved a logo from the top left-hand corner of the page, it was actually six times harder for users to navigate to your homepage.
Only break the rules if you have a good reason for doing so. Don’t alienate your users.
I definitely got lost on my slides, so that’s exciting. Cool. Sorry.
UI conventions, the same goes for accessibility. Ultimately, it is better to have a usable and accessible website than one that is really creative. But I believe that we can work within those constraints to build creative sites, whilst still maintaining usability and accessibility.
Much of design is driven by trends. Slavishly following those trends does not account for your project’s needs. Design is about communicating a message from your client to your audience. If your audience can’t distinguish between a hospital and a music festival, your meaning is lost, and understanding is diminished. Visual patterns are language, they have meaning. Think about what you’re communicating. What is trendy isn’t always going to be what is right for your project.
All fields of design need innovation to drive forward. And the web is no exception. Web design desperately needs new ideas and thought leaders. We need to buck trends in order to make new ones. It is all well and good saying be different, be unique, buck trends and be a special snowflake, but how do we actually do that and design websites that don’t look like every other website out there while still accounting for UI conventions and modern tastes? I have some ideas. First of all, not everything needs to be totally flat.
I expect we’ll move away from flat design at some point anyway. Designed trends tend to be cyclical, and flat design is going to look as dated as those swooshy logos into couple of years. So try playing with texture and pattern. When used well, they can add dimension and visual interest to design work. As human beings, we respond to natural organic objects. It is why we find emotional connection to hardwood floors but not so much to steel girders or glass windows. These subtle imperfections humanise what can otherwise be a sterile interface. For the same reason, hand-drawn elements are effective, particularly if you want to impart an emotional reaction.
Play around with typography as well, don’t just use proxima Nova and call it a day. It is beautiful, but it is really overused, and beware distinct but commonly used typefaces, some Google fonts can fall into this trap. Lobster is one, Playfair is another, it is beautiful, one of my favourite typefaces, but I have seen it used for corporate sites and it doesn’t fit. Think about your message and choose something that suits. Take inspiration from classic typography, try unusual combinations. Try serifs, get crazy, you can get creative with typography these days. Try using oversized type or type broken out of the box. This can add interest, even if you’re using a plainer typeface. Blowing type up really big makes it become an illustrative element. Dropcaps work on the same principle, and it is becoming easier and easier to do them in because CSS. There is a property called Initial Letter getting more and more browser support, and allows a really fine grained control over a dropcap.
Try getting creative with your layout to avoid that boxy syndrome. The concept of breaking the grid is very traditional to print design, but we don’t really do it on the web very much. If you’re not familiar with the concept, read Making and Breaking the Grid, which talks about building grids and then breaking them. The basic concept is you want to align every element on your page to an underlining grid, so it is nice and orderly and feels well structured. You can then pull an element outside of that grid. This gives it more visual weight and adds dynamic tension to your page, so it is more interesting to look at.
You can also try working with non-boxy shapes. You can break your text around objects. We have more tools to play with now. We can use Flexbox or CSS columns, we can skew and rotate elements and use SVG clipping masks. Even something relatively simple like using a squiggle shape instead of an underline or using multiple borders around an image can add character and visual interest to a layout, structurally, otherwise the exact same as every other website.
Animation is also a great way to add visual interest. Again, these tools have been improving and expanding. We can do a lot of animation with CSS alone these days. We don’t even need to learn Javascript. This site does a lot of — that’s not going to move because it is a PDF, but in theory, this site would have been animated and would have looked really great. So it is very easy to go overboard. When this site moves, it actually animates every single element as you scroll down, so as you scroll down, they start popping out at you and things jump out and move. It is absolutely like madness to look at. It is really easy to go overboard. So as a general rule, try to animate elements that are interactive. And animate only interaction rather than on the scroll.
All fields of design need innovators and the web is no exception. So get outside your comfort zone. Interact with design in a new way, and bring that passion and learning back to your web work. One of the neatest things and the things I love most about design is that it is everywhere: it is in airport signage, on packaging, billboards, restaurant menus, you can’t possibly escape it. Go ahead and experience it. Viewing design through a wider lens will improve your work and bring new ideas. Look at packaging design or hand lettering where typography and illustration converge. Read fashion magazines where colour can be amazing, look at film titles both modern and new, they’re a great source of inspiration for animation. This is a theme on web.com. It is super old, not responsive, but the sort of soul bassy style means it does interesting stuff, which makes it look different and interesting. Look at interior design. There is lot of pattern and textile inspiration that can be found here. Magazines are a great source of layout and breaking the grid. Get out and go to museums, not just art and design museums but also science museums, history museums. Displays are a great way to understand interactive design, experiencing design in the real world and interacting with it is a great experience.
Read print media. Book covers are a great source of inspiration for illustration and conceptual thinking. There are so many things to inspire you out there. Embrace a multi-disciplinary approach to design, don’t just look to the web for inspiration. This is a vicious cycle that means everything keeps looking the same. Look outside the web for more inspiration.
Once you’re expired, experiment. Try taking a magazine layout and recreating it in CSS as an exercise to learn new tools. Try your hand at calligraphy or hand lettering, build furniture, paint stuff. Make time for creative play, even if it is only a few minutes a week. And not just with code, but also with other disciplines. Experimentation is how we discover new things. Bucking trends is how we make new trends. So take risks, don’t be afraid to make mistakes. You can make the web more diverse, better and more interesting. So go out and experiment. Thank you. [applause].
MARK: Thank you very much. Is this on? Brilliant. We’ve got some time for questions, we’ve got a mic runner in the middle there, so if you want to ask Sarah a question then please raise your hand and we’ll get a mic to you. There we go. Anyone?
FROM THE FLOOR: What have you been inspired by lately?
SARAH: That’s a great question that I don’t have an answer for. Clearly that’s a sign I need to go out and experience more design in the real world myself.
MARK: Any others?
FROM THE FLOOR: Hello, do you have any sort of thoughts on what you think is next in terms of web design from, you know, what you’re thinking about, or what you see as going on at the moment?
SARAH: So I’ve been starting to see more skewed lines, which is a start. A small step, but a start. Oftentimes when things used to be very straight lines, sometimes people are now using skewed to move that. So I think that’s the first step, and I’m starting to see that crop up a bit more now.
FROM THE FLOOR: A really good talk. I have a question about where do you keep, in a sense, the line, the boundary between experimenting and keeping the interface usable? Could you elaborate maybe a little more on that?
SARAH: I think it is worth considering your audience there. If you’re building something more that is more experimental, you can push the boundary a bit more, but if you’re building something that people need to use, you probably want to gear yourself more towards the sort of usability aspect. But testing is a great way to find out if your experiment will work or not. So I thoroughly recommend testing all your designs, even if it is just giving it to somebody in a coffee shop and seeing if they can use it.
MARK: Any other questions? No? Okay, thanks again, Sarah. Okay, we’ve got a short break. We’re back in here at 11.20 with a talk from a cartoonist, which should be interesting. Don’t forget if you haven’t collected your WordPress T-shirt, please do so. It is downstairs in this building. The Happiness Bar is open at ten to 12 today, so if you’ve got any questions about WordPress, anything you want to ask the experts, I’m sure they’ll be happy to help you so head down to the Happiness Bar just downstairs, and go say hello and ask any questions you can. We’ll see you shortly.
Sami Keijonen
Panel: How do you Build a Custom Theme?
Theme frameworks vs starter themes vs build from scratch vs hack up a premium theme – there are lots of different ways that people build themes!
A short (2-3 minute) talk from each panel member on their chosen preferred development model, followed by an open discussion with the audience of QandA’s on building custom themes.
ANT MILLER: It’s Saturday, it’s 5.10, no it’s not Crackerjack, it’s your final session of track A! Well done you’re nearly through, that was almost an entire day of WordCamp London you have managed to get through today hasn’t it been fantastic? I think so yes. Right now to put a cherry on the cake to cap it off on a grand final, we have Jonny Allbut and his wonder panel to explain to you in intricacy, the wonders that are making custom themes. Jonny, take it away.
JONNY ALLBUT: Thank you for that amazing introduction, I hope I live up to expectations. So, welcome to the last presentation of the day, and what an awesome conference it been. I have got a huge list of R&D, and that’s without even starting tomorrow, so yeah so just as a brief introduction my name is Jonny Allbut I am director of digital at a company called Wider I have been working with WordPress since 2005 and built my first custom theme in 2006. I will be hosting this discussion today we have this wonder range of panellists, we all approach theme building in slightly different ways, that’s why we have such a wonderful panel because ultimately it’s like getting four presentations in one instead of hearing me ramble about how I think you should build themes, you will have a very balanced perspective, so its probably the best value presentation you will come to today.
So, I will pass the mic now oh they have already got their own, awesome, to let the panel introduce themselves, we’re going to kick it straight off. So the one thing I am going to say hopefully we will have questions at the end, but rather than me introduce topics and then throw it out to audience, we will probably only get through about two or three things, I am sure you would prefer to hear me and the panellists ramble about our perspectives, and hopefully at the end there will be time for questions, if there’s not of course please feel free to grab us at the end and ramble to your hearts content about if you think we’re doing things, the wrong, indifferent we’ll be happy to share our opinion. Please guys if you would like to introduce yourselves.
AFZAAL: Hi my name is Afzaal I run a WordPress theme company, we develop premium WordPress themes and distribute themes to WordPress.org as well. Personally, I help out a lot with the theme review, theme shaping the guidelines getting involved in that side of things as well. Think up themes was we initially released our first theme in 2013, prior to that I had a career in finance as an actuary not related to WordPress at all.
SUE FERNANDES: My name is Sue Fernandes I am a freelance design developer from Stockport up north near Manchester, I have been working with WordPress now since 2006, and I create custom themes for small to medium size clients.
SAMI KEIJONEN: Hi everybody my name is Sami I come from Finland I am actually a teacher but at the same time a front-end developer. I build also public themes in .org and .com but also for clients, for custom themes and let’s have a good show.
ULRICH POGSON: Hi my name is Ulrich I am from Switzerland I work for a Swiss agency called Required, working on back end different things, and I have also got a theme shop wp zoowear with a friend I am selling themes. I work on the theme review team and at the moment I am working on ought mating the process of reviewing themes, and if anyone is interested in talking to me about that afterwards, they are welcome to.
JONNY ALLBUT: Awesome thank you very much. So, obviously the first burning question here is how do you build your themes? So, obviously we all come at this from a slightly different perspective, myself and Sue are somewhat similar in our approach, but you know obviously there’s a lot of different ways to do, it from scratch, starter themes, parent themes, right up to framework’s all kinds of cool things. In my part, we have our own in house theme framework which is open source it’s completely free, I won’t ramble on about it it’s awesome though. (laughter) called Wonderflux. So, all of our themes in are agency are built bespoke as child themes for our theme framework. So if I pass you over if you would like to outline how you build yours.
AFZAAL: We initially started off with underscore, we develop a custom framework from that we continually develop that framework any new theme we release is built from that framework. The good thing about that it is pretty much have all the functionality within that framework itself that you would want in any of you themes so if whether it’s a sidebar theme, a sticky header or theme that focus on WooCommerce it’s all in that framework. It’s a case of cutting the framework down to get to theme you want. We have a designer who designs all the themes just in PSD format they have a broad remit whether it will be multipurpose focusing on a specific area or a theme for a niche like a law firm then we just develop, build with the framework to meet that PSD. That’s essentially how we do it I am sure we’ll tell you more as we go on.
SUE FERNANDES: When I first started developing themes I started working in building themes from scratch which as a freelancer when you’re doing everything, it proved to be incredibly inefficient so for about the last 8 years I have been using the Genesis Framework, and over that time I have been created my own custom child theme which is now use for the, as the starting point for the majority of my clients sites. Then I now adapt and use that to create any sort of different functionality and styling that I need for that particular site, so I can create everything to be custom and bespoke.
SAMI KEIJONEN: Yeah when I started out building themes I think I built them from scratch every time, but I think at least for four years now I have been using underscores, and I have been thinking a lot or making a fork of it like most companies do already, have their own fork and Github or somewhere. I also used for example, web dev studio’s they own Fork in the Github for example, and in Finland we also have another fork from another company, called Dude, that’s really, really good. Basically myself I use also, I always underscores as my starting point. Then I also use some portions of the hybrid core if you know Justin Dadlock and his hybrid core framework it’s not a parent theme it’s kind of different, it’s kind of library stuff you can put in your theme. When I started out I was always using everything that hybrid core had, I just put it in the theme folder and started from there. But nowadays, I just take the best parts what fits into that project. So for me it’s underscores and the best part of the hybrid core framework.
ULRICH POGSON: So at work at Required we use underscores for client site, just using that an working on just adding the stuff that we need for. For my theme shop that I have we use underscores also as the base, but what we started trying to do using Grunt to create the lite version of the theme then the pro version also so we end up having just one repo, and then when we want to generate the lite version to upload to WordPress.org we run a Grunt task which removes some of the files that are not needed which are premium code in them, and create a zip file that we can just up WordPress.org.
JONNY ALLBUT: I think you can see all of us have got quite a few years of building themes, my takeaway from everything we have said here is that although we may approach it in slightly different ways, ultimately, we are starting with a common set of functionality in some form or another. I think the deeper you move into bespoke theme development, especially client based work you are been paid for, not personal projects, personally I think it becomes more of a combination of working smartly and efficiently, and quickly to basically execute your projects in the smallest amount of time and the best way you can, but also quite an important aspect and I think you know you have picked this up from what the guys have said here that there is a level of consistency amongst your projects so, consistency is a good thing because when you revisit that project 6, 12, 18 months later have a got to do those a mends if you’re working in a team or even individually, having consistency in your code just allows you to jump on that project and then next to no time you know where you are and you know where your bits and pieces are and you can just get to work on it so that’s my take away from what’s been talked about there it’s consistency and starting off with some common functionality, rather than blank line, line one off we go Monday morning.
Ok let’s move on to talking about CSS. So my question to you guys is how do you deal with your core CSS layout? So, when I talk about that, you will obviously was of you will be familiar with things like Bootstrap, that kind of thing, which in some ways could be called a framework in itself. So, my question to you guys next is do you use a pre-existing framework do you have your own, do you code it bespoke every time, how do you guys do it? Tell us.
AFZAAL: So, we actually have a bespoke framework and we don’t use Bootstrap or anything like that for the grid layout because, well when you look at the responsive layout the theme is easier to control it that way when have a custom plugins like a page builder or custom short codes is easier to have at grid layout completely under your control. If you work on Bootstrap and they release an update it’s not necessarily going to be the case that it’s going to be compatible across your plugins, your short codes and everything else in the theme so just find it a bit easier from a management perspective to keep that complete in-house. It’s a bit more work to build up that layout initially, but it’s one of the more simpler things if you are going to run a theme company, it’s something which is easier to keep in-house.
JONNY ALLBUT: Once again consistency, really.
AFZAAL: Exactly especially as you are releasing more and more themes, that flows through all themes.
SUE FERNANDES: Working with Genesis also gives you that base framework so Genesis has a really good structure, in its core layout and also gives you it’s core CSS included with the theme framework. The beauty of Genesis is that using hooks and filters an function you can move that layout round as you wish to create your custom code then overlay that with custom CSS to make it look complete bespoke. Whereas in actual fact the underpinning of the site is the same in every case. What that gives you is a really robust site that’s built on a very strong structure, without you having to worry about rewriting the lay outs fret time you start a new project
SAMI KEIJONEN: I basically never use any CSS frameworks they are more or less in my way and give me headaches more than they help me. Kind of my rule, kind if you are starting out with the CSS you should definitely learn it first without any frameworks, then you know the CSS then you probably can use any frameworks if you want, but you really need to know what they are doing and what, where it’s going to lead you. So, I don’t actually use any frameworks, but I might have some kind of grid systems, because, you know, the layouts could be crazy or something different, but I kind of… I don’t have kind of bespoke, in that sense, because that’s more of the really easy thing to do in my project, any ways. So I kind of, kind of start from scratch in that sense.
ULRICH POGSON: I don’t really work much with CSS, I leave the answers for everyone else.
JONNY ALLBUT: No problem. So, yeah, there is obviously some different approaches here, the key theme here, again, consistency and development.
We have our own CSS layout framework called flex layout that’s built into our framework, it’s less than 3k minified, hyper efficient, any number of columns, that’s Open Source too on Github, by the way — little plug.
I think a really important point got pulled up here about learning covers with anything when you start talking about pre-existing frameworks, tools, whatever it may be, jQuery, whatever it may be, there is always a learning curve and I think the challenge to a lot of theme developers is deciding if it’s worth investing the time to save the time in the future, so you invest the time, learn the system and get the most out of it, or you just run around every time. You know, I think it’s a matter of opinion, but again, consistency is key I think in development, speed that up and ultimately if you are working in teams as well, using consistent naming in your CSS will save the sanity of you and your friends and your family. [Laughter]. Okay.
So, keeping on with CSS, a real hot topic is pre-processors, versus vanilla CSS, when I talk about pre-processes, I’m talking about Sass, that kind of stuff that basically allow you to do clever, efficient things with CSS, but I think for my five pence worth on it, it comes to the learning curve thing, Sass is awesome, it’s got a really cool name, who doesn’t want Sass, CSS for God’s sake. At the same time it can be used for a lot of different ways.
Let’s hear from the panellists, the question to be clear is, do you just go to CSS vanilla or use pre-processors.
AFZAAL: We don’t use pre-processors at all, just CSS vanilla that way, when you are doing it that way you do need to do more testing, we do a lot of the unit tests on the dot [Laughter] Organise website, I wouldn’t release a theme until I’m truly happy any way, I’m not the biggest fan of short cuts any way, that’s my personal preference, you probably save a little bit of time on development, but it’s not time that I find so valuable that I need to save it we cover it in testing any way.
JONNY ALLBUT: Sure.
SUE FERNANDES: I use SaSS and I also use [Inaudible] for the library, as a freelancer again it goes back to efficiency, I need to produce my code in the highest quality and most efficient and time-sensitive way. Sass saves me a huge amount of time on every single project, I really find it very intuitive to use, it means I can put everything I need in the same place, rather than searching I’ve and down a 5,000-line stylesheet for hours and hours on end.
SAMI KEIJONEN: In the last question already I love pure vanilla CSS, if it’s a simple project, for example, for a public theme I’m definitely going with the vanilla CSS, it’s kind of what it is and pure HTML and CSS is the first thing that you learn any ways. Of course, with custom themes or more complex themes, I use Sass also, it has maintained the project so much easily and saves time. Yep.
JONNY ALLBUT: No CSS.
ULRICH POGSON: No!!
JONNY ALLBUT: Got it check!! [Laughter].
Okay, so the take away from here is an interesting one, it kind of touches upon some of the, some of the points from last outcome, which was really about working smart and deciding if you should dedicate the time to learning the framework. But a good point was made here, twice I have to say, so it must be a particularly good point, in that a decision must be made about investment in time, but also let’s not forget that at the end of the day, regardless of whether you are using Sass, if you are new to creating CSS, please, please, please, learn CSS first. You will actually too yourself quite a disservice by learning a framework or CSS or Sass, or something, all of these kind of cool things that can give you hyper efficiency in due time, once you have got past the learning curve, ultimately if you don’t understand the core, fundamental aspect you are doing yourself a disservice, you will come across a problem, probably about half past two in the morning and suddenly you can’t fix it. So, I think, a real important point here is to make sure that you learn the underlying technologies before moving on to the fancy stuff, in a nutshell.
Okay, that’s quite interesting. Sue, just before we move on, I’m going to put you on the spot here, little bit, but I am not going to be mean, I promise, I would just be really, really interested because we ourselves just, I hate to say it we’re not sassy, we’re old school, we just like vanilla CSS the team that we work in, one or two developers want to work on Sass, I’m not exactly an expert in it, the decision was made that it would be really difficult to move our projects around our team and basically force them to learn new technologies, when in fact I would prefer them to become super ninja JavaScript experts, rather than pour weeks and weeks into learning Sass, Sue, could ask you, roughly speaking, how long did it take you to become confident with Sass.
SUE FERNANDES: About a week.
JONNY ALLBUT: The mic.
SUE FERNANDES: About a week.
JONNY ALLBUT: Quick learner!!
SUE FERNANDES: I went on-line, took some courses, watched some videos, I had a really solid understanding of CSS which is the point that you were making, that converting that CSS into Sass, wasn’t a great, great leap, if I had started with Sass it would have been a nightmare, once I got into using it and using it modularly, when you see the benefit it clicks into place.
JONNY ALLBUT: It’s a good point, for those that don’t really understand CSS pre-process, I’m going to give you an extremely simple example of how they are used: you could, for instance, have a certain colour value or measurement in your file that is common and maybe repeated ten, twenty, fifty times throughout the CSS file and using a pre-processor, would allow you to set a single variable that is then generated. So, you can change the variable once and it sort of generates itself and obviously plates it through your file if you are old school like me, you just do Search & Replace, yeah, that’s one of the cool things in a very, very simple application of why you would use a pre-processor.
Okay, so moving on, for me this is a really, really big topic. Once you get beyond basic theme building, you quickly discover the short comings of the standard editor in WordPress. If I outline a simple example, if you have got your ‘the content’, displayed and it’s inside a kind of container on your site, how then without getting the client to write lots of closing and opening dives, how would you then include something like a full width section. The next question is: how do you deploy custom layout in page sections? They essentially go beyond what the standard editor is capable of, what technology do you use?
AFZAAL: For that it’s the page builder, if you want to add full width span the whole width of the page, if you want to add a Parallax background so when you switch themes the functionality is there, it’s the easiest way the user can select specific rows, customise the text in that section, centralise the text, even change the pad in the margin all of that stuff. We looked at various different ways, short cuts for things like that, but by far the easiest was to have a pagebuilder, sometimes even having a separate template, they can have a canal template, but it won’t be the width of the whole page, page builder is by far the easiest.
JONNY ALLBUT: Just before we move on so we are clear, when you say, “Page builder”, is that something you developed in-house, is it a plugin.
AFZAAL: It was from the site origin page from 2013, there was a lot of functionality in the original version that wasn’t, just wasn’t there, eventually the functionality was added to the core version, now it’s an extension to that plugin, that has theme-specific functionality.
SUE FERNANDES: I use advance custom fields I’m a great fan of their flexible content fields, so what I normally do I’ll create a range of different layouts which are given to the — well, me mainly, because the client tends not to touch them after they have been set, but in theory the client can then move those content sections around the page to suit their own agendas and whatever they need and add and delete them on the fly, as they wish. Then I can choose what options and what variations they can include in that.
SAMI KEIJONEN: I also use custom fields but I normally use custom meta box 2, or carbon fields you probably haven’t heard that before [Inaudible] if it’s really, really simple ones then I probably create my own meta fields but if it’s more complex ones then I use the plugin, custom meta box 2.
ULRICH POGSON: So for our clients we have built plugins that have shortcodes but then adding support for short cake which allows you to have a UI so the customer if they activated a visual tab they don’t see the short code but a nice representation of the front-end, then they click the button and enter the fields, with the information, some of it can be pre-plated, you can have things they can choose or a checkbox, they can upload images, super useful, it works great.
JONNY ALLBUT: Okay, great, I’m just going to touch on what we do, love it or hate it, we use advance custom fields as well. We really like the flexible content stuff and by building out with that, in the pro version, you can then use all kinds of cool stuff, repeater fields can be used to build out things like accordions, we haven’t built one in any custom themes in 18 months now, even fancy looking home pages are perfectly modular, in fact it allows us to build out any page config, so a very fancy looking homepage, elements of that can be used on any part of the site and I think a common thing that we are hearing hear, is that we do not like to reveal the code to our clients. If we reveal code to our clients and expect them to even do what we would consider very, very simple things, personally I think it’s dangerous ground, purely for the fact that I do not feel that it provides a good end-user experience and between you me and the gate post and the panel over he you will massively reduce your support inbound inquiries if you maybe research some of the things that have been talked about here, you know there is a lot of different ways to do this, at its most base value it could be a custom page template with some custom boxes, right up to page builder, advance custom fields et cetera, it really does depend on the project and the layout the technologies you pick.
Okay, so moving on. I’m sure 95% of the themes that we all build here end up having custom post types and custom taxonomies. So, there is a couple of different ways of approaching this, there is plugins that will configure this stuff for you, that’s crazy talk, you should code it yourself, the functionality is actually pretty easy to understand.
My question to the panel next is: with that kind of functionality when you are creating your custom post type and your taxonomies, do you use a plug in I’m not going to be mean on you if you do. Do you put it straight into functions, PHP, or create your own stand-alone plugin for that site? How do you do it guys?
AFZAAL: So at the moment the customer post set functionality is in the theme, which isn’t that great if you are familiar with the WordPress theme requirements, the reason why our themes have a CPT within the theme itself, is because the CPC is across all themes, so it doesn’t make sense to release a plug-in with that, if they install a theme that doesn’t support it, then it will still be there and it won’t be styled and there is a problem. Over time, as we are developing the themes to include the CPTs, the view is we will move that to a separate plugin and the plugin itself will check if that CPT should be loaded for the theme currently active at that time, one theme is a [Inaudible] theme, that has things to do specifically for that industry which aren’t relevant to other themes, so that is easier to manage, when we need to update any of that code we just update it within the plugin directly, not needing to have to update 20 themes or whatever. So.
SUE FERNANDES: I would always put it in plugin, yeah. When I was sort of getting started developing and even now I get clients that come to me that have custom page built into a theme, then we change a theme, develop a nice new custom one built in genesis and all of that custom post data disappears and we can’t access it. As a general rule of thumb, anything that is meant to work the theme, anything that is meant to be part of the theme, stays in functions. PHP, anything that works independently goes into a custom plugin, that way if they ever decide they don’t want to use that theme anymore they won’t lose it, it might look ugly but they won’t lose the content they have got there already.
SAMI KEIJONEN: Yeah pretty much the same for me always a custom plugin for custom sites, it’s something that is going to stay thereafter the theme switches, it’s always a custom plugin.
ULRICH POGSON: Yeah same here. (laughter).
JONNY ALLBUT: Ok we’re in agreement, you can see a commonality, just finish up on that topic we also drop it into our own kind of little custom plugin that just has an array that sits all the taxonomies and post types and joins up all the relationships. The reason why we do that is sometimes when you’re in testing, it’s quite useful say if you like, hideously break your theme, you still want to actually keep the core content structure together for testing say for certain archive views and stuff like that. Our mentality is that it’s almost becomes a dependency on that specific theme that we have the plugin configures that kind of stuff, that is pretty much along the lines of what everyone is saying here. We’re going have to wind it up really soon, I have now got one minute left. There’s a certain question, we’re going to have to whip through this really quick guys otherwise we will be in trouble. But I think it’s important. I am not going to even share my opinion because there’s no time for that I think we would like to hear from the panellists, when considering accessibility, what are the key things you consider. You have got 10 seconds each.
AFZAAL: So when it comes to accessibility make sure they can get through the page just by using tabs, making sure that wherever the users highlighting at that point is clear, so maybe have a visual change in the background colour or box round, it but just making sure the tab feature is really important to get.
JONNY ALLBUT: Time is up.
SUE FERNANDES: Genesis framework comes already enabled with a huge amount of really good accessibility stuff, especially the last couple of releases, so knowing that gives me the confidence that the themes I am producing are going to be really robust in terms of accessibility. Then I just need to concentrate don’t sign side of things, in terms of colours and focus and so on.
SAMI KEIJONEN: Everything you do just keep accessibility in mind. Every step you take.
ULRICH POGSON: Underscores comes with a number of accessibility features in it, so there’s like with Genesis you just need to make sure that when you design it you choose the right colours and things like that but it’s also important to realise that the content needs to be accessible also, not sufficient just for the theme to be accessible.
JONNY ALLBUT: Absolutely. Good point made that’s is for us, we had about another 20-odd questions, which unfortunately we didn’t have time for, so unfortunately I don’t think we have got time for questions either. So, please do feel free to catch anyone of us either at the social tonight, or tomorrow indeed. We would love to share our opinions on theme building and thank you very much. (applause).
ANT MILLER: Do you want 5 minutes for questions? There’s a slight miscommunication, yeah 5 minutes. I will hold this I will do running from the floor you got the things up there ok. Oh, there’s a mic runner, we have got another one there your first question is coming in. You watch that one, here we go.
FROM THE FLOOR: Hello, first of all great panel, and I have one question to ask you. It’s about the amount of code you reuse in your composer elements, visual composer, page builder or custom, do you have some base templates that you use and then apply design elements to those, or do you most of the time build bespoke elements.
JONNY ALLBUT: Anyone feel like answer that.
AFZAAL: Each theme would have its own custom styling so if you are looking at page builder modules where there’s modules are available across all themes you would still want something in the theme that fits with the design layout of that particular theme. So that’s not always the case, there’s a lot of short codes where there is no styling needed at all like video short codes things like that, and it’s difficult to style like a tab short code and a toggle short code but you would try to have some sort level of consistency throughout the themes.
FROM THE FLOOR: Ok thank you.
ANT MILLER: Anyone else have any points?
JONNY ALLBUT: Next question then please.
ANT MILLER: We have got one over here.
FROM THE FLOOR: Hi. My microphone wasn’t as loud as his, I just shout at everybody. So I think all of you mentioned building themes based from frameworks or other themes making child themes, how do you feel about building themes from scratch, because a lot of the themes have a lot of functionality built into them that you might not necessarily need in the themes for your clients, how would you handle maybe a really elaborate theme build and the framework that you use for example, only provides a small percentage of that rather than doing most of it for you, would you build that from scratch or would you carry on with the theme work.
JONNY ALLBUT: Ok well I am just going to give you my 5p worth and pass it down. It’s a kind of tricky question to answer in some ways, because we have kind of got a couple of guys here that actually will use a starter theme to build on, which I would imagine I mean if you look at underscores is basically has no visual design in it. It just has kind of core layout, and there is really hardly any CSS in it, and I presume the same goes for Genesis as well. Certainly, our framework from base install, has a part from the responsive stuff and the grid layout it has no visual aspects. So, from our point of view the way we approach it we are able to create literally anything visually, we’re not limited in anyway shape or form. I am going to pass it on down the line to get some other opinions on this, but for us if you’re framework if you have to override 10,000 lines of CSS that’s a waste of time, highly inefficient.
AFZAAL: When you develop a custom framework even if it starts off with underscore by the time you finish your framework it will have no resemblance to underscore S anyway. In terms of building advance functionality you can do that via hooks, add custom action, filters put all your function in separate file hook it in. That’s probably the easiest way to make sure have a really simple template structure and keep all your complex stuff in separate files.
SUE FERNANDES: Exactly, anything, speaking from a business point of view you need to have something that is going to give you a head start. If you start to think about coding everything from scratch, then the amount of time is just going to eat into your profit margins and especially when you’re a small business it will take your bankrupt very, very quickly so anything you can do to get ahead, make your time work more efficiently for you which means having a structured base theme that is a vanilla, if you like, theme, which you can then build your CSS over the top and add any style and functionality that you want to and means you are always starting from halfway up the track, you’re not starting from the bottom every single time. That can be the difference between profit and loss on a project.
SAMI KEIJONEN: Just one comment I am with Jonny here what he said, but before if you are just starting out, then please do build stuff from scratch, learn from the bottom up, that’s my main point.
ANT MILLER: I think that’s your lot. Thank you very much indeed Jonny, thank you to our panel. (applause) thank you to Jo I in the corner on the desk, thank you Jonny, great works on the microphones. Thank you to our wonder stenographer, transcription crew for their awesome, awesome work. You can put your Twitter link up there again, this just the most awesome thing it’s like having a sort of little mental cache of the moment running through as we run along.
That’s it for Track A, that’s it for the session of the first day of WordCamp London, of course we have the social. 7.30 here for dinner, but the bar opens sooner downstairs. Enjoy it see you tomorrow!
Lightning Session
Have you seen onethingwell.org? It’s a weblog of simple, useful software. I’m going to show you a selection of similar software for WordPress – simple, useful plugins that you may not have heard of. There won’t be any bulky plugins with a hundred options and vast ecosystems, just small, focussed plugins that perform one thing well.
Slides: https://mattrad.uk/slides-single-purpose-plugins-wcldn-2017-talk/
Caching, timezones and internationalisation are just a few things that make developers cringe. In this short talk I will highlight some recent enhancement in the field of i18n in WordPress to show how we’ve got you covered. I will also give a glimpse at what’s coming in the future.
Slides:
I this talk we cover:
Slides: https://foxland.fi/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/svg-icon-system.pdf
DAN MABY: Hello everyone, welcome back to the afternoon session, I want to start by saying a huge thank you to our sponsors these guys have done a phenomenal amount to support this event and give us the ability to be able to attend with a ticket that just costs £30, it’s incredible, I want to say a big thank you to Timpani, WooCommerce, JETPACK for their boxes, thank you to HeartInternet, SiteGround, 34sh, GoDaddy, also thank you to the dress circle and grand circle sponsors who are all downstairs and a big thank you to the balcony and patron sponsors.
On to this afternoon we have three lightning talks to start with, our first speaker has been working with WordPress for the last ten years, as a developer, specialist WordPress agency ten degrees, focusing on optimisation and site performance, giving his talk this afternoon on single purpose plugins, if you would like to give a big round of applause to Matt Radford. Please. [Applause].
MATT RADFORD: Right, sorry about that technical interlude, I know everyone has just come back from launch you don’t want to hear me droning on and on and on, I’m going to give you a quick blast of single purpose plugins.
So, what might you ask are single purpose plugins, I was inspired by blog I read ‘One Thing Well’ which gives you a regularly up-dated list of simple, focused, small, bits of software that do, as the site suggests, one thing very well. Also, inspired by Kim’s wow plugin talk of WordCamps of yesteryear, where he ran through three or four plugins, what they did and how they were useful and when to use them.
In my job, I’m always looking for the best solution, but sometimes what you need is just a quick solution, you need a solution for right now. It doesn’t have to require code. One of the, one of WordPress’ massive strengths is that it’s so extendible, anyone can install a plug-in that just makes their website do more. There are round about, I was told last night, 60,000 plugs into choose from at the moment, that’s probably too many to trawl through. This is just about a few plugins I consider well-written, well-targeted and had functionality, which I know clients have asked me for in the past and will help developers do better work.
So, this first plugin is from an experience from a recent project, we took over a site from another agency, naming no names, but they are here.
There are a ton of page templates that were used, I needed a quick way of examining which pages were using which templates, I knew that I could do that by adding some code to an admin column, but I half remembered I had come across a plug-in that would do that pretty quickly. A quick trawl through my history, I came across this one from Tim McFarlin, it was quick to install, it did what I needed perfectly, I was able to exam all the pages quickly and move on with the project, what I like to do, go through some other plugins that I found and described why they’re useful, why you might want to use them and why they might save you a bit of time.
The first one is subtitles, it’s functionality, that I’ve been asked for by clients before, they see a title, they want to add a subtitle, that’s pretty much it. Usually you have to build a custom field but it does it very nicely with a built-in UI where it sits where you would expect it to. There is your post, you edit it and the subtitle field is where you would expect it to be.
So, you save your post and refresh it and bingo, that’s a five-minute job, you have got a subtitle field, it works very well.
Another one that I recommend for clients is one of delicious brains less pricey, you can change the exert, it’s the small bit of generated text that WordPress outputs from the main body of the text, usually if you want to change that you have to go in and you know filter that, change the exert, change what comes after it, with this it’s got a very simple option screen you can change the amount of text you output, change the read more, changes the e lips, change which pages it changes it on, it’s very simple to do, it and it gives clients control which they like a lot, I’ve used it on projects before.
One thing we have come up with recently, this plugin called instant images, this will give you content-specific images, created licence so you can use it and it will download to your media library, if I wanted to do a search for London, to add some post, to add some images to WordCamp London posts, I’ll do a search and set the size that the images will be resized, to, when they are downloaded I can download as many as I need I’ll click the ones I want, download them, unfortunately you can’t do 50 at a time, you have to pick the ones you want, download them quickly and resize to the dimensions you specified, as you can see it will just add them into your media library, ready for use in your content.
If your, if you are a user or site owner, one of the things, when I was freelancing before that, I was asked for on an awful lot of occasions, was to just stick an image in the sidebar, this isn’t built into core, I’m not sure why not, it seems very useful, there might be a move to do that, this simple image widget has made lots of my freelance clients happy when I was using that and it did exactly what they needed. If you are developer and you have used, say instant images to add a bunch of images, there is a wp-cli plugin, assign featured images it does what it says on the tin, will take all the images you downloaded via instant images and will assign them as feature images, there you go a load of contents’ specific images assigned to post and ready to keep developing that theme with content specific stuff on there.
Now, if like me at work you manage sites for quite a number of clients, you might have had the call that says, “You have broken my set it doesn’t work anymore, what are you going to do about it?” I say actually, we have installed simple history on all sites, gives us all the actions, plugin installations, plugin deletions, it’s WordPress’, I see what you did there! [Laughter] You can get a client say, “Actually, I’m sorry we can see in the dashboard that you changed all of that and unfortunately we will have to charge you to fix it”, or not if you are feeling generous, it does give you a good idea of what they have been up to.
If you have clients who like to go a little deeper and you haven’t disallowed file editing, you may find they hack the theme files directly, that’s clearly not a good idea, it breaks the update process and could lead to the whole site coming down, instead if you want to keep their changes in… keep them out of the parent theme you can get them to add a child theme, this is a quick plugin that clients can add, it will take the current plant theme, create the child theme from it and they can do all the damage they want in the child theme without touching that parent theme, it’s update friendly, so find that very useful.
If you also have clients, for example, or you are a site owner, I guess most people here have heard of the REST API vulnerability recently, for sites not updated it’s still on-going with hacks and defacements, you can suggest they install easy update manager, it will keep core, plugins, themes and you can also exclude any of those from being updated as well if you have specific one you don’t want updated, easy updates manager will just keep everything up-to-date, you will just get a notification afterwards and you know your site is kept self and secure.
Now for developers, if you have ever spent time developing on an aeroplane, you know that WordPress is still trying, even when it hasn’t got a network, to make external calls to CSS and JavaScript and Gravatar, core updates, blah, blah, blah, for me when I was on a plane to Colorado last year I was trying to do some work and it was just really slow and it didn’t really work very well.
Andrew Norcross, has come up with this plugin on Github, that’s called Airplane — with one click you can just stable all those external calls and WordPress is magically faster it’s not trying to deal with all those things without a network.
Also for development, we have started using this plugin recently, which is really useful. If you find that you have got a live set and you need to do some work on it and you don’t want to have to download all those images, you can use coral remote images, one simple option screen where you put in the live sets URL and it will rewrite all the image paths to the site, it’s a really time saver.
In terms of time saving we also use, what I do specifically but I don’t know about the other devs at 10 degrees, bulk press, you can paste in pages, child pages, other posts, custom post types, terms, menu items, all sorts of stuff, if you have got specific lists of pages, you can use this, it’s paste, one click, update done, you can add random posts terms through wp-cli generate command but this one does, that generates random pages or posts whereas this one does specific ones, so specific sites it’s quite useful.
What have we got next… if you are developing WooCommerce sites and you want to populate with a bunch of data, then meteoric, wc cyclone on Github is useful as well, you can add products, customers, orders, as much as you need it will again rate all of those, it doesn’t yet do coupons, refunds or more complex products, to quickly populate a WooCommerce site for development, this is a great wp-cli plugin, it will also grab a bunch of featured images, from unsplash so you can have all those products nicely populated — times up — ready for your development. I have one though, great.
This is the last one, DB post types, you have probably come across things out there that will take custom tables and again rate custom post types from them it will duplicate it into wp posts, DB post types calls itself an interpreter, it will leave the data in the custom tables but again rate custom posts from that, again rate admin screens, you can use wp query, wp meta query, so imagine you can take, grab the entries, instead of creating custom post types use the entries from the database directly to use them as post’s you can take custom tables or subsite tables from multi-sites and create posts out of them, do whatever you need to do with wp query, I’ve not tried this one yet but I thought I would talk about it, it looks quite interesting and I thought it would be something you would like to see. That’s me, thank you very much for listening.
DAN MABY: We’ll have a round of Q&A at the end of the three lightning talks, just while we transfer over, I’ll let you know there are a number of T-shirts still leftover, if you have partners, children, please feel free to grab an extra T-shirt on the way out.
The next speaking began blogging at the age of just 12, now web developer at required — internationalisation, improvements in WordPress Core, give a big round of applause for Pascal.
PASCAL BIRCHLER: All right. So, last year when I was here, I talked about Swiss chocolate bribery, and I don’t have any chocolate here today so I am going to talk about recent internationalisation improvements in WordPress core instead.
A few years ago, some of you might remember this, translation management in WordPress was cumbersome, you only got new translations when you updated WordPress, so then they introduced language packs which allowed you to install and updates translations in the panel independently from the code, this also allowed WordPress to update translation automatically.
So there is was a really good and it’s really like proven and when you just, felt like you wanted to change the language it just go through the channel settings, change the language to whatever you want, and just works.
But we felt like we could do more, and do better so in WordPress 4.6 we did some improvements under the hood and let’s have a look. So first up we have the jQuery UI date picker, which some of you might know it’s not used in WordPress core actually only plugins and themes use it. When you use it in your code it’s now fully localised powered by the data WordPress already has, it’s much easier for developers to use it. Also you might know load plugin text domain or load theme text domain it’s the function you use in your plugin to load the hey please load the translation for my plugin. Because of language packs, when your plugin is on WordPress.org those translations are already in your wp content/languages folder, we felt like we already know the translations are in that folder so why do you still have to tell WordPress to load the translations from there. So we figured let’s just remove the requirements to call this function.
What we did is built a so called just-in-time loading for translations. So whenever you call a translation function like the underscore underscore function in your code, WordPress will look if there’s a translation file in WordPress content language folder, and load the translation for you. And super fast because it like everything is cached and also backwards compatible, so you don’t have to worry about anything. Yeah, just works.
Now next up we have WordPress 4.7 where we focus more on the user facing side of things. One of them is really cool, is user admin language. So as you have seen before, you can go to the channel settings page and change the low Karl for you local for your website it change the language for the whole website. We wanted to let users decide which language they want to use WordPress in.
So with WordPress 4.7, every user can go to the profile and select their preferred language. It’s worth noting that this only changes the language for the back end. So this means one user can use the back end in let’s say English, the other in Spanish, and one perhaps in German and the front-end will be in the site language so here it English.
It’s super cool for like, huge international sites like for example WordPress.org. For this to work we needed a way to switch the language on the fly so for example when sending e-mails, you want to send an email in the language of the user and not in the site’s language. So we essentially needed a way to switch these translations on the fly, and what we came up with us a function called Switch Local you just tell the function whatever local you want to switch to, send your email to all the stuff you want, and restore to previous state afterwards. This also allows you or maybe for WordPress in future to do cool things like display the toolbar in the user language, and the rest of the site in the site’s language. It’s not yet in core, there are a of bugs we need to fix, but confident we can put this into like WordPress 4.8 maybe.
So, what’s next? WordPress 4.7 already shipped in December, and we’re still thinking of all the cool ways we can improve internationalisation in WordPress core. One thing that is like related to user admin language is really improve so there’s a user you can select multiple preferred language. You might know this from Firefox or like your browser operating system where it can tell the system which local you understand best you set that in order of preference the system will figure out which translations to load based on what is available and what is your preference. So, we might see that in WordPress in the future. We also as I told you before, we improved the translation loading in php, and now we want to do the same thing with JavaScript. So as you might know if you are developer, using translated themes in JavaScript is quite hacky you have to use the wp localised script function and parse the translated strings to a global variable you can use in JavaScript it works but it has some drawbacks, for example doesn’t really support plural forms and stuff like that. So we thought why not make this more similar to how it works in php. So right now, like there’s proof of concept already, you could just use like a wp I18N underscore underscore right function right in your JavaScript.’ another thing that I particularly important to me is user times on setting. So, figure that when you are kind of already select your preferred language why not select your preferred time zone as well. I saw that all the time on WordPress.org for example, I see all the blog posts with their published date I never knew that it was my time, was it in the morning or the afternoon, so if it can have a user time zone setting and user profile it would be super cool to display all the dates according to your time zone.
Well, that’s it already. Thank you very much.
DAN MABY: Excellent thank you, the next speaker this afternoon is a teacher a front-end dev who likes to work about the web accessibility and WordPress, he’s also the CEO of fox land a theme plugin shop. He will be giving his talk about the SVG icon system in WordPress, Sami Keijonen, a big round of applause.
SAMI KEIJONEN: So I am going to talk to you about SVG icon system in WordPress. SVG stands for scaleable vector graphics. Like the introduction it Sami Keijonen. I hail from Finland I am a front end developer who tries to keep accessibility in mind everything I do I try to build it in a way that is accessible to everyone. This is going to be like a short introduction in the technical overview what we have done in 2017 theme, using the SVG icon system. So we’re going to talk you through why we use those SVG icons, where you could get those icons, how you use those icons.
If you have some time, we going to take code examples from the 2017 theme.
What kind of icons are we talking about? We could talk about for example, icons that look like that. They could be icons for example from Twitter or Instagram or Github. Or, SVG icons could be a logo, or it could be other graphics that have multiple colours in it, for example so it could be one colour icons, or multicolour icons.
How many of you are using icon fonts? Instead of SVGs, for example font is pretty common icon font library, how many of you are using icon fonts. That’s ok. (laughter).
I am trying to tell you about why you should make a switch to SVG icons system. So why? Because they are better. (laughter) in short. For example, Github switched away from font icons to SVG system, because it’s, you can serve your icons more easily, more quickly, it’s faster, and you can take account of accessibility stuff more easily and they do look better in any environment.
And you can have multicolour icons, you can animate the icons, you can control all with your icon with CSS and JavaScript. Just to name a few other good things about SVGs. So the next step is that where are you going to get SVG icons? Your first source is probably if you are pilling a custom site and you need going to need some custom icons in your site, or custom icons in your client sites, of course go to your designer. He is going to make them for you. Or if you need for example, the Twitter icons or Github icons, just go to a service called Icomoon, I personally use that one and you can keep track what kind of icons do you want to have in your project. Don’t load for example, all the font apps and icons in your customer site if you are only going to use 10 of them. Just pick the ones you want, and it’s going to export in SVG format, to you instead of using the font icons.
There is also a service called Font-Blast but I have not used that personally.
So in mark up how can you use the SVG icons, the first step you scan just use it like any other image. The SVGs are not exactly the images, they are XML format you can use it in same way, or you can use it as a background image in your CSS, in the same way as any image.
Both have the same kind of bad thing that you can’t control the CSS anymore, about the icon and this is probably something we want to do. in our CSS. Or you can drop the SVG code right into your HTML mark up, it could be hard to maintain those icons if you have like 100 of them, or little bit cleaner way is to use the php function called file get contents, and just it just take the same XML code format from there and put it in your mark up. That could be a little bit cleaner way to do it. But for the next 5 minutes I think I am going to talk about more about the stuff we build in 2017 theme. We use this inline SVG sprite technique in there. Which contains all of your icons it’s kind of easier to maintain.
So, what is SVG sprite, for example, I’m going to show you in the next slide what it can look like. First step is okay, you have one icon SVG file, that you can put in your folder, you can probably put it in your header also, but it could be a little bit faster if you put it in the folder. In 2017 we use the hook, the footer hook, you can probably just copy and paste in there if you want. The sprite file looks like this, it starts with the switch tag inside it, there is the symbol tags, you can lots of markers in it, you can use that ID, for example ID Twitter anywhere in your marker after that, for example I can, icon Twitter in my header check, just use this kind of HTML and it automatically imports the icon in that section, where you want it to be., so I noticed that icon Twitter in the red one here and the icon Twitter in here, so it gets the same ID. You can use the absolute path without injecting the sprite file in there, the only issue is it doesn’t work in the explorer, you have to use SVGXUZE, it could be a good way to use it, the cache works automatically, there is just one file in there, it works better in that sense. If you are wondering, is it easy or not to generate the icons, if you are already using Grant or Gulp, you have a task and it generates everything for you on the fly. So in 2017 look at the folder inc, in there there’s a php file icons function.php, I forgot the php part there look at that function, pretty much everything you need to know about twentyseventeen stuff is inside that function. For example, one of the most important functions in there is twentyseventeen get SVG function which is kind of a wrapper function that powers everything that is involved how to mark up is going to look like. It looks like this. If you check the template files there is lots of calls for twentyseventeen get SVG function, for example you want to have a Twitter icon some where you just call the function us then icon Twitter, it exhibits out the HTML pat for you. As you have notice in the red there is area hidden true but by default, but all the icons in the 2017 themes are security one they don’t need to be read by screenreaders for example, but that can be over written in the settings when they are read inside the function.
Another example social links menu it’s the same kind of a menu system that you used for your primary a menu but this for the social links but I just automatically works, it was originally written by Justin Tadlock. There is also a base CSS in style CSS which kind of resets everything back to normal and after that you can pretty much do anything you want with the CSS.
So, check the code, from the 2017ink folder icon function php file. Thanks. (applause).
DAN MABY: Thank you very much just ask you to stay here if I can ask the speakers to come back on the stage, if have we got any questions at all, we have got a few minutes available.
FROM THE FLOOR: Hello, I just had a note about SVGs so, I am here. I agree the ways.
I agree with what you mentioned about loading them, one thing I would notice, SVG, can have triangles, squares, flashing beds, script tags when you are looking for SVGs, it’s important to open them do a quick search and make sure nothing was snuck in there that might be a little untowards, I don’t know, do you have any recommendations on how to check that an SVG might be safe, is it more of a case for reportable source or are there tools that can automate that process, or functions that might do it you can take SVG from any source and no that the output is safe
SAMI KEIJONEN: I can’t remember the site name at the moment, that kind of strips everything off from the. XML files, I think you asked about it, that there could be some extra stuff in her, so there are sites that can kind of clean it up for you, I think also that Gulp or Grunt tools also have to clean it up for you, so you don’t have to do it manually, I’m not sure if that’s what you asked.
FROM THE FLOOR: I didn’t know the Gulp tools could do that, that’s good to know.
THE CHAIR: Anymore questions?
FROM THE FLOOR: Hi, I just have a question about the fall-back with the languages, if you have a German — informal, you don’t have a pack for that, if it’s not the German informal it’s the English, do you have something for that by default, it’s preferences, or a new feature that every admin has to buy for the website.
PASCAL BIRCHLER: So for the formal and informal languages, yeah, it’s kind of like a German problem, so as a user you can set the multiple languages, but the formal version would be like just one setting you could add to that and, yeah if it’s not available it would just load like the informal variant, and I think it makes sense, we are still in the exploring phase of looking at all the different sites and how they do that and I think for example on Facebook you can even say like how you want to be greeted, for example. So, there is even more to that, not just formal and informal.
FROM THE FLOOR: Hi. Yeah, my question is for the gentlemen on the far left, how easy is it to animate SVG icons, wouldn’t you see that as being a bit of a distraction on the website, where the users’ attention will be taken away from the main content?
SAMI KEIJONEN: Sorry I’m not sure I understand the question; do you mean that would it be easy to have SVGs in the content.
FROM THE FLOOR: I imagine having an SVG icon on say, like in the header of a page, whether it be a Twitter icon or something like that, you said you can animate them, did you not say that.
SAMI KEIJONEN: You can animate them, you can use the class that SVG can have, every icon will have the same class, called, “Icon”, then individual class called, “Icon Twitter”, for example, so you can animate by the class you have in there, or the animation could also mean that you have a custom icon that have, inside the SVG are different kinds of sections in there, and you can animate any part inside the SVG icon, for example, you have to, you have hamburger icon, you can animate that one, you just animate the SVG file, that’s like one example of how you can do it.
FROM THE FLOOR: Thank you.
THE CHAIR: Have we got anymore. Yeah.
FROM THE FLOOR: So a question to Pascal, thank you for your work on the language stuff. I was just wondering are there any plans or discussions for multilingual, yeah, put you on the spot?
PASCAL BIRCHLER: It’s a tough question, I think at last, like — 2015, they kind of asked a working group to explore how we can make it easier for plugins to enable sites to be multilingual, I think, kind of, like it’s nothing happening there anymore, so maybe we could maybe bring it back to life, it would be super cool. I don’t think there will be multilingual feature built into WordPress any time soon, but we can definitely make it easier.
THE CHAIR: Thank you, time for one more question.
FROM THE FLOOR: One question for Matt, first off, thank you for curating that list of plugins, it was really great when it comes to maximisation, is there a maximum number of plugins you would recommend installing at the same time.
MATT RADFORD: This is a perennial question, there was one plugin that I didn’t add in, that strips emojis, 538 bites that’s plug in then JETPACK, that’s a plug in it’s really not a question, I think, of how many plugins, because that’s, it an arbitrary amount of PHP code that you are adding to your site, so I think it’s a question of, if you notice things are slowing down or a particular plugin is doing a high number of queries or making the site unresponsive or under-performing, then you should target that one just like you would target any other bit of PHP code to make sure it runs properly. I would say there is no limit to — I mean there is 60,000 plugins out there, go nuts!! [Laughter] If your site stops, then maybe cut back a little! [Laughter]
THE CHAIR: Excellent, thank you very much, a big round of applause for the speakers, please. [Applause]. Okay, time for the next session, please don’t forget that there are additional T-shirts, please feel free to grab them as we go past.
Rachael Dines
Website Design Pain Points for Clients and How to Help Them Through it
Meg Fenn and Rachael Dines, Directors of Shake It Up Creative Ltd talk about the pain points that clients face when setting up their business website and how to help them through it. For example, one common pain point is content. Where to start? How much? Does it need to optimised? Another common pain point is deciding whether to manage their own website or pay a web designer or marketing company to do this for them. Do all business owners need to be techy?
VINEETA: Hello? Hello. We’re starting in two minutes so is that okay? Fantastic. So I’ll let Rachel and Meg start in the next two minutes. We’re starting in 1 minute. Okay 30 seconds. Okay I’m going to hand over to Rachel and Meg now, and they’re going to talk about website design pain points for clients how to talk them through it.
MEG: Hello everyone. I hope you’re enjoying the weekend so far. We certainly are. This is our first WordCamp ever, so we’re excited to be here. Our talk is not techy, so I hope you still enjoy it. My name is Meg and this is Rachel, my business partner. We are from Sussex and we run a design and marketing company called Shake it Up Creative. We’ve both been sole traders before as well, and we have over 15 years’ experience with all types of clients. Getting to know our clients and what drives them and their passions is part of our job, and it is something we really enjoy about our jobs. And for me in particular as web designer, it is my job to solve clients’ problems, so I have to work closely with them in order to help them find solutions.
So there is a fair amount of client management involved in what we do, and it is probably the same for a lot of you guys as well. So hopefully you’ll know what I’m talking about there, and we work with other developers and designers too, and the story is always the same. Our jobs would be so much easier if we didn’t have clients, but of course we have to have clients. We wouldn’t have a business if we didn’t have clients.
What do we mean by pain points? It is the concerns that clients have when getting their website built. So it could be anything to do with hosting or domain names, perhaps content, or maybe they’re not even really clear on who their target market is. Also, it could be about costs as well.
Sometimes it is not even about the website at all; it is about maybe an experience that they had previously with another service provider.
RACHAEL: For example, we recently started working with a mobile ice cream retailer, and they had actually already selected their web development partner, but they were concerned about their search engine rankings, and wanted to work with someone that understood they wanted to preserve, what they had, but also build on that and generate more visitors to their site, and they began to discuss some questions, and we talked them through how we would find the right data and how we would use that data, and how we would preserve what they had and build on their traffic over time. We gained their trust and they decide to switch, and we got the contract, and we’ve just built the site, which is brilliant.
Once we’d explained to them how we could do those things as we took that pain point away, they chose us and we got that business, which was fantastic.
MEG: Pain points will be different for every client.
When I was at university in the States, which is where I’m from originally, I took a class in my sophomore year called the philosophy of art 101. It was really intense and we studied Aristotle, et cetera, because actually I really don’t remember very much about that class at all. My main takeaway from that entire year, something that our professor told us, he told us how an artist sees a horse. So if you ask people, picture a horse, they’ll probably see something in their minds like this, an average horse. If you ask an artist, or we could say a designer, to picture horse they’ll see something more. They’ll see the details. They’ll see the muscles beneath the skin. They’ll actually hear the way the tail sounds when it swishes, they’ll see the wind and how it flows behind the neck, they’ll see the nostrils and how they flair. They’ll also see the shadows the horse makes when it moves, and the sheer beauty of this animal. And not just that, but they’ll see how it affects people.
Clients see a website. That’s their average horse. We see everything else. We see more. We see the details. So we see the design, the copy, the HTML, the CSS, the hex codes, plugins, blah blah blah, all that kind of stuff. We see everything and anything that has to do with the website, with user experience, with SEO, with marketing.
Our clients don’t see any of that, or most of them don’t. We could show them this. But that might not be the best idea because they might freak out and say, “Where do I start? I don’t really understand that. What’s going on here?”
Our job is to turn this into something that our clients will love, and be proud of.
RACHAEL: How much does a website cost? Great question. We know the answer. We hear that all the time, but sometimes we have to extract a little bit of information from the client first. What we really need is to get answers for the questions that potential clients don’t even know that they need to ask. We have to listen to them and solve their problems with a solution that also understands the value of their spend.
Even if you have a range of packages, it may not fit their needs. Of course sometimes you actually have to say no to a project, and learning to say no is really difficult.
MEG: How do we help our clients? You got to know your stuff. You got to gain knowledge and share knowledge. And you can do that by networking, talking to other developers, other designers, creators, innovators, by coming to conferences like this, by coming to WordCamp is a great way of gaining and sharing knowledge.
Be part of a business community in your local area. If there isn’t one, then create one. Create a group you can all go to. And share ideas and gain knowledge.
RACHAEL: My background is in marketing and PR, and when I worked in-house with developers they couldn’t see past the code. Not unless I was very specific with them. Their brain naturally focused on the functionality and not the aesthetics. So I learnt to discuss the aims and ideas behind the project, and build their understanding and just like we do now with clients.
MEG: I also put on the screen “confidence”, and I put that in capital letters because being confident in what you do and how you do it is really helpful for clients. Confidence is key here. Your client is looking to you for the answers. They’re looking to you to create what’s in their head that doesn’t exist yet. So you need to have the confidence in order to help them.
So hands up anybody knows what this is. I’m not sure how clear it is on the screen. Okay, it’s fine, it doesn’t really matter. It’s a work of art by Damien Hurst and it’s called Black Sun. I’m just going to give you a quick little story about when I was a kid in school. One day the teacher said everybody is going to draw a picture. What did the kids draw? Something they know, so everyone was drawing a house, a yard, the sky, a sun. I was doing that as well. I looked around the classroom and everybody’s sun was yellow, but my sun was blue because I liked blue. When the teacher came round I started to feel really like oh, everybody else’s sun is yellow, mine is blue. When the teacher got to me, I actually covered up my sun with my hands, and she came to me and looked down and physically pried my hands away from my drawing, and she tutted because I had a blue sun, so that did not make me confident. Your confidence may be knocked from time to time, and you may have your own blue or black sun. But going back to your passion and what you love doing, that will enable you to go from strength to strength and take your business forward. So don’t lose your confidence.
You need to find a balance between demonstrating your expertise and giving succinct explanations. You’ve quoted, you’ve itemised, you’ve nearly won the job. But your clients still have questions. From your quote and your conversations, the client has a better idea of what a website entails and knows that it’s not just a website. Some will want to understand more, others won’t really want to know the inner workings of it. You want to win the contract, of course, and once you do, you will want to build a good relationship with your client. That may have begun before they were even a potential client. Maybe you knew them from networking or something. With web design, you can demonstrate expertise while keeping it understandable. So break down the process for them. Tell them how you start. How you get started. Then what happens next. Then what happened after that. For example, some clients come to us, and even though we do graphic design, some clients come to us with a logo and brand details, all good to go. So we know we can tell them the next step is to focus on the content, the page structure, the page titles, all that kind of thing. Next will come the layout design, then after that the web build and so on. There may be other mini steps in between as well.
You can let them know the processes without getting bogged down with the technical.
RACHAEL: Who finds this question easy to answer? No? That must mean you all find it really tricky, because it is actually really hard to give an answer that’s easy to describe in one brief sentence. But the client needs to know this, and you need to know this, to create a website that serves them well and generates conversions. Help them work it out. Ask questions as if you were the customer. Challenge them to focus and prioritise. You can either consult together or alone, but if you skip this step, this pain point, then you’ll find the content becomes unclear and wishy-washy, and it won’t speak to the target audience.
Asking what they don’t want and what they don’t need and what they don’t like is actually really important. Don’t waste time including things that they’ve just forgotten to communicate to you. Extract the negatives as well as the desirables. We’ve asked this question many times, and the response has always been “Good question. Actually, I don’t want any blue on the website,” possibly, or “We don’t want to use any of those images from the old site, we need a whole fresh photography session booked.”
We wouldn’t know that if we didn’t ask, and it does help avoid disappointment and amends.
Make it clear what you will be doing, and make it clear what they will be doing. When information needs to be supplied, log-ins and content, we will talk a bit more about content later, guide them. Steer them in the right direction. Who is going to be the main point of contact? Break it down into stages, and schedule calls and meetings ahead of time.
It sounds obvious, but sometimes these things get forgotten and deadlines get missed. For larger organisations, we find that having one person as the main point of contact works best. Let them fight out over the options themselves, and come back to you with the answers, and not steal your time away from the project.
MEG: Your job as the designer is to solve problems, and the more you do this, the easier it will become, and the more you’ll have kind of those ready-to-go answers, and the more ideas you’ll have as well. So think of your clients’ challenges as your own challenges, go on their journey with them. Because then you’ll have a better understanding of what they need and what they want, and you’ll be better equipped to serve them.
So just to give you an example, this website here is a site for Headway West Sussex, which is a local charity that supports people affected by brain injury. And the challenge here was to create a website that was going to be understandable to the end user.
RACHAEL: We felt we needed to actually run a focus group. We attended one of their support groups where people that have unfortunately been affected by an acquired brain injury and their carers, or their family, attend and help each other and do activities and support each other.
We learnt there that we should avoid bright white backgrounds, and we toned it down to an off-white colour. We also learned that the curved edges around the boxes would help people digest the information and find things better, and that content in smaller chunks was better for them.
We wouldn’t know those things if we hadn’t have asked. We found the unknown information by running that focus group, as well as including the usual accessibility features like the AA text size.
MEG: Just real quick, this website is actually up for an award. It has been short listed for a digital award in Sussex and we’re really proud of that. Whether we win or not, it doesn’t matter, we were proud that we were chosen because we worked really hard with the client in order to achieve their goals. Here is another example. This website is for artist Carrie Sanderson and she actually built the website herself in WordPress, but she got to the stage in her business where she wanted to take it from a DIY look to a more professional looking website, and that’s where she came to us to help her. So it wasn’t a straightforward site build. We needed to first ascertain what it was she had already achieved, and then what it was she wanted going forward. And there were also cost implications as well.
RACHAEL: It is really important to build a good rapport with your clients and find out what really matters to them and what specific concerns they have. Talk to them and reassure them. They’re not buying a T-shirt in small medium or large. It could be a change of career for them, or it could be a company moving to get clients internationally. It is life, and it is emotions, and it is bigger than a website. So if they feel like they’re a problem, it will dull their enthusiasm for you as a supplier.
MEG: I don’t know if you’ve ever had this, but we’ve had clients cry because they’ve been so emotional about their website because it is actually not just a website, it is a life change for them.
And be flexible about how you communicate with your clients. Some will be find with e-mail, others will prefer face-to-face. Some people are just face-to-face people. You can minimise client pain points by communicating with them in the way they respond best. Not the way you respond, but the way they respond best. It may not always be convenient or cost effective or time effective to meet up face-to-face all the time. We just can’t do that, so that’s when things like video Skype and Google Hangouts can maybe be a solution.
Themes. There are lots and lots of themes, hundreds of themes. It’s probably best not to overload your client with all the different theme options out there. They often don’t even care, and they don’t really know that their website is actually running on a theme. It doesn’t matter to them. They just want it to do what they need it to do and to look great.
There may be times when a client does come to you and says, “I really want to use this thing”, so I put up on the screen the DV thing, you probably all know it. It is a very popular theme. This is the one that the clients have come to us and said, “I want to use this theme because I went on a course and that’s the one they recommended”, or “My friend has a business and she set hers up on DV, and so that’s the one that I want to use.”
That’s absolutely fine as well. Plugins too. Do not overload your client and say “Which plugins do you want?” Because they’ll look at you and say, “What’s a plugin?” You probably already have all the standard plugins you install on a website automatically like Jetpack, and things like that.
So you can help your client by just taking away those pain points and helping them through that.
You can buy a batch of themes, put up on the screen elegant themes, and Template Monster. There are so many out there. And then, based on whatever project you’re doing, choose the right theme for that project. And you just take that decision away from the client and you can always talk them through it and tell them what you’re doing, and be open about it, but they don’t necessarily need to choose it. If you say to a client you haven’t really worked with before “Go away and choose a theme”, you’ll probably never hear from them again because they won’t really understand what you’ve asked them to do.
Also, if there are cost implications with buying a theme or buying a plugin, let’s say they’re running an events website and they need a specialised events plugin, you can explain that they need this and the costs involved with it from the outset.
I have also just put up here one of the themes that we use all the time, is a theme called Weaver Extreme. It is just a good theme. It has everything you need. You can make the front-end look pretty much however you want, and it is a really good versatile theme we use all the time, and most clients don’t even no they’re using that theme.
It is going back to what we said before about building a really good rapport with your clients. They’ll trust you and they’ll trust your professional judgment.
RACHAEL: Start talking about content at the very beginning. Make sure that clients don’t leave this until the last job. Have clear expectations in the beginning, and schedule stages to come later. If a deadline is looming and you haven’t received any copy, pick up the phone, but also e-mail them as well. We’ve actually had plenty of happy clients, despite a late launch, because they know it was their fault and not ours.
MEG: Also talk about blogs. Are they going to have a blog or not? If they immediately say “Oh yes, yes, I’m going to have a blog. I’m going to blog all the time.” Really? Are they really going to have a blog? If they are struggling to get their content together for their “about” page, then maybe a blog is not the best idea, or unrealistic goal. Blogs are part of the overall marketing strategic. They need to be thought out and given time. There is time commitment with blogs.
We’re really thrilled and pleased when clients take on our recommendations and suggestions, and it makes a difference to their website or business. So we’ve had clients who, you know, have got — built up a really good following from their blog, after we’ve built it for them and showed them how to do it, and how to blog and done the content, planning and the strategy, done the training with them and everything. It is fantastic. We love that. We’ve also had clients who say: yeah, yeah, we’re going to blog as we go through the whole set-up and training and everything, and we have their plan, six months or a year plan, and then the site launches with maybe one or two blog posts and then they never never blog again.
RACHAEL: These are the things the client often doesn’t even know they need. They’re invisible to them. Make them aware they have to be there, but also actually help them create it. We’ve got template versions available for all these things, just to make it easier and they can use those and they can add to them if they have time later.
Often a client will view a development site on a PC or Mac and won’t really think about the end result that actually, their site is going to be viewed on mobiles and tablets and various browsers and screen sizes. They don’t really think about the fact that it is going to take a whole heap of time to jig things around to make it work on all these different browser sizes, so help them understand that, and that that’s part of what they’re paying for. Make sure they know that it’s going to be tested, and things are going to be altered, because that’s your job, and if they launch the site and then they view it on a mobile and it is not right, you can be sure that you’re going to get the blame for that.
MEG: If you don’t help your clients, the website won’t get done. Be flexible. Offer add-on services to help them get the website done. They might be stuck on the copy, they might not really have decided on the photos or don’t have photos. Perhaps they are not sure about the social media side of it and maybe they also need training.
So you could offer these services to help get the website done. If you can’t do them yourself, then you can help them find the right people to do it for them. It is going back to what I was saying before: build your team, come to conferences like WordCamp and find other people that you can trust and that you know will be helpful to your clients to offer the whole package and just get things done. What’s better: a website launching on time and empty with an unhappy client, or a website launching late and great and one you can put on your portfolio? So be flexible and help your client.
So why bother? Why is this important? What’s the big deal? You want and need client satisfaction. You want those Google reviews and testimonials and retainer clients and bigger clients. You want more clients. Helping client with pain points and solving their problems will help to build your reputation, gain clients, and make money.
So we hope you enjoyed our talk, last screen there. And I hope you feel ready to go out there and build your five-star reputation so you can take your business to the next level. Thank you very much. [applause]. Does anybody have any questions?
FROM THE FLOOR: Hi. I support what you said about single point of contact, that’s absolutely, yeah, we found that to be totally vital. One of the things that tends to clause is that they go off and disappear into an internal huddle. We’ve had projects go quiet on us for months and months, and we stop getting anything back. Any tips on that? What do you tend to do in that situation? Do you bother them all the time? Do you just say, “We’ll just invoice for everything we’ve done up to this point and leave it with you”? What’s your approach?
RACHAEL: Sometimes it does drag on, and it is really hard because you don’t want to be nagging them to the point of annoyance and losing them, and so you have to judge it on the type of client. Sometimes, if we’ve got stages of work in place, there will also be payment stages, and that does help. But obviously, you just want to get the project finished and out the door as best you can, so that’s really where the deadlines along the way come in. Not just waiting for those deadlines to come round, but also babysitting them a bit, and just reminding them “Actually in a week’s time this is going to happen. So have your meetings, get what you need to get done, and then come back to us.”
It is inevitable that some projects will just drag on and be out of your hands, but unfortunately, it is more of your time, but do everything you can to remind them and push them on with things.
MEG: Yeah, I think just to add one small bit to that, you just have to be very proactive with everything you do, especially when it comes to — yeah, patient as well. And sometimes it may be out of your hands. Like an example that we have been working on a website recently where the project manager is actually a different marketing company, and they’ve outsourced the web design and development to us. So we don’t actually have contact with the end client. So we’re reliant on the other marketing company, so we’re chasing the marketing company and the marketing company is chasing the other client, so it really depends on your client relationship and all of that. I hope that answers it.
FROM THE FLOOR: Hi, when clients come so enthusiastic to you for a new website, what is it, what’s the pain point with the content usually that makes them submit it so late?
MEG: They don’t have it.
RACHAEL: Yeah. It is normally if they’ve got to write it all from scratch. We will try and say that “Okay, just provide it to us in bullet points, and you can pay us to copy edit.” I’m copyright trained, so I’m willing to do that, but sometimes they’re very precious about their own content and will only handle it themselves and that’s the stumbling block for time, because they don’t realise exactly how much time it is going to take them. So I think sometimes if you know or have an idea that the client might be going that way, set the deadline a bit longer than you originally would, just for your build, because you know there might be a hold up on their end, and then obviously it’ll get to a point where it does become their fault, as it were, because they know they should have provided it to you on time.
MEG: A lot of clients are very visual and they cannot really imagine what the content is going to be, so maybe do a little bit of research and find other websites that have similar content or content structure and say: “Look these over, and this might give you a really good starting point to devise your own content.”
RACHAEL: We’ll come to you.
FROM THE FLOOR: Hi. I’ve got a 78-year old client who has just started a new business, and he has got — he had a Facebook page which I didn’t know about, and he asked me to do a website for him. I know he has been using Facebook for his other businesses, so instead of having a blog page, it’s a good idea to just put in a plugin called Facebook feed, and make that a menu item on his website, just a point, for news, and that just shows his Facebook feeds so that’s an idea if anybody wants to.
MEG: That’s a good idea. We’ve done that for a couple of clients as well. We have a client who is a pilates teacher, and she has a phobia of technology, and pretty much the only thing she can manage is the Facebook page. And when we were talking about blogs and stuff I could tell that that was just going to — she was just going to go home and go into dark room and lie down and stuff. So we suggested exactly what you said, and it works really well for her, so thank you.
FROM THE FLOOR: Hi. You’ve said you prefer to deal with an individual person in a company rather than have a whole committee bombarding you. How do you divide your side of the communication with clients up amongst yourselves and how have you developed that method of working?
RACHAEL: That’s an interesting question. We tend to have one of us as the lead project manager, and that depends what functions it requires. So really, my part of the business tends to be the marketing, PR, copywriting at search engine optimisation, whereas if it is any graphic design and web build or social media, then it is Meg. But it also can depend on where that client came from. So if it is a contact, perhaps Meg has met them networking, but this is marketing, it might make more sense. They might feel more comfortable to deal with her as the lead, but they may get communications from me as well. As long as the client knows, I feel it can work either way. It does for us, certainly.
VINEETA: Any more questions? How do clients react when you say, “We want one point of contact?” Do they like it? Because some struggle with that.
RACHAEL: It depends on the client set-up, because if it is not immediately clear, or if they have several people in the same function, it can become a bit of a bun fight for them to actually want that job or not want that job, depending on the situation. But it just has to be the case, because things have dragged on and past experience has led us to that conclusion where that is the best way forward, and if you’ve got too many people, you’re getting different answers for things, and you get passed around the houses, it is too difficult and you have to.
MEG: As long as you set out with a good plan and structure, it is never going to go smoothly, and it is always going to be different depending on the project. We work with a lot of charities and non-profits, and they make their decisions by committee, and a lot of those committee members and board member leave and new ones come in. So it is really hard to maintain that one point of contact all the time with those types of clients.
RACHAEL: Thank you.
MEG: Thank you. [applause].
Why and How to Use Screencasts to Train Users
In person client and user training can be difficult to arrange, time consuming, and expensive. I’ve been using screencasts and animated GIFs in client training and support for a while now and it’s good for everyone involved. I’ll talk you through why it’s so good to do, how to get started, what tools and setup you need, and how your work can help others too.
SAM: Ross Wintle who is a freelance developer and consultant from Swindon. Scared of elephants.
He will be talking about the benefits of training users with screencasts. How you can get started doing it yourself, so a round of applause for Ross. (APPLAUSE).
ROSS WINTLE: Thank you Sam. People came, always amazes me that people come so welcome. I hope you are enjoying WordCamp we are nearly at the end.
My name is Ross Wintle. I am a software developer and one of the odd things about me being a software developer and giving talks is that I tend not the give talks about technical topics. So, hopefully you will enjoy this one and my perspective on it.
There aren’t many people in the world called me, if you want to find out more about me, there is a screencast of how to find out more. The only other thing you need to know is that I am not an Australian cricketer.
There we go.
There is a lot of animated gif’s in my slides they do advance slowly sometimes. Hopefully they will keep up.
So, quick user research audience research, who has ever and I hope you know about these things already, if not this is going to be embarrassing, who has shown someone what the screen options are and what they do? If you don’t know, here is a screencast of the screen options in use.
Who has shown someone where the kitchen sink or where the toolbar is? Again a good few hand ifs you don’t know about the toolbar or the kitchen sink it gives you additional formatting options in the editor and much easier to show that way.
Who has shown someone how to add an excerpt.
Who has written a user guide for WordPress?
Who has ever done, oh, that thing, who has ever done friends and family IT support on the hands! So I am here to explain what if, there was a better way of doing some of these things. What if there was a faster way? What if there was an easier way?
Video, is easier than ever before, there is a little device there in the middle of the room that is live streaming me and my slides and some of this room to a screen outside. Our mobile devices have video built in, we can stream stuff on Facebook with the click of a button, we can up load stuff to you tube, down load video in copious quantities from all over the globe.
Tools for recording video and sharing with the world are so freely available, easy to use now and screencasts for me, have become a regular part of my tool kit as a developer who works with clients and they have been a great way for me to both teach people and learn some things myself and the idea of this talk to try and share with you the experience that I have gained from 2 years of using this part of my tool kit.
So let’s start by talking about why you might want to use them?
Oh no, this is the title. The full title. I always come up with the enormous long titles: Why and how to use screencasts and cover video and animations, and animates gif’s, to train user for customer support, software development and if you are willing to put in effort for the good of everybody.
The format is we will talk about why screencasts are good and tools and tips and tricks I will try to disseminate to you, grab me after if you want to see these things in action.
Does anyone not know what a screencast is? Anyone recorded or shared a screencast or recording with anyone? Okay most of you.
I will split this into 2 parts I will explain what I think is a screencast is, let’s talk about screens, it is a screen recording of some sort. It can be narrated it maybe silent, it may have an additional video like in an inset video of the person recording the screencast, looks something a bit like this, which is me creating my slides.
The cast part of the word screen past can be scary you might think that means you are having to broadcast the thing you are creating to the world and this is not necessarily true, you can send your screencast to a single person or a single organisation. It doesn’t have to be something that you share publicly with people. Don’t think I am talking about live streaming you doing your work or live streaming a training session to the world.
So why are they so good? Why am I up here raving about the thicks. Let’s talk about one-to-one training. When I quit my corporate job and became freelance I spent a lot of time in coffee shops and offices with people, showing them how they can use like just teaching them the basics of WordPress.
That was great, it got me time with my client and there were lots of good things about it. It was personal, I could, the client could ask questions of me and it could all be tailored to their needs but was time consuming, travel was usually required and because of those two things it was expensive and critically, it is also a one off thing. You have had that conversation with that one person and if that person moves on and is replaced within their organisation, then passing that training on isn’t an easy thing to do.
Don’t take these as like statements of fact. These are like extreme opinions intended to demonstrate my points. So, I have come up with a single word the try and describe each of these types of training and one-to-one training is expensive.
But that is not to say it is a bad thing, still do it if you do it. It a useful tool to add to your tool kit,.
The next step up is classroom training, classroom training is also great. It enables you to talk to more than one person at once, but classroom training is even more time consuming to prepare and you need certain skills to deliver it. People can still ask questions while they are there and people can actually run businesses doing this. So people have businesses running classroom training for WordPress, so it can be a sort of money for you.
But you need to kind of be good at training to do it. Travel again is required. So it is expensive and again once you trained those people they can’t necessarily give that same training experience to a replacement if they come along.
So I summed this up as classroom training is hard.
But, that is not to say it is a bad thing, if you do it, still do it, use screencasts as an addition to these things that can go in the tool kit.
I am a software developer, we have this little saying called dry. Which means don’t repeat yourself, when I found myself repeatedly in places telling them the same thing. It bothered me, how can I make it more efficient because that is what software developers do. I started developing a user guide for WordPress, this was a pretty bad idea because it took an awful lot of my time. Once I had finished it. I needed to update it. It was hard to make and time consuming and difficult for my clients to use and it was impersonal. So, but, on the good side it was repeatable this document can be passed around people and I can share it with multiple clients or where the world publicly if I want to.
Documentation and guides. Well, they are just a bit boring. But, they are really useful so if that is your thing, keep doing it and there is a, I couldn’t find an official WordPress user guide which bothered me. This is a good user guide that is kept up to date. If you need documentation, look that up. A note on accessibility, screencasts are videos they are visual medium. If you create them, captioning is a great way to make them accessible. But document can be a more accessible document for some people. These things compliment each other.
Screencasts, I get excited at this point. They are great, repeatable, pass them around, share them with people, they are really easy and quick to make, probably have already the tools you need to start making the screencasts which means they are cheap. But okay, they are impersonal, they are not face to face communication with your clients and they can’t ask questions back.
But you know, there are limitations to everything.
Screencasts are awesome.
They are good for you, your clients and everyone. I won’t do this again, but, this is just some quotes from the clients who I sent the screencasts to, really clear and very useful, I’ve not worked with the … that did this before.
“this is way better than a written document with the screen shots and the like.”
Screencasts are good for you because they are quicker and easier to produce, you can actually learn by teaching people these things as well. So, if you fire up your little screencast program and start recording you are putting yourself in your user shoes and using WordPress as a beginner, as you explain how to use it and it is a useful exercise if nothing else, to sit down and maybe just produce a couple of introductory guides to understand what it is like to use WordPress for the first time again.
As you seen from the quotes, client pleasing and good for your reputation.
So the next step on my journey having made a user guide was well, these little videos I am making are good. What can I do about that? How can I build up some kind of library of training material? I made a New Year’s resolution, to try and record a 5 minute video, explaining an aspect of WordPress, it was a New Year’s resolution, it wasn’t everyday, it fell by the wayside, I got a cold and lost my voice. I published them at press ups, I recorded it so I could share with my clients but also set up a simple website and they sit there. I am not here to promote this. I am not telling you to go here and look at them because they are rubbish. But I challenge you, is this something you can do, creating a library of short easy to produce videos. In this case, publishing them publicly your work could be good for everyone.
Let’s move on and talk about how to make them.
You all need some things I am assuming if you use WordPress you have a computer. Anyone not have a computer in this room? Good. You will need a microphone? Where is my bag?
I should have done this before? Most laptops have inbuilt microphones, it will pick up all sorts of noise. The very least you can do is pull your earbuds out and assuming you have them and put them into a laptop, you could just buy a cheap head set mic and plug that in. It is picking up less of the ambient noise from where you are, start with your built in, but rapidly progress to a head set like. If you are getting into this and you want to improve sound quality, recommend spending like 50 quid on a USB condenser mic, this is one that I bought on eBay for about that price. The only thing I would say about this, this is huge, this is about like professional mics are enormous, you don’t realise. This is like 3-quarters of the height of my monitor in my office. Ridiculous, I can’t see the screen when I am doing stuff. But the sound quality is so much better. In my opinion, the biggest change you can make if you are recording narrated screencasts, get yourself a decent microphone. I have 2 small children who invade my house, well they are there pretty much all of the time. You will need somewhere quiet. I hope this goes out saying, yes, I don’t record screencasts from home.
You will need some software, probably already have some actually, so let’s talk through some of the software options. This is a bit Mac centric, I haven’t explored the Linux world, if that is your thing use Google to find out more, with Mac you will have quicktime player installed. It is also a quicktime recorder. So, each of these tools has a short animated git screencast showing you the tool in action. With quicktime player you can just tell it to create a screen recording and it will make a screen recording.
It is free if you have got a Mac already got it but has limited functionality, and only export your videos in a limited number of formats.
As a new tool called Kap, this is a stand alone screen recording app and it is pretty good, recording your whole screen, has nice options really easy to use, free, it has some additional export options which is handy, export animated gif.
Loom, is something you can use on a mac or windows. It up loads your screencast to the cloud but you can then down load them again if you want to share them in another way. There are limited formats you can down load in. Has no editing, I found it a bit buggy, maybe that is something that will improve. Give it a try.
If you want to take things to the next level then these software tools, the two recommended are Camtasia which is on Mac and windows and screen flow on Mac only. These have all sorts of filters and annotating functions, do full editing with multiple tracks and just go wild. These are professional editing tools basically, they cost kind of £60 to £100 to buy. If you want to produce professional stuff, this is definitely the way to go.
Making animatinged GIFs is fun, if you are communicated with other developers you work with, or with an audience like this.
So all of these are recorded with the giphy capture app for Mac. It is free, trimming capability, so chop the start and end of your video. Limited to 30 second clips which is good in some ways bad in others, probably don’t want a gif more than 30 seconds because the file size will close. It is gif only, it will only export gif’s.
Have you seen the film inception or know what it is about? This is a screen grab of me using LICEcap to record giphy to record something, if you want to do something, you can record a screen recorder if you want to. It is not much fun.
LICEcap is very, very similar to giphy it is available for windows and possibly Linux as well, Opensource app, really good, it is free, easy to use. You can record longer than 30 second clips with it but still gif only and has no editing features at all. You may also because your screen might not necessarily be your computer screen, you might need an emulator if you want to record a mobile screen, options for that.
If you are on a Mac, you can install this 8 gigabyte thing called X code, which is a Mac developer toad. You will get the ios simulator, you can record that.
Android emulators a world that I stepped into occasionally, you have to be brave to do it. They do exist, so fill in the blank.
Your web browser also has an inspector or dev tools inside of it. Most of those have a mobile view where you can choose different device sizes. Now this isn’t necessarily an exactly what you would see on that device. But it is a reasonable approximation and great if you want to communicate some responsive website function or something to a client or to users.
Camtasia and screen flow, the two paid applications also have the ability to record from a mobile device if you plug it in as well, so, that might be worth playing with, if that is something you want to try and do.
So, what have we got? Computer, we have got at least our earbuds or maybe a decent mic, software, that you have preinstalled or bought. Recorded your screencast, a means of sharing.
All sorts of places you can self-host, YouTube and Vimeo are obvious places to upload stuff. Remember, or if you don’t know YouTube and Vimeo have private places. They can be listed and private and need to be logged into to be seen. If you use these services you can also get subscriptions and feed and connect them up to mailing list and things to do distribution of the content that you are producing; you could also use something like a file transferring service like Dropbox to upload and share large files with people so you just share the video with the person and that works fine to.
Has anyone used WP help? WP help looks a bit like this. It let’s you create inside your WordPress dashboard a little help section, just hierarchical simple posts so what I do sometimes is I’ll create a help section for my web-sites and I will upload the videos unlisted to YouTube and just the YouTube URL in and that appears as embed in there so you can get all your video training embedded within the users web-site so that’s a really good way to do it too.
Usecases. Mentioned these before, you can use these things for user training but you can also use them for customer support so if people ask you a question and you need to show them, for example, where the screen options are you can record a quick animated GIF. Record it in an email and sent it back, much easier than writing out at length the steps someone has to take to do something and it’s more visual so it’s easier for them to understand.
Can also use it for software development, so if you work in a team you can use this to share visual bugs or explain to people how to use as your in-house tools. This is one of my favourite GIF ever. A real bug with WordPress shiny updates where I managed to get the little exclamation point to turn around which was funny. It’s fixed now. But this was so much easier to show this as a visual demonstration to people than to try and write, hey, that little exclamation mark thing that appears when you do this thing is spinning round, and they’re inevitably going to come back and say, yeah, right, well. As a good example I’ll skip this but this is just me using a screencast to show someone how to use a brilliant Mac tool called Dash to look up documentation. Some people live code, they take these gaming platforms or people livestream their gaming activity using things like twitch and I’ve known people do this with code for pair programming or getting feedback on their coding style. So, that’s a bit extreme but it’s something you can do.
Let’s do the tips and trips. This is like 2 years of me doing this all condensed into 7 minutes. I’ll do my best.
Turn off notifications. You don’t want your personal email subject lines popping up on your screen while you’re recording these things. You can do it on a Mac from the activity centre in the top right. Little tip if you hold down the ALT button and click that it disables it straight away. There are options in settings in windows 8 and 10 for turning off notifications as well. Do it.
Also great if you are presenting a talk like this. Turn them off.
Close your applications. People don’t want to see all of this, do you. Close the applications. It will slow down your computer while you’re recording and people don’t want to see this. You probably don’t want to share information about the tools you are using. You now know all the tools I use. Ask me about them.
Avoid private data. This is my password manager. This isn’t a real web-site or password, it’s fake but you don’t want this kind of stuff shared. If you are demo-ing a live site recording from a live site you don’t want real user data being shared. If you’re recording a staging site that’s not yet live and you intend to put that publicly somewhere that’s probably not a great idea so avoid anything you shouldn’t be sharing unless you know that you’re only privately sharing video with the people who already own that data.
One way to achieve that is to use a private install or a staging or a test site so I tend to use a local install for recording WordPress.
Clean your desktop. This is polite and makes everything look nice even if it means create a folder that says “stuff that used to be on my desktop”. Drag everything in it; you’ll thank me tomorrow because your desktop will be clean and 3 months later you’ll wonder where your things are.
Use a lower resolution or screen size so you can change the resolution of your screen just for your recording or capture just a small area of your screen which means rather than this huge screen with this thing going on, you’re only capturing the thing you are talking about and it’s big. Bear in mind people might be watching this on a mobile device while commuting so it might be on a small screen they’re watching so make the thing you are demonstrating as big as possible or tell people to sit closer to you.
Use larger fonts and spacing if you are demonstrating something that involves text. People don’t want to see this. They want to see something more like this. So you can increase the line spacing, increase the font size and the whole thing is much more easy for your users to read.
I tend not to prepare scripts but rather I have a list of prompts to work from. So if I get lost or forget where I am or just get flustered in the heat of the moment when I’m recording something I know what’s coming next.
And try and keep it brief. My opinion is that if someone posts an hour long video I’m probably not going to watch it. So keep it to 25, 30 minutes as a maximum. 10 or 15 minute if you can. If you are just demonstrating a short thing, try and keep it to 5 minutes and if it’s a long thing see if you can break it up into smaller chunks because people are more likely to watch it.
Learning your keyboard short cuts is really handy. I’ll talk about staying still in a minute and it’s related to that.
At the very least learn the start and pause and stop recording shortcut for your screen recorder otherwise at the end of every video you are going to be ah how do I stop this thing and moving around and it just looks a bit messy.
I talked about being in a noisy place. There are thing that you can do to reduce noise. There are physical things you can do. If you really want to you can install sound proofing or buy a little soundproofed booth. That’s one end of the scale. At the other end of the scale is draw the curtains because that will reduce a bit of the noise coming in from outside.
Timing can be interesting. So, in my house at a certain time of day all the birds come and feed off the lawn and go chatter, chatter, chatter. So there might be certain times of day when you’ll get more noise. Some of the recording and editing tools also have noise reduction filters so if you’ve got one of those tools use that filter. It will really help.
Stay still. Like this is really distracting and annoying right? So, sometimes you just want to move your mouse around and go this thing here, this is what I’m talking about! Do that as little as possible. Try and stay still and it will help you if you are editing, if you are editing out your ums and errs, you don’t want your mouse jumping round your screen as you perform your edits, so staying still, learning to use the keyboard if you can will help with that and it will just mean – it’s bothering me now! {Laughter} – allow pauses and allow yourself to go wrong.
This is kind of key. If you’ve got software that allows you to edit then it’s fine to get something wrong and then – hush, right, if you can edit then you can look like you know everything because you can stop at some point in your screen cast and go I’ve forgotten how to do that thing, look it up and go back and do it and you chop out the bit where you had to look it up and you look like an absolute genius. But even if you get flustered you can allow yourself to pause and edit out the pause.
And the other thing you can do is edit, edit, edit; chop out all that stuff but also if you are doing something like a software install that takes a long time to do, either edit that out or you can actually speed it up in some of these applications so it all happens instantaneously.
I know some people find slides that move around a bit difficult. If that’s you, close your eyes now or look away. Some of the editing tools let you do really crazy zooms and annotations and all sorts of flying around and whizzy stuff. I would recommend doing that as little as possible because some people it will make them feel nauseous and I just think – it kind of sometimes helpful. Use it wisely.
Get permission for what you’re recording and sharing. I asked if these slides because they contained lots of recording of bits of WordPress would be GPL because I am recording this GPL licensed software so on my slides now GPL. Turns out we think they’re not but get permission if you need to for the things you are sharing. There might be copyright issues or privacy issues so just bear that in mind.
So I live in this place called Swindon that has this roundabout and I end my presentations with a “which way now?” slide. And I only have one thing to say about that which is go for it. I will share these slide’s I have introduced you to the tools many of which you already have installed or in your bag. Yes, just go and give it a try. You don’t need to share your initial efforts but practice, practice, releasing stuff to clients initially because that’s really helpful, may then be something you really get into and decide to share more publicly with the world I’ve had a lot of funding. It’s great just firing up a tool and doing a quick screen recording and it’s transformed the way I communicate with my clients for the better. So yes hopefully it will all go and next week you’ll be playing around with these tools and making screen casts. Thanks for listening.
There is one more talk before the end of WordCamp so go and enjoy that. {Applause} I’ll take questions.
SAM: We do have time for questions. We’ve got 10 minutes so if anyone has got any questions?
FROM THE FLOOR: Hi, sometimes screencasts have content where the presenter is doing something good related and they press shortcuts but obviously on a video I wouldn’t be able to tell whether they pressed command A but there is a small something that will display that command A has been pressed. Do you know what that is?
ROSS WINTLE: Yes, so the more advanced tools they actually record your mouse movement and keyboard clicks. They record them and install them separately and you can turn them on so you can turn on a display of the keys you pressed normally, so yes, but normally only in the more advanced tools. Mouse clicks. So some of my little GIFs here showed a little bubble when you clicked the mouse. Most of the tools will record that and display those and it’s optional to turn them on and off.
FROM THE FLOOR: Hi. Great talk. I use a lot of screencasts as well. My question is more about if you are sharing longer videos, like YouTube would make sense for that but those little short 30 second GIFs you send as a support thing, how do you share that with the client? Is it a Dropbox link or keep them all then go back to them?
ROSS WINTLE: It depends how I’ve been asked so if it’s a customer support request by email you can embed it or attach it to the email and back it goes. One of the organisations I work with has a support system, so you can just drag and drop or paste it as an attachment into there. For larger things like if you’ve recorded a longer 15 minute MP 4 video file that’s going to be bigger, it probably won’t fit in an email, depending what email system you use, so upload it to somewhere like retransfer and send it. Generally with the GIFs – or you can tweet a GIF. So you can provide customer support through twitter with animated GIFs which is cool.
SAM: I’ve seen stuff like that with developers they’ve found a cool trick at upload it to twitter and share it with everyone and get lots of likes. Any more questions? Where’ve you been?!
FROM THE FLOOR: It’s more of an addition than a question. There is a screenshot sharing service called cloud app APB not Automattic’s cloud up which is UB which now let’s you record GIFs from screen then just instantly give your shortcut for it as well.
ROSS WINTLE: Sure. The giphy app let’s you upload – can I run it? Hold on. See what happens if I do this. Mirror this. I promised myself I wouldn’t do a live demo. So, here is giphy capture. This is great you just literally click the button, off it goes, it records whatever I’m doing, blah, blah, blah, stop, and then down the bottom – it was just my background and my mouse so there it is. You can hit edit, change the size of it, the looping option, change the frames per second, add a caption, then these thing you trim then once you are done you can save, you can upload to giphy and once you are uploaded you can share with any of those sharing services. That’s a really quick and easy way to do animated GIFs and make them public.
FROM THE FLOOR: Is there any software that allows you to create chapters in a screencast? This is the thing that sometimes I go to look for documentation. I’m a fast reader but if I’m listening to a screencast, I’m limited to the speed at which the person reads and if it’s 25 minutes long I think, blimey, that’s 25 minutes of my day. I’ve not seen that anywhere and you haven’t mentioned anything, it seems like a really obvious one. Does that exist? Skip to GIFs you are interested in skip to these sections?
ROSS WINTLE: It’s not something I’ve tried. YouTube will let you create indexes. You can create links to specific times within a YouTube video. Vimeo probably let’s you do the same, so if you use that service you can probably create a table of contents where everything is. It may be some of the bigger screen recording tools will let you annotate in that sort of way. I don’t know. But yes we can look that up if you want to come and have a play later.
SAM: A question at the back? Somebody put their hand up earlier.
FROM THE FLOOR: Thanks for the talk. Do you have quick tips about screenflow? Because I haven’t used that before, so is it by default really good or do you have quick tips how you use it?
ROSS WINTLE: It is worth watching – so, the people who make screenflow, Telerik have introductory training videos, so the tip is spend half an hour watching some of those. You can pick it up and do the recording really easily but if you want to play with editing tools, filters and adaptations it’s really worth watching their screen cast user guides and finding out from there how to do it but in its basic form it is very easy to make a recording and export it. If you want to play around with the more advanced features then follow their learning path.
SAM: Any more questions?
ROSS WINTLE: Or if you really want to get going, find me afterwards.
FROM THE FLOOR: It’s not a question; it’s more like an addition. I like i-movie to edit my {inaudible} record them in quick time. I would avoid to use shortcuts because they’re different on Windows than on Mac especially if you do something for beginners to {inaudible} shortcuts {inaudible} what is this shortcut like? I have no idea. So I would not really recommend this and also, like, editing for me, I find it really annoying, so I try to not take so much M and stuff like this but – after a while, okay, there is a mistake; doesn’t matter, it’s just like more {inaudible} I don’t care, so, yeah.
ROSS WINTLE: Really good tips. There is a certain amount of personal preference. I, for some reason, love editing. It’s mindful. Like some people love colouring books. My video editing is my mindfulness. I can spend hours editing video. But other people may want to try and do it all in one take and not edit and develop some strategies for doing that. Tip about using i-movie which is in called on any new Mac you buy and with the keyboard shortcuts there is a certain amount of knowing your audience. So, there will be times when I deliberately right click to do something because I know that my user base aren’t going to use a keyboard shortcut to do that. They’re going to want to see how did you do that and the way to show how to do that is to do the right click and show the thing being used in the menu then assume the user will then go and learn the keyboard shortcut afterwards if they need to so thank you and have been doing this for a little while but I’m not the expert, there are lots of good tips out there. So, yes, any more tips, contribute!
SAM: Good. Any more questions? Cool. Thank you very much.
ROSS WINTLE: Grab me if you want demos. I’ll be around. {Applause}.
SAM: Excellent. So now we’ve got the last break of the day before we finish. The luggage room is now open so if you want to collect your bags you could do it now before going to the next session because there will probably be a bit of a queue after the closing remarks.
A reminder again to go and collect your teeshirts if you definitely want your own size otherwise you can pick one up at the end. Then we’ll be back here at 3.30. Thank you. Back here at 3.30 for Nela Dunato who will be talking about design processes and ending design revision hell.
Thank you.
Ronald Ashri
An AI Bot will Build and Run your Next Site… Eventually
Artificial Intelligence is finally in mainstream news almost daily. From self-driving cars to intelligent drones, medical chatbots to insurance analysis algorithms AI has gone mainstream in a big way.
We web developers, of course, have known all about this for some time. We use AI every day to build sites, don’t we? What would we do without our trusted bots providing helpful advice as we pick colours and typography, create content, define the layout and launch a site? How would we optimise our sites without having our bots tap into big data, fire up their neural networks and provide us with the perfect website recipe in order to maximise conversions? What would our users do without a bot to converse with them and lead them to the best choice every time. Thanks to AI web development has never been easier, and every launch is a success!
Sadly, unless you are from another dimension that is not actually what web development looks like right now. So where and, more importantly, what exactly is the grand AI promise for web development. I have been looking at all the different ways AI will influence (and has influenced) web development. This talk prepares you for the inevitable changes AI will bring to web development and points out what technologies you can take advantage of today as well we what you need to be thinking about so as to be able to better handle what is coming.
The bots are actually here and more are coming. Let’s make them our friends.
DENISE: Hello everyone, and welcome to track B. Please pick up your T shirts from the registration desk downstairs. We have a ton of T shirts left you can even get an extra one if you want I want to thank our sponsors Timpani WooCommerce, Jetpack. HeartInternet for our sales sponsors. SiteGround, 34 SPW com, WP Engine and GoDaddy and our Dress Circle and grand circle sponsors as well as balcony and patron sponsors. So I am so excited about our next talk which will be by Ronald. Ronald has a wonderful story about how he got interested in technology, he is based in Italy right now and in Sicily an amazing place where he works remotely at the digital agency Deeson. Ronald actually has a PhD and studied artificial intelligence and then when he moved to Italy started getting involved wit web design and Drupal and his work has come full circle he is looking at art finitially technology inside web development. So let’s give a warm applause and welcome to Ronald (Applause).
RONALD: Thank you. I am going to have to start with an apology. I had a cold, pretty bad cold and I have a weird very deep voice. This is not my normal voice. And then it sometimes turns in to a 12-year old voice and can go really high. We will see how this goes.
So yes, I work for Deeson I am the technical strategy director there. Deeson is hiring if you are into UX, looking for UX Director, WordPress develop developers. Solution art et ceteras and so talk to me after this talk.
I am going to try to convince you about two things, that AI, artificial intelligence is going to change the way we develop websites and that this is going to happen quickly. That is the important bit and then I am going to talk about what we do about that.
Before I go on how many of you are web developers, build sites day in and day out. So great this is going to be very relevant to what we will be doing in a few years.
So we are going to talk a bit about what AI actually is. Then look at technological progress from a slightly abstract stand point how technology progresses in general. And that is important to understand the consequences. We talk about how web development is changing and what should we do next.
So what is AI? It is not Sky net it is not the terminator. This is important because when people mention AI, when I finished my studies and people would ask what did you do and I say artificial intelligence, they say oh you are building a terminator or something. No it is kind of more mundane and worse at the same time, it really is going to change things. I am going to give you a view of AI that is not philosophical or anything like that. Not about consciousness, it is a view that helps us think about how we build things and it comes from age based software development. How do you build software that has intelligent software within it.
So what is an agent. An agent is anything that can perceive the environment through censors and modify. Think of a thermostat. It perceives the temperature of the environment and then it switches the heating on and off to change that environment right through effectives. First level in agent based software is something called reactive agents, they are very simple and I am going to be using chat bot as an example here. How many know what chat bots are? Okay cool. It is programmes that live within something like messenger or Slack and you can talk to them and they respond and do things for you. So a reactive agent chat bot would do something like just sit them and it is only going to react once you talk to it. So if you say “hey how are you doing” it is going to reply “I am doing good how are you doing?” It is not trying to achieve anything it is just sitting there waiting for something to happen. And from an AI perspective that is not necessarily interesting, but it is the first stepping stone. Then we get into something a bit more interesting which is a proactive goal oriented agent. Now a proactive agent is a piece of software that has a goal. What is a goal? It wants to change the environment from state A into state B. And it is going to do that proactively. So it is not just going to sit there and mate for you to talk to it, it is going to actually try and do it. This is when things start becoming interesting. Because we are relinquishing control. We are letting programmes do things for us. So in a chat bot scenario you would have something like a chat bot with a goal to take the world from a state where Ron did not read the news where a state where Ron read’s the news “you will not believe what happens today, click here to read the details” and this is things we see happening on chat bots and we write applications that do this. Let’s take it a step further. So you can have a proactive goal oriented agent that is also learning. It wants to change the world but it is not just going to do it trying to do the same thing evidence and over again. So with our chat bot example it is going to say “you will not believe what happen today, click here to get the details” and I ignore it. So try something else “click here for the latest news” no result. It learns what is going to make Ron click. And it changes a different approach “Dear Ronald, all the things you need to know here” that does not work either. It keeps using some facility function to figure out what makes said. If it said “My masters will delete me if you don’t click here” I would click. You have a piece of software proactive, trying to change the world in some way. And it learned based on very much things it tries and it is still very simple. 20 lines of code and just something that assigns values to, but this is still AI. It is very simple, but the moment you start relinquishing control you are building something that is changing the would on its own. Now, next level and we are done, are autonomous agents. And autonomous agents are more interesting they are not just driven by goals where goal is a very specific thing change from state A to B they have motivations and they can be things like increase user engagement. Just in general. And then they have specific goals like get the user to read the news or subscribe or sign up to facebook, stuff like that. And there can be any number of complicated mathematically interesting function there that try to figure out how am I going to get maximum utility for this motivation of increased user engagement putting in place actions that are going to achieve those goals. The basic level it is simple and that is what I am trying to drive through. That relinquishing control. Not just trying to get the user to read the news, we are saying there is this high level thing which is user engagement. And then it can get like transistors they start simple and they get increasingly more complicated. Integrated circuit. And then you imagine you can have different motivations and those motivations had to different goals so increases engagement but it is also increase add income. So then do you know do you get the you store click on an ad, that is going to take them away from me and my ability to increase engagement. And conflicting things and you are really increasingly losing control. You don’t know what the programme is going to do. You know you have overall utility functions that are going to lead it in the right direction. Take this into car driving, why do we call them autonomous vehicles and phone everybody is excited and scared about how autonomous vehicles are going to change the world, because we are letting these cars figure out how they are going to get us from A to B. And the goal maybe get the passenger back home but the motivations can be things like do this in a fuel efficient way, so you don’t know exactly what route it is going to choose. It can be don’t kill the passenger before you get them home, that is a big motivation. Don’t kill anyone else while you are taking the passenger home. And those motivations are going to conflict at some point. This car is going to have to decide there is someone in front of me and there is a wall and a passenger, who do I kill, that is a real question that autonomous driving vehicles are going to have to answer. So that is where AI starting from simple building blocks becomes a more interesting thing because we are relinquishing control, letting a piece of software decide what it is going to do. Okay. So leave that to the side for a bit and talk about technological progress and how progress happens. There are two concepts I want to talk about here. Exponential growth and interconnectiveness. So what is exponential rate of change I think you have seen graphs like that, things start slowly and take off. A great book called “the second machine age” which talks about what exponential rate of growth means, I definitely recommend. And where we hear about exponential rate of growth most is MOORE’s law. The number of transistor in an integrated circuit doubles every two years, this line is straight it is a logarithmic scale. So this has been extremely consistent over a long period of time. Now the problem with exponential rate of growth is that we as human beings are really bad at dealing with numbers, specially big numbers like we don’t get it. So, I will tell you a story about chess to talk about exponential growth. And the story goes like this. Once upon a time a ruler of Indian was bored and asked a mathematician to come up with a game and he invented chess. I don’t think it was how it was invented put it is is a great story. The court was really pleased with chess it was a fun game they were not bored any more and they asked the mathematician how do you want to get paid? The mathematician said I want to be paid in rice and what you are going to do is place a grain of rice on the first square of the Board and then on the second square of the Board you are going to place two grains of rice because you are going to double what you did before, and you are going to keep doing that so it is four, and keep doubling the amount of rice that you place on each square of the Board until the Board finishes. So it is like 64 steps right. So I think where are we now. 128, 256 grain of rice and the ruler was laughing here is some more rice, okay 256. 512 grains of rice. Okay, here is more rice. And I wanted to do a great slide where this went crazy with grains of rice. But keynote bombed it can’t handle more than 512 grains of rice. So here is what happens, the numbers grow very quickly. So the first line think that is like the 70s the first two lines and then the 80s and it is okay here is a bag of rice and here is a Barrow and here is a truck. By the fourth line that is two billion grains of rice. A big rice field a lot of rice and then it is four all of a sudden and then by the time you have finished the fifth line it is 274 billion blah, blah, blah. So how does the story end. There are two endings the first one is that the Royal goes bankrupt, they cannot supply enough as to complete the Board. The second ending is that they just chop the mathematicians head off and went back to playing chess which is probably the most likely outcome of that scenario. Now why this is interesting? This is interesting because we are actually 32 doublings in. As humans in terms of computer technology we have done the first half of the Board. And this is not me saying this, this is Ray Kurzweil Director of Engineering at Google and a really famous AI scientist and Director of Engineering at Google. So make the connection there. We are starting the second half of the Board. Every next step change is going to be so much bigger than everything that happened before. That is what exponential rate of growth means. That is why I think this is going to happen very soon because the rate just goes like this. So everything we have seen happen in the past 30 years it is just going to double. Think of when the iPhone came out. What was that ten years ago, eleven years ago. Now everyone has a Smartphone, those Smartphones have all sorts of censors and we just use them and get annoyed when they don’t quite work. That device is crazy, that thing recognises your voice and does things in the real world because of that and that just happened in the past few years. Exponential rate of growth. So that is one concept to keep in mind the future is going to change much faster than the past did. The other concept is things are inter connected. And another great book called the inevitable. And it is talking about technological processes, things that are by their very nature leading technology into a certain direction. And I am going to give you one example of inter connected, it has to do with machine learning. Machine learning has actually been around for a very long time, since the 1950s, let’s just put it there. It has not been very exciting. So a few things had to happen at the same time for machine learning to get exciting and they have happened. The first one is cheap parallel computation. In order to train a neural network you have to run a lot of processes in parallel and that takes a lot of computation. And that is expensive. But, at the same time as neural network scientist trying to make efficient neural networks teenage kids were really excited about shoot them up games and when they shoot someone they should see that head explode in full realism. As a result we got graphical processing unit chips GPUs from Avida that are extremely efficient and the cost went all the way down because teenage kids were buying them. So 2011 Andrew NG who used to be Head of Google, and is now at. So he said let’s get a bunch of GPUs and put them together and solve neural networks that way and problems that would take weeks to solve they solved in a day. So that happened. Other thing that happened is big data. I am very pleased with that. How do you represent big data. So AI feeds on data. In order to train a neural network you just need a lot of information and we did not necessarily have that information, we had it a training set, then storage got cheaper and networks got faster and database technology got better and Google and facebook started collecting data and suddenly you have a lot of data to train neural networks. The other thing that happened better algorithms. In 2016 someone called Jeff Hinton working in Canada with his research group came up with a better way of running neural networks and they called that deep learning, so when you have deep learning it is another algorithm for running your networks and that in increased the efficiency by a factor or several factors. One of the first paper they wrote, I don’t expect you to read this, something called image net classification with deep convolutional neural networks. A competition to see how well neural networks perform. Just look at the numbers there. 102 million high Resolution images categorise across a thousand different classes, the neural network 60 million parameters and 650,000 they use GPUs in order to solve the problem and they got an error rate of 15. 3%. So 85% of the time they were correct. Current error rates for image recognition is 5%. That is better than humans. So computers are better than us at recognising an image right now. So, exponential this all happened in the past five years. Computers went from being other for image recognition to better than us. They are better than us in recognising cancer in scans. They are better than doctors. There are all sorts of things in the past two years computers started being better than us, and that is going to impact all sorts of things and how we do them. Okay, so we have AI, we know that the rate of change is exponential and we know that changes are inter connected and months we come together the shift is factors of magnitude more. So how does this impact web development and what we do day-to-day? Well let’s think about what problem we are actually trying to solve. What is it that we do? And if the answer is build websites that is the wrong answer. Because who needs a website? There is no intrinsic need for a website in human beings. People need solutions to their problems, they want to find clients, they want to sell widgets and hire people and retain et cetera et cetera. So what if we can solve all of these problems without websites, that is the question we need to be asking ourselves because we cannot depend on people needing websites and if they don’t it is a bit of a problem. So, we have two questions we need to answer. Do we need a website and if we do need a website how will it be built. Let’s tackle the first one. I am going to give you an example with Deeson’s own website. Here is my user story. As a user I want to find where your business is and I type Deeson agency into Google and it gives me some results fantastic. Click on the first one. I go to Deeson’s website and it does not say where they are, so contact maybe I will click on contact, it is a very nice picture of our managing director. But I have to scroll down and finally here is where they are, London and Canterbury and remote. But actually I lied because when I typed Deeson agency in Google this is what Google actually gave me. Deeson is exactly there, this is the phone number and their opening times and you know if you are a restaurant or a hotel or any sort of business of that sort you did not need a website to solve that specific use case. And it can get better. Because if I have Alexa I can say “Alexa where is Deeson agency?” And it is going to tell me. I did not even use the web. I used the web but I did not type anything. We need to ask ourselves what are the problems we are solving and how are they currently solved. Once you are in a situation where you also have dedicated market places and by the way all these things work efficiently because they work with artificial intelligence in the back end. Google knows where Deeson agency is because there is a tonne of things in the back end. Take airBnB. It has all the data and the processing power it will give you a best price why should you build a website for that. The same with Amazon and so on. So if I want to book a flight now I can talk to kayak. I can say give me some ideas, tell me when flights are available, tell me how much they are going to cost. I am not using a website. At Deeson we are working with museums and building exhibition experiences instead of building a website for an exhibition you build a message board and it can have like fun character of the one we are working with now is King Charles the second, so there is a King Charles Charles the second and asking about the life and eventually you can book tickets. Devices are changing. Getting smaller, getting bigger, they are moving, static or hidden. You have voice and motion and text entry this is all going to impact the utility of websites. And we can understand the user in ways that we could never before. So, websites are becoming a part of a much bigger picture. Does not mean they are not completely going to go away, but they are going to change in terms of what they are. But let’s deal with the other problem. Okay we do need a website. Convince ourselves the best solution is a website, how are we going to build it. There is a bunch of dedicated SaaS tools including WordPress.com, so go to here and get a website built and it works nicely. I include facebook there, because that is what facebook pages are, they are websites and there is a bunch of businesses right now that say I don’t need a website I have a facebook page, I know who comes there and what they click. I see their face and all of that. Then you dig a little deeper and you have things like wix has their AI based design and you can laugh and say it is not really, it is, you are relinquishing control. It is deciding how to set up the picture the page based on context, on what you are try doing achieve. It is not just wix. You have this services completely AI based. So fire drop says “build your site with Sascha the AI web designer. You have tools like Adobe SENSEI. This is across all their products where they are building artificial intelligence into every single thing they do including web design. So this is just nuts. The fact that we can do this. A designer can sit and say an umbrella here and a person and then the programme is going to go away and say okay those things match exactly what you need. And anyone who does design knows how much time designers spend to just find the right picture. Now with AI you have compressed the time into literally nothing. This is just going to get better because exponential rate of growth. Two years from now it is going to be much much better than what it is now. In the Drupal world you have Acquia doing personalisation Acquia lift and it allows you to try out different images and words and keeps building that user profile. You have ad designed management. A great story CosaBella. They do lingerie and they have outsourced their ad management to an AI and the CEO is crazy about this thing, saying I would never going back to my agency, I love my agency they are beautiful people. I will never go back to humans I will just use Albert and Albert is going to figure out the right phrase and image and manage my advertising and does it so much better than those lovely humans that I really like. Logo design. There is something called Mark maker that spits out designs and you tell it what you like and it just keeps doing it and you can say well this is not as good as a real designer, but exponential growth, it is going to get better. Automated content creation. Association press writes something like three to 4,000 stories now per quarter using bots AI, it feeds in facts and outcomes a story. No journalist actually interacted with that. Initially there was a monitoring phase to make sure it was okay. There are no humans involved the story gets released. It would be awesome if it were robots typing at a keyboard but it is not which is sad. So every aspect of what it takes to build a website is going to impact by AI. And the question becomes okay what now? I think there is a few things, a few answers. We need to start thinking now about all those other interfaces like chat based, motion, virtual reality, augmented reality and how those solve problems. We need to stop selling websites, because websites are not going to be the most interesting thing, you have to sell solutions to problems. Tell your client, which is a good idea anyway. This how I am going to get you more clients. There is going to be new professions, new things we can’t think of right now. So stuff like data scientists and machine learning experts and stuff like bot designers and conversation writer thousand people that write the conversations for bots. I love this one “chief listening officer” some one who tries to interpret what is going on. Assistive ability expert. By definition we don’t know what the new professions are going to penal they get there. And something else that I want to mention is it has to come down to policy. How many know what universal basic income is? It is an idea, a complicated idea summarised into there’s enough abundance and automation that the basics are covered without you doing actually go work. It is not welfare. It is literally saying we don’t need to do these things any more as a society. Because we are changing how society works so we need to change how we run society, the two things can happen separately and then it is going to break and you get a number of things that we are already seeing, this process is happening. So in conclusion, it is going to happen, because there are underlining forces that are pushing things in this direction. We can either pretend it is not going to happen or accept it is going to happen and it is really exciting. I love the idea that my retirement plan is universal basic income. I have all sorts of things I want to do and they don’t need to involve computers any more. That is fantastic. There is opportunity there. Okay.
Thank you (Applause).
DENISE: Thank you so much, that was a lot of information. Did everyone learn something? A lot are you afraid of your machines now? No okay. So we have some time for questions and I am sure you all have many. So raise your hand and somebody with a mic will come to you.
FROM THE FLOOR: Do you think that jobs will vanish and jobs will be created. What worries me certain jobs will be automated, and you will find people not working, do you think there will be a balance between job created and those that will vanish?
RONALD: There is an intense debate about this, some people say you don’t know. I fall on the side of there will not be the same number of jobs created as opposed to jobs that go away. There will be less jobs because we are automating. So by definition less things to do. That is why the change is actually bigger it is political and sociological and so on.
FROM THE FLOOR: Yeah so one of the things that occurs to me at the moment when you are doing old school search with Google et cetera you present went present with a bunch of results and you can choose which shop you buy Nike shoes from, with this bot revolution you are only given one option. That is a lot of power you are handing over to the provider of the results. Do you have any thoughts on the rights and wrongs and what can be done about that?
RONALD: I think we are going to see two things developing. On the one hand we are going to have companies like Nike having their own bots and interact with that and that is the shoes you are going to get. What is going to be more interesting is independent bots that at the back end they are powered by a search engine and they learn who you are and what you like. And you have a conversation literally having a conversation with someone in a shop and they offer different options and so on. I don’t think that bots are going to limit that side of the equation. You are still going to get the single ones and essentially search engines disguised as a bot.
FROM THE FLOOR: Have you got any practical starting points for this kind of work. I have played with something called super script and there are a few tools out there. Have you got any practical favourites starting places or resources you can share?
RONALD: You mean for something specific like bots.
FROM THE FLOOR: Yes the museum bot.
RONALD: What we are playing around with is bot Kit an open source GS base framework and API services like API AI from Google for example that does the natural language processing and figures out the intent of what the user typed in and that you type that back into your bot and give the reply.
FROM THE FLOOR: So you are telling us that we are using bots to inspired by us to create content, writing text and create graphics but what will happen in the future bots will be inspired by other bots so we are dropping the human out of the equation. What is the creativity process in that?
RONALD: I don’t know what is going to happen with that. There is different views right. So it is kind of the view of AI abandoning humans in a way and worrying about itself and things inter acting between themselves. But I think what is more likely to happen and it is very hard to predict right, but is a combination, so there is going to be an augmentate augmentation of what we can do. So not just bots interacting between themselves it is us with bots and it will be hard to tell the line of where the bot finishes. Right now if you take away my Smartphone I can’t go back home. I am going to sleep under a bridge. That is the kind of thing I mean, it becomes codependent on things. The same time my Smartphone is useless without me. Ray Kurzweil calls it a singularity. I think it is 2029, two things together, who knows.
DENISE: Any other questions.
FROM THE FLOOR: For in order for AI to take over more and more stuff does that mean for the consumer to give up privacy more and more.
RONALD: Yes that is where the interesting social questions come out of it. I think the question is much bigger than do you need websites or not. It is happening if you look at elections and how they are run and the level of influence. We need to start asking ourselves what are we actually, where do we want to end up. I will just add I don’t think the answer is oh let’s just stop. We can’t stop. But we need to deal with it. And the problem is that the rate of change might just be a bit too fast for us to adapt. I don’t want to get all dark and so on. But there might be a breaking point. So the more we think about it now the less likely that is.
DENISE: You have a question?
FROM THE FLOOR: Just to follow up on that, talking about influencing and what we just saw happening, is there any controlling instance for AI that we can think about already? Like fake news and all that stuff.
RONALD: There isn’t really. If you look at the news you will hear there are Parliamentary commissions that are calling the managers of Google and facebook and asking questions and saying you need to do something better about this. But there is no legal framework to actually handle it, so there are no penalties to fake news currently.
DENISE: Did you have a question? Did anyone else have a question.
FROM THE FLOOR: I just wondered looking at this in a WordPress context are you aware of anything where bots are being used to interact with WordPress and help people carry out high level functions using this kind of bot technology.
RONALD: I have not seen anything like that. Although I would be surprised if that did not happen soon enough. The person you need to talk to….(Indicates someone)
DENISE: I think we have time for one more question. Does anyone have a question.
FROM THE FLOOR: Don’t you think the problem is what worries me the fact that we are not all unified as humans we have nationality and there are factions in the world, if we use this technology those bot will realise they are more united and have more in common that we do (laughter)
RONALD: That is evolution.
FROM THE FLOOR: They have more in common with each other than we do.
RONALD: It is entirely feasible very intelligent people, Stephen Hawkin and Ellen .. Specifically said this might be the end. These are not silly people. The issues are completely real.
DENISE: So we are going to leave with that positive thought enjoy the rest of WordCamp and we will be back here in 20 minutes.
FROM THE FLOOR: Where can I find your slides.
RONALD: I will put them up on slide deck.
DENISE: He will be tweeting it out and this talk will be on WordPress TV.
Pascal Birchler
Lightning Session
Have you seen onethingwell.org? It’s a weblog of simple, useful software. I’m going to show you a selection of similar software for WordPress – simple, useful plugins that you may not have heard of. There won’t be any bulky plugins with a hundred options and vast ecosystems, just small, focussed plugins that perform one thing well.
Slides: https://mattrad.uk/slides-single-purpose-plugins-wcldn-2017-talk/
Caching, timezones and internationalisation are just a few things that make developers cringe. In this short talk I will highlight some recent enhancement in the field of i18n in WordPress to show how we’ve got you covered. I will also give a glimpse at what’s coming in the future.
Slides:
I this talk we cover:
Slides: https://foxland.fi/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/svg-icon-system.pdf
DAN MABY: Hello everyone, welcome back to the afternoon session, I want to start by saying a huge thank you to our sponsors these guys have done a phenomenal amount to support this event and give us the ability to be able to attend with a ticket that just costs £30, it’s incredible, I want to say a big thank you to Timpani, WooCommerce, JETPACK for their boxes, thank you to HeartInternet, SiteGround, 34sh, GoDaddy, also thank you to the dress circle and grand circle sponsors who are all downstairs and a big thank you to the balcony and patron sponsors.
On to this afternoon we have three lightning talks to start with, our first speaker has been working with WordPress for the last ten years, as a developer, specialist WordPress agency ten degrees, focusing on optimisation and site performance, giving his talk this afternoon on single purpose plugins, if you would like to give a big round of applause to Matt Radford. Please. [Applause].
MATT RADFORD: Right, sorry about that technical interlude, I know everyone has just come back from launch you don’t want to hear me droning on and on and on, I’m going to give you a quick blast of single purpose plugins.
So, what might you ask are single purpose plugins, I was inspired by blog I read ‘One Thing Well’ which gives you a regularly up-dated list of simple, focused, small, bits of software that do, as the site suggests, one thing very well. Also, inspired by Kim’s wow plugin talk of WordCamps of yesteryear, where he ran through three or four plugins, what they did and how they were useful and when to use them.
In my job, I’m always looking for the best solution, but sometimes what you need is just a quick solution, you need a solution for right now. It doesn’t have to require code. One of the, one of WordPress’ massive strengths is that it’s so extendible, anyone can install a plug-in that just makes their website do more. There are round about, I was told last night, 60,000 plugs into choose from at the moment, that’s probably too many to trawl through. This is just about a few plugins I consider well-written, well-targeted and had functionality, which I know clients have asked me for in the past and will help developers do better work.
So, this first plugin is from an experience from a recent project, we took over a site from another agency, naming no names, but they are here.
There are a ton of page templates that were used, I needed a quick way of examining which pages were using which templates, I knew that I could do that by adding some code to an admin column, but I half remembered I had come across a plug-in that would do that pretty quickly. A quick trawl through my history, I came across this one from Tim McFarlin, it was quick to install, it did what I needed perfectly, I was able to exam all the pages quickly and move on with the project, what I like to do, go through some other plugins that I found and described why they’re useful, why you might want to use them and why they might save you a bit of time.
The first one is subtitles, it’s functionality, that I’ve been asked for by clients before, they see a title, they want to add a subtitle, that’s pretty much it. Usually you have to build a custom field but it does it very nicely with a built-in UI where it sits where you would expect it to. There is your post, you edit it and the subtitle field is where you would expect it to be.
So, you save your post and refresh it and bingo, that’s a five-minute job, you have got a subtitle field, it works very well.
Another one that I recommend for clients is one of delicious brains less pricey, you can change the exert, it’s the small bit of generated text that WordPress outputs from the main body of the text, usually if you want to change that you have to go in and you know filter that, change the exert, change what comes after it, with this it’s got a very simple option screen you can change the amount of text you output, change the read more, changes the e lips, change which pages it changes it on, it’s very simple to do, it and it gives clients control which they like a lot, I’ve used it on projects before.
One thing we have come up with recently, this plugin called instant images, this will give you content-specific images, created licence so you can use it and it will download to your media library, if I wanted to do a search for London, to add some post, to add some images to WordCamp London posts, I’ll do a search and set the size that the images will be resized, to, when they are downloaded I can download as many as I need I’ll click the ones I want, download them, unfortunately you can’t do 50 at a time, you have to pick the ones you want, download them quickly and resize to the dimensions you specified, as you can see it will just add them into your media library, ready for use in your content.
If your, if you are a user or site owner, one of the things, when I was freelancing before that, I was asked for on an awful lot of occasions, was to just stick an image in the sidebar, this isn’t built into core, I’m not sure why not, it seems very useful, there might be a move to do that, this simple image widget has made lots of my freelance clients happy when I was using that and it did exactly what they needed. If you are developer and you have used, say instant images to add a bunch of images, there is a wp-cli plugin, assign featured images it does what it says on the tin, will take all the images you downloaded via instant images and will assign them as feature images, there you go a load of contents’ specific images assigned to post and ready to keep developing that theme with content specific stuff on there.
Now, if like me at work you manage sites for quite a number of clients, you might have had the call that says, “You have broken my set it doesn’t work anymore, what are you going to do about it?” I say actually, we have installed simple history on all sites, gives us all the actions, plugin installations, plugin deletions, it’s WordPress’, I see what you did there! [Laughter] You can get a client say, “Actually, I’m sorry we can see in the dashboard that you changed all of that and unfortunately we will have to charge you to fix it”, or not if you are feeling generous, it does give you a good idea of what they have been up to.
If you have clients who like to go a little deeper and you haven’t disallowed file editing, you may find they hack the theme files directly, that’s clearly not a good idea, it breaks the update process and could lead to the whole site coming down, instead if you want to keep their changes in… keep them out of the parent theme you can get them to add a child theme, this is a quick plugin that clients can add, it will take the current plant theme, create the child theme from it and they can do all the damage they want in the child theme without touching that parent theme, it’s update friendly, so find that very useful.
If you also have clients, for example, or you are a site owner, I guess most people here have heard of the REST API vulnerability recently, for sites not updated it’s still on-going with hacks and defacements, you can suggest they install easy update manager, it will keep core, plugins, themes and you can also exclude any of those from being updated as well if you have specific one you don’t want updated, easy updates manager will just keep everything up-to-date, you will just get a notification afterwards and you know your site is kept self and secure.
Now for developers, if you have ever spent time developing on an aeroplane, you know that WordPress is still trying, even when it hasn’t got a network, to make external calls to CSS and JavaScript and Gravatar, core updates, blah, blah, blah, for me when I was on a plane to Colorado last year I was trying to do some work and it was just really slow and it didn’t really work very well.
Andrew Norcross, has come up with this plugin on Github, that’s called Airplane — with one click you can just stable all those external calls and WordPress is magically faster it’s not trying to deal with all those things without a network.
Also for development, we have started using this plugin recently, which is really useful. If you find that you have got a live set and you need to do some work on it and you don’t want to have to download all those images, you can use coral remote images, one simple option screen where you put in the live sets URL and it will rewrite all the image paths to the site, it’s a really time saver.
In terms of time saving we also use, what I do specifically but I don’t know about the other devs at 10 degrees, bulk press, you can paste in pages, child pages, other posts, custom post types, terms, menu items, all sorts of stuff, if you have got specific lists of pages, you can use this, it’s paste, one click, update done, you can add random posts terms through wp-cli generate command but this one does, that generates random pages or posts whereas this one does specific ones, so specific sites it’s quite useful.
What have we got next… if you are developing WooCommerce sites and you want to populate with a bunch of data, then meteoric, wc cyclone on Github is useful as well, you can add products, customers, orders, as much as you need it will again rate all of those, it doesn’t yet do coupons, refunds or more complex products, to quickly populate a WooCommerce site for development, this is a great wp-cli plugin, it will also grab a bunch of featured images, from unsplash so you can have all those products nicely populated — times up — ready for your development. I have one though, great.
This is the last one, DB post types, you have probably come across things out there that will take custom tables and again rate custom post types from them it will duplicate it into wp posts, DB post types calls itself an interpreter, it will leave the data in the custom tables but again rate custom posts from that, again rate admin screens, you can use wp query, wp meta query, so imagine you can take, grab the entries, instead of creating custom post types use the entries from the database directly to use them as post’s you can take custom tables or subsite tables from multi-sites and create posts out of them, do whatever you need to do with wp query, I’ve not tried this one yet but I thought I would talk about it, it looks quite interesting and I thought it would be something you would like to see. That’s me, thank you very much for listening.
DAN MABY: We’ll have a round of Q&A at the end of the three lightning talks, just while we transfer over, I’ll let you know there are a number of T-shirts still leftover, if you have partners, children, please feel free to grab an extra T-shirt on the way out.
The next speaking began blogging at the age of just 12, now web developer at required — internationalisation, improvements in WordPress Core, give a big round of applause for Pascal.
PASCAL BIRCHLER: All right. So, last year when I was here, I talked about Swiss chocolate bribery, and I don’t have any chocolate here today so I am going to talk about recent internationalisation improvements in WordPress core instead.
A few years ago, some of you might remember this, translation management in WordPress was cumbersome, you only got new translations when you updated WordPress, so then they introduced language packs which allowed you to install and updates translations in the panel independently from the code, this also allowed WordPress to update translation automatically.
So there is was a really good and it’s really like proven and when you just, felt like you wanted to change the language it just go through the channel settings, change the language to whatever you want, and just works.
But we felt like we could do more, and do better so in WordPress 4.6 we did some improvements under the hood and let’s have a look. So first up we have the jQuery UI date picker, which some of you might know it’s not used in WordPress core actually only plugins and themes use it. When you use it in your code it’s now fully localised powered by the data WordPress already has, it’s much easier for developers to use it. Also you might know load plugin text domain or load theme text domain it’s the function you use in your plugin to load the hey please load the translation for my plugin. Because of language packs, when your plugin is on WordPress.org those translations are already in your wp content/languages folder, we felt like we already know the translations are in that folder so why do you still have to tell WordPress to load the translations from there. So we figured let’s just remove the requirements to call this function.
What we did is built a so called just-in-time loading for translations. So whenever you call a translation function like the underscore underscore function in your code, WordPress will look if there’s a translation file in WordPress content language folder, and load the translation for you. And super fast because it like everything is cached and also backwards compatible, so you don’t have to worry about anything. Yeah, just works.
Now next up we have WordPress 4.7 where we focus more on the user facing side of things. One of them is really cool, is user admin language. So as you have seen before, you can go to the channel settings page and change the low Karl for you local for your website it change the language for the whole website. We wanted to let users decide which language they want to use WordPress in.
So with WordPress 4.7, every user can go to the profile and select their preferred language. It’s worth noting that this only changes the language for the back end. So this means one user can use the back end in let’s say English, the other in Spanish, and one perhaps in German and the front-end will be in the site language so here it English.
It’s super cool for like, huge international sites like for example WordPress.org. For this to work we needed a way to switch the language on the fly so for example when sending e-mails, you want to send an email in the language of the user and not in the site’s language. So we essentially needed a way to switch these translations on the fly, and what we came up with us a function called Switch Local you just tell the function whatever local you want to switch to, send your email to all the stuff you want, and restore to previous state afterwards. This also allows you or maybe for WordPress in future to do cool things like display the toolbar in the user language, and the rest of the site in the site’s language. It’s not yet in core, there are a of bugs we need to fix, but confident we can put this into like WordPress 4.8 maybe.
So, what’s next? WordPress 4.7 already shipped in December, and we’re still thinking of all the cool ways we can improve internationalisation in WordPress core. One thing that is like related to user admin language is really improve so there’s a user you can select multiple preferred language. You might know this from Firefox or like your browser operating system where it can tell the system which local you understand best you set that in order of preference the system will figure out which translations to load based on what is available and what is your preference. So, we might see that in WordPress in the future. We also as I told you before, we improved the translation loading in php, and now we want to do the same thing with JavaScript. So as you might know if you are developer, using translated themes in JavaScript is quite hacky you have to use the wp localised script function and parse the translated strings to a global variable you can use in JavaScript it works but it has some drawbacks, for example doesn’t really support plural forms and stuff like that. So we thought why not make this more similar to how it works in php. So right now, like there’s proof of concept already, you could just use like a wp I18N underscore underscore right function right in your JavaScript.’ another thing that I particularly important to me is user times on setting. So, figure that when you are kind of already select your preferred language why not select your preferred time zone as well. I saw that all the time on WordPress.org for example, I see all the blog posts with their published date I never knew that it was my time, was it in the morning or the afternoon, so if it can have a user time zone setting and user profile it would be super cool to display all the dates according to your time zone.
Well, that’s it already. Thank you very much.
DAN MABY: Excellent thank you, the next speaker this afternoon is a teacher a front-end dev who likes to work about the web accessibility and WordPress, he’s also the CEO of fox land a theme plugin shop. He will be giving his talk about the SVG icon system in WordPress, Sami Keijonen, a big round of applause.
SAMI KEIJONEN: So I am going to talk to you about SVG icon system in WordPress. SVG stands for scaleable vector graphics. Like the introduction it Sami Keijonen. I hail from Finland I am a front end developer who tries to keep accessibility in mind everything I do I try to build it in a way that is accessible to everyone. This is going to be like a short introduction in the technical overview what we have done in 2017 theme, using the SVG icon system. So we’re going to talk you through why we use those SVG icons, where you could get those icons, how you use those icons.
If you have some time, we going to take code examples from the 2017 theme.
What kind of icons are we talking about? We could talk about for example, icons that look like that. They could be icons for example from Twitter or Instagram or Github. Or, SVG icons could be a logo, or it could be other graphics that have multiple colours in it, for example so it could be one colour icons, or multicolour icons.
How many of you are using icon fonts? Instead of SVGs, for example font is pretty common icon font library, how many of you are using icon fonts. That’s ok. (laughter).
I am trying to tell you about why you should make a switch to SVG icons system. So why? Because they are better. (laughter) in short. For example, Github switched away from font icons to SVG system, because it’s, you can serve your icons more easily, more quickly, it’s faster, and you can take account of accessibility stuff more easily and they do look better in any environment.
And you can have multicolour icons, you can animate the icons, you can control all with your icon with CSS and JavaScript. Just to name a few other good things about SVGs. So the next step is that where are you going to get SVG icons? Your first source is probably if you are pilling a custom site and you need going to need some custom icons in your site, or custom icons in your client sites, of course go to your designer. He is going to make them for you. Or if you need for example, the Twitter icons or Github icons, just go to a service called Icomoon, I personally use that one and you can keep track what kind of icons do you want to have in your project. Don’t load for example, all the font apps and icons in your customer site if you are only going to use 10 of them. Just pick the ones you want, and it’s going to export in SVG format, to you instead of using the font icons.
There is also a service called Font-Blast but I have not used that personally.
So in mark up how can you use the SVG icons, the first step you scan just use it like any other image. The SVGs are not exactly the images, they are XML format you can use it in same way, or you can use it as a background image in your CSS, in the same way as any image.
Both have the same kind of bad thing that you can’t control the CSS anymore, about the icon and this is probably something we want to do. in our CSS. Or you can drop the SVG code right into your HTML mark up, it could be hard to maintain those icons if you have like 100 of them, or little bit cleaner way is to use the php function called file get contents, and just it just take the same XML code format from there and put it in your mark up. That could be a little bit cleaner way to do it. But for the next 5 minutes I think I am going to talk about more about the stuff we build in 2017 theme. We use this inline SVG sprite technique in there. Which contains all of your icons it’s kind of easier to maintain.
So, what is SVG sprite, for example, I’m going to show you in the next slide what it can look like. First step is okay, you have one icon SVG file, that you can put in your folder, you can probably put it in your header also, but it could be a little bit faster if you put it in the folder. In 2017 we use the hook, the footer hook, you can probably just copy and paste in there if you want. The sprite file looks like this, it starts with the switch tag inside it, there is the symbol tags, you can lots of markers in it, you can use that ID, for example ID Twitter anywhere in your marker after that, for example I can, icon Twitter in my header check, just use this kind of HTML and it automatically imports the icon in that section, where you want it to be., so I noticed that icon Twitter in the red one here and the icon Twitter in here, so it gets the same ID. You can use the absolute path without injecting the sprite file in there, the only issue is it doesn’t work in the explorer, you have to use SVGXUZE, it could be a good way to use it, the cache works automatically, there is just one file in there, it works better in that sense. If you are wondering, is it easy or not to generate the icons, if you are already using Grant or Gulp, you have a task and it generates everything for you on the fly. So in 2017 look at the folder inc, in there there’s a php file icons function.php, I forgot the php part there look at that function, pretty much everything you need to know about twentyseventeen stuff is inside that function. For example, one of the most important functions in there is twentyseventeen get SVG function which is kind of a wrapper function that powers everything that is involved how to mark up is going to look like. It looks like this. If you check the template files there is lots of calls for twentyseventeen get SVG function, for example you want to have a Twitter icon some where you just call the function us then icon Twitter, it exhibits out the HTML pat for you. As you have notice in the red there is area hidden true but by default, but all the icons in the 2017 themes are security one they don’t need to be read by screenreaders for example, but that can be over written in the settings when they are read inside the function.
Another example social links menu it’s the same kind of a menu system that you used for your primary a menu but this for the social links but I just automatically works, it was originally written by Justin Tadlock. There is also a base CSS in style CSS which kind of resets everything back to normal and after that you can pretty much do anything you want with the CSS.
So, check the code, from the 2017ink folder icon function php file. Thanks. (applause).
DAN MABY: Thank you very much just ask you to stay here if I can ask the speakers to come back on the stage, if have we got any questions at all, we have got a few minutes available.
FROM THE FLOOR: Hello, I just had a note about SVGs so, I am here. I agree the ways.
I agree with what you mentioned about loading them, one thing I would notice, SVG, can have triangles, squares, flashing beds, script tags when you are looking for SVGs, it’s important to open them do a quick search and make sure nothing was snuck in there that might be a little untowards, I don’t know, do you have any recommendations on how to check that an SVG might be safe, is it more of a case for reportable source or are there tools that can automate that process, or functions that might do it you can take SVG from any source and no that the output is safe
SAMI KEIJONEN: I can’t remember the site name at the moment, that kind of strips everything off from the. XML files, I think you asked about it, that there could be some extra stuff in her, so there are sites that can kind of clean it up for you, I think also that Gulp or Grunt tools also have to clean it up for you, so you don’t have to do it manually, I’m not sure if that’s what you asked.
FROM THE FLOOR: I didn’t know the Gulp tools could do that, that’s good to know.
THE CHAIR: Anymore questions?
FROM THE FLOOR: Hi, I just have a question about the fall-back with the languages, if you have a German — informal, you don’t have a pack for that, if it’s not the German informal it’s the English, do you have something for that by default, it’s preferences, or a new feature that every admin has to buy for the website.
PASCAL BIRCHLER: So for the formal and informal languages, yeah, it’s kind of like a German problem, so as a user you can set the multiple languages, but the formal version would be like just one setting you could add to that and, yeah if it’s not available it would just load like the informal variant, and I think it makes sense, we are still in the exploring phase of looking at all the different sites and how they do that and I think for example on Facebook you can even say like how you want to be greeted, for example. So, there is even more to that, not just formal and informal.
FROM THE FLOOR: Hi. Yeah, my question is for the gentlemen on the far left, how easy is it to animate SVG icons, wouldn’t you see that as being a bit of a distraction on the website, where the users’ attention will be taken away from the main content?
SAMI KEIJONEN: Sorry I’m not sure I understand the question; do you mean that would it be easy to have SVGs in the content.
FROM THE FLOOR: I imagine having an SVG icon on say, like in the header of a page, whether it be a Twitter icon or something like that, you said you can animate them, did you not say that.
SAMI KEIJONEN: You can animate them, you can use the class that SVG can have, every icon will have the same class, called, “Icon”, then individual class called, “Icon Twitter”, for example, so you can animate by the class you have in there, or the animation could also mean that you have a custom icon that have, inside the SVG are different kinds of sections in there, and you can animate any part inside the SVG icon, for example, you have to, you have hamburger icon, you can animate that one, you just animate the SVG file, that’s like one example of how you can do it.
FROM THE FLOOR: Thank you.
THE CHAIR: Have we got anymore. Yeah.
FROM THE FLOOR: So a question to Pascal, thank you for your work on the language stuff. I was just wondering are there any plans or discussions for multilingual, yeah, put you on the spot?
PASCAL BIRCHLER: It’s a tough question, I think at last, like — 2015, they kind of asked a working group to explore how we can make it easier for plugins to enable sites to be multilingual, I think, kind of, like it’s nothing happening there anymore, so maybe we could maybe bring it back to life, it would be super cool. I don’t think there will be multilingual feature built into WordPress any time soon, but we can definitely make it easier.
THE CHAIR: Thank you, time for one more question.
FROM THE FLOOR: One question for Matt, first off, thank you for curating that list of plugins, it was really great when it comes to maximisation, is there a maximum number of plugins you would recommend installing at the same time.
MATT RADFORD: This is a perennial question, there was one plugin that I didn’t add in, that strips emojis, 538 bites that’s plug in then JETPACK, that’s a plug in it’s really not a question, I think, of how many plugins, because that’s, it an arbitrary amount of PHP code that you are adding to your site, so I think it’s a question of, if you notice things are slowing down or a particular plugin is doing a high number of queries or making the site unresponsive or under-performing, then you should target that one just like you would target any other bit of PHP code to make sure it runs properly. I would say there is no limit to — I mean there is 60,000 plugins out there, go nuts!! [Laughter] If your site stops, then maybe cut back a little! [Laughter]
THE CHAIR: Excellent, thank you very much, a big round of applause for the speakers, please. [Applause]. Okay, time for the next session, please don’t forget that there are additional T-shirts, please feel free to grab them as we go past.
Meg Fenn
Website Design Pain Points for Clients and How to Help Them Through it
Meg Fenn and Rachael Dines, Directors of Shake It Up Creative Ltd talk about the pain points that clients face when setting up their business website and how to help them through it. For example, one common pain point is content. Where to start? How much? Does it need to optimised? Another common pain point is deciding whether to manage their own website or pay a web designer or marketing company to do this for them. Do all business owners need to be techy?
VINEETA: Hello? Hello. We’re starting in two minutes so is that okay? Fantastic. So I’ll let Rachel and Meg start in the next two minutes. We’re starting in 1 minute. Okay 30 seconds. Okay I’m going to hand over to Rachel and Meg now, and they’re going to talk about website design pain points for clients how to talk them through it.
MEG: Hello everyone. I hope you’re enjoying the weekend so far. We certainly are. This is our first WordCamp ever, so we’re excited to be here. Our talk is not techy, so I hope you still enjoy it. My name is Meg and this is Rachel, my business partner. We are from Sussex and we run a design and marketing company called Shake it Up Creative. We’ve both been sole traders before as well, and we have over 15 years’ experience with all types of clients. Getting to know our clients and what drives them and their passions is part of our job, and it is something we really enjoy about our jobs. And for me in particular as web designer, it is my job to solve clients’ problems, so I have to work closely with them in order to help them find solutions.
So there is a fair amount of client management involved in what we do, and it is probably the same for a lot of you guys as well. So hopefully you’ll know what I’m talking about there, and we work with other developers and designers too, and the story is always the same. Our jobs would be so much easier if we didn’t have clients, but of course we have to have clients. We wouldn’t have a business if we didn’t have clients.
What do we mean by pain points? It is the concerns that clients have when getting their website built. So it could be anything to do with hosting or domain names, perhaps content, or maybe they’re not even really clear on who their target market is. Also, it could be about costs as well.
Sometimes it is not even about the website at all; it is about maybe an experience that they had previously with another service provider.
RACHAEL: For example, we recently started working with a mobile ice cream retailer, and they had actually already selected their web development partner, but they were concerned about their search engine rankings, and wanted to work with someone that understood they wanted to preserve, what they had, but also build on that and generate more visitors to their site, and they began to discuss some questions, and we talked them through how we would find the right data and how we would use that data, and how we would preserve what they had and build on their traffic over time. We gained their trust and they decide to switch, and we got the contract, and we’ve just built the site, which is brilliant.
Once we’d explained to them how we could do those things as we took that pain point away, they chose us and we got that business, which was fantastic.
MEG: Pain points will be different for every client.
When I was at university in the States, which is where I’m from originally, I took a class in my sophomore year called the philosophy of art 101. It was really intense and we studied Aristotle, et cetera, because actually I really don’t remember very much about that class at all. My main takeaway from that entire year, something that our professor told us, he told us how an artist sees a horse. So if you ask people, picture a horse, they’ll probably see something in their minds like this, an average horse. If you ask an artist, or we could say a designer, to picture horse they’ll see something more. They’ll see the details. They’ll see the muscles beneath the skin. They’ll actually hear the way the tail sounds when it swishes, they’ll see the wind and how it flows behind the neck, they’ll see the nostrils and how they flair. They’ll also see the shadows the horse makes when it moves, and the sheer beauty of this animal. And not just that, but they’ll see how it affects people.
Clients see a website. That’s their average horse. We see everything else. We see more. We see the details. So we see the design, the copy, the HTML, the CSS, the hex codes, plugins, blah blah blah, all that kind of stuff. We see everything and anything that has to do with the website, with user experience, with SEO, with marketing.
Our clients don’t see any of that, or most of them don’t. We could show them this. But that might not be the best idea because they might freak out and say, “Where do I start? I don’t really understand that. What’s going on here?”
Our job is to turn this into something that our clients will love, and be proud of.
RACHAEL: How much does a website cost? Great question. We know the answer. We hear that all the time, but sometimes we have to extract a little bit of information from the client first. What we really need is to get answers for the questions that potential clients don’t even know that they need to ask. We have to listen to them and solve their problems with a solution that also understands the value of their spend.
Even if you have a range of packages, it may not fit their needs. Of course sometimes you actually have to say no to a project, and learning to say no is really difficult.
MEG: How do we help our clients? You got to know your stuff. You got to gain knowledge and share knowledge. And you can do that by networking, talking to other developers, other designers, creators, innovators, by coming to conferences like this, by coming to WordCamp is a great way of gaining and sharing knowledge.
Be part of a business community in your local area. If there isn’t one, then create one. Create a group you can all go to. And share ideas and gain knowledge.
RACHAEL: My background is in marketing and PR, and when I worked in-house with developers they couldn’t see past the code. Not unless I was very specific with them. Their brain naturally focused on the functionality and not the aesthetics. So I learnt to discuss the aims and ideas behind the project, and build their understanding and just like we do now with clients.
MEG: I also put on the screen “confidence”, and I put that in capital letters because being confident in what you do and how you do it is really helpful for clients. Confidence is key here. Your client is looking to you for the answers. They’re looking to you to create what’s in their head that doesn’t exist yet. So you need to have the confidence in order to help them.
So hands up anybody knows what this is. I’m not sure how clear it is on the screen. Okay, it’s fine, it doesn’t really matter. It’s a work of art by Damien Hurst and it’s called Black Sun. I’m just going to give you a quick little story about when I was a kid in school. One day the teacher said everybody is going to draw a picture. What did the kids draw? Something they know, so everyone was drawing a house, a yard, the sky, a sun. I was doing that as well. I looked around the classroom and everybody’s sun was yellow, but my sun was blue because I liked blue. When the teacher came round I started to feel really like oh, everybody else’s sun is yellow, mine is blue. When the teacher got to me, I actually covered up my sun with my hands, and she came to me and looked down and physically pried my hands away from my drawing, and she tutted because I had a blue sun, so that did not make me confident. Your confidence may be knocked from time to time, and you may have your own blue or black sun. But going back to your passion and what you love doing, that will enable you to go from strength to strength and take your business forward. So don’t lose your confidence.
You need to find a balance between demonstrating your expertise and giving succinct explanations. You’ve quoted, you’ve itemised, you’ve nearly won the job. But your clients still have questions. From your quote and your conversations, the client has a better idea of what a website entails and knows that it’s not just a website. Some will want to understand more, others won’t really want to know the inner workings of it. You want to win the contract, of course, and once you do, you will want to build a good relationship with your client. That may have begun before they were even a potential client. Maybe you knew them from networking or something. With web design, you can demonstrate expertise while keeping it understandable. So break down the process for them. Tell them how you start. How you get started. Then what happens next. Then what happened after that. For example, some clients come to us, and even though we do graphic design, some clients come to us with a logo and brand details, all good to go. So we know we can tell them the next step is to focus on the content, the page structure, the page titles, all that kind of thing. Next will come the layout design, then after that the web build and so on. There may be other mini steps in between as well.
You can let them know the processes without getting bogged down with the technical.
RACHAEL: Who finds this question easy to answer? No? That must mean you all find it really tricky, because it is actually really hard to give an answer that’s easy to describe in one brief sentence. But the client needs to know this, and you need to know this, to create a website that serves them well and generates conversions. Help them work it out. Ask questions as if you were the customer. Challenge them to focus and prioritise. You can either consult together or alone, but if you skip this step, this pain point, then you’ll find the content becomes unclear and wishy-washy, and it won’t speak to the target audience.
Asking what they don’t want and what they don’t need and what they don’t like is actually really important. Don’t waste time including things that they’ve just forgotten to communicate to you. Extract the negatives as well as the desirables. We’ve asked this question many times, and the response has always been “Good question. Actually, I don’t want any blue on the website,” possibly, or “We don’t want to use any of those images from the old site, we need a whole fresh photography session booked.”
We wouldn’t know that if we didn’t ask, and it does help avoid disappointment and amends.
Make it clear what you will be doing, and make it clear what they will be doing. When information needs to be supplied, log-ins and content, we will talk a bit more about content later, guide them. Steer them in the right direction. Who is going to be the main point of contact? Break it down into stages, and schedule calls and meetings ahead of time.
It sounds obvious, but sometimes these things get forgotten and deadlines get missed. For larger organisations, we find that having one person as the main point of contact works best. Let them fight out over the options themselves, and come back to you with the answers, and not steal your time away from the project.
MEG: Your job as the designer is to solve problems, and the more you do this, the easier it will become, and the more you’ll have kind of those ready-to-go answers, and the more ideas you’ll have as well. So think of your clients’ challenges as your own challenges, go on their journey with them. Because then you’ll have a better understanding of what they need and what they want, and you’ll be better equipped to serve them.
So just to give you an example, this website here is a site for Headway West Sussex, which is a local charity that supports people affected by brain injury. And the challenge here was to create a website that was going to be understandable to the end user.
RACHAEL: We felt we needed to actually run a focus group. We attended one of their support groups where people that have unfortunately been affected by an acquired brain injury and their carers, or their family, attend and help each other and do activities and support each other.
We learnt there that we should avoid bright white backgrounds, and we toned it down to an off-white colour. We also learned that the curved edges around the boxes would help people digest the information and find things better, and that content in smaller chunks was better for them.
We wouldn’t know those things if we hadn’t have asked. We found the unknown information by running that focus group, as well as including the usual accessibility features like the AA text size.
MEG: Just real quick, this website is actually up for an award. It has been short listed for a digital award in Sussex and we’re really proud of that. Whether we win or not, it doesn’t matter, we were proud that we were chosen because we worked really hard with the client in order to achieve their goals. Here is another example. This website is for artist Carrie Sanderson and she actually built the website herself in WordPress, but she got to the stage in her business where she wanted to take it from a DIY look to a more professional looking website, and that’s where she came to us to help her. So it wasn’t a straightforward site build. We needed to first ascertain what it was she had already achieved, and then what it was she wanted going forward. And there were also cost implications as well.
RACHAEL: It is really important to build a good rapport with your clients and find out what really matters to them and what specific concerns they have. Talk to them and reassure them. They’re not buying a T-shirt in small medium or large. It could be a change of career for them, or it could be a company moving to get clients internationally. It is life, and it is emotions, and it is bigger than a website. So if they feel like they’re a problem, it will dull their enthusiasm for you as a supplier.
MEG: I don’t know if you’ve ever had this, but we’ve had clients cry because they’ve been so emotional about their website because it is actually not just a website, it is a life change for them.
And be flexible about how you communicate with your clients. Some will be find with e-mail, others will prefer face-to-face. Some people are just face-to-face people. You can minimise client pain points by communicating with them in the way they respond best. Not the way you respond, but the way they respond best. It may not always be convenient or cost effective or time effective to meet up face-to-face all the time. We just can’t do that, so that’s when things like video Skype and Google Hangouts can maybe be a solution.
Themes. There are lots and lots of themes, hundreds of themes. It’s probably best not to overload your client with all the different theme options out there. They often don’t even care, and they don’t really know that their website is actually running on a theme. It doesn’t matter to them. They just want it to do what they need it to do and to look great.
There may be times when a client does come to you and says, “I really want to use this thing”, so I put up on the screen the DV thing, you probably all know it. It is a very popular theme. This is the one that the clients have come to us and said, “I want to use this theme because I went on a course and that’s the one they recommended”, or “My friend has a business and she set hers up on DV, and so that’s the one that I want to use.”
That’s absolutely fine as well. Plugins too. Do not overload your client and say “Which plugins do you want?” Because they’ll look at you and say, “What’s a plugin?” You probably already have all the standard plugins you install on a website automatically like Jetpack, and things like that.
So you can help your client by just taking away those pain points and helping them through that.
You can buy a batch of themes, put up on the screen elegant themes, and Template Monster. There are so many out there. And then, based on whatever project you’re doing, choose the right theme for that project. And you just take that decision away from the client and you can always talk them through it and tell them what you’re doing, and be open about it, but they don’t necessarily need to choose it. If you say to a client you haven’t really worked with before “Go away and choose a theme”, you’ll probably never hear from them again because they won’t really understand what you’ve asked them to do.
Also, if there are cost implications with buying a theme or buying a plugin, let’s say they’re running an events website and they need a specialised events plugin, you can explain that they need this and the costs involved with it from the outset.
I have also just put up here one of the themes that we use all the time, is a theme called Weaver Extreme. It is just a good theme. It has everything you need. You can make the front-end look pretty much however you want, and it is a really good versatile theme we use all the time, and most clients don’t even no they’re using that theme.
It is going back to what we said before about building a really good rapport with your clients. They’ll trust you and they’ll trust your professional judgment.
RACHAEL: Start talking about content at the very beginning. Make sure that clients don’t leave this until the last job. Have clear expectations in the beginning, and schedule stages to come later. If a deadline is looming and you haven’t received any copy, pick up the phone, but also e-mail them as well. We’ve actually had plenty of happy clients, despite a late launch, because they know it was their fault and not ours.
MEG: Also talk about blogs. Are they going to have a blog or not? If they immediately say “Oh yes, yes, I’m going to have a blog. I’m going to blog all the time.” Really? Are they really going to have a blog? If they are struggling to get their content together for their “about” page, then maybe a blog is not the best idea, or unrealistic goal. Blogs are part of the overall marketing strategic. They need to be thought out and given time. There is time commitment with blogs.
We’re really thrilled and pleased when clients take on our recommendations and suggestions, and it makes a difference to their website or business. So we’ve had clients who, you know, have got — built up a really good following from their blog, after we’ve built it for them and showed them how to do it, and how to blog and done the content, planning and the strategy, done the training with them and everything. It is fantastic. We love that. We’ve also had clients who say: yeah, yeah, we’re going to blog as we go through the whole set-up and training and everything, and we have their plan, six months or a year plan, and then the site launches with maybe one or two blog posts and then they never never blog again.
RACHAEL: These are the things the client often doesn’t even know they need. They’re invisible to them. Make them aware they have to be there, but also actually help them create it. We’ve got template versions available for all these things, just to make it easier and they can use those and they can add to them if they have time later.
Often a client will view a development site on a PC or Mac and won’t really think about the end result that actually, their site is going to be viewed on mobiles and tablets and various browsers and screen sizes. They don’t really think about the fact that it is going to take a whole heap of time to jig things around to make it work on all these different browser sizes, so help them understand that, and that that’s part of what they’re paying for. Make sure they know that it’s going to be tested, and things are going to be altered, because that’s your job, and if they launch the site and then they view it on a mobile and it is not right, you can be sure that you’re going to get the blame for that.
MEG: If you don’t help your clients, the website won’t get done. Be flexible. Offer add-on services to help them get the website done. They might be stuck on the copy, they might not really have decided on the photos or don’t have photos. Perhaps they are not sure about the social media side of it and maybe they also need training.
So you could offer these services to help get the website done. If you can’t do them yourself, then you can help them find the right people to do it for them. It is going back to what I was saying before: build your team, come to conferences like WordCamp and find other people that you can trust and that you know will be helpful to your clients to offer the whole package and just get things done. What’s better: a website launching on time and empty with an unhappy client, or a website launching late and great and one you can put on your portfolio? So be flexible and help your client.
So why bother? Why is this important? What’s the big deal? You want and need client satisfaction. You want those Google reviews and testimonials and retainer clients and bigger clients. You want more clients. Helping client with pain points and solving their problems will help to build your reputation, gain clients, and make money.
So we hope you enjoyed our talk, last screen there. And I hope you feel ready to go out there and build your five-star reputation so you can take your business to the next level. Thank you very much. [applause]. Does anybody have any questions?
FROM THE FLOOR: Hi. I support what you said about single point of contact, that’s absolutely, yeah, we found that to be totally vital. One of the things that tends to clause is that they go off and disappear into an internal huddle. We’ve had projects go quiet on us for months and months, and we stop getting anything back. Any tips on that? What do you tend to do in that situation? Do you bother them all the time? Do you just say, “We’ll just invoice for everything we’ve done up to this point and leave it with you”? What’s your approach?
RACHAEL: Sometimes it does drag on, and it is really hard because you don’t want to be nagging them to the point of annoyance and losing them, and so you have to judge it on the type of client. Sometimes, if we’ve got stages of work in place, there will also be payment stages, and that does help. But obviously, you just want to get the project finished and out the door as best you can, so that’s really where the deadlines along the way come in. Not just waiting for those deadlines to come round, but also babysitting them a bit, and just reminding them “Actually in a week’s time this is going to happen. So have your meetings, get what you need to get done, and then come back to us.”
It is inevitable that some projects will just drag on and be out of your hands, but unfortunately, it is more of your time, but do everything you can to remind them and push them on with things.
MEG: Yeah, I think just to add one small bit to that, you just have to be very proactive with everything you do, especially when it comes to — yeah, patient as well. And sometimes it may be out of your hands. Like an example that we have been working on a website recently where the project manager is actually a different marketing company, and they’ve outsourced the web design and development to us. So we don’t actually have contact with the end client. So we’re reliant on the other marketing company, so we’re chasing the marketing company and the marketing company is chasing the other client, so it really depends on your client relationship and all of that. I hope that answers it.
FROM THE FLOOR: Hi, when clients come so enthusiastic to you for a new website, what is it, what’s the pain point with the content usually that makes them submit it so late?
MEG: They don’t have it.
RACHAEL: Yeah. It is normally if they’ve got to write it all from scratch. We will try and say that “Okay, just provide it to us in bullet points, and you can pay us to copy edit.” I’m copyright trained, so I’m willing to do that, but sometimes they’re very precious about their own content and will only handle it themselves and that’s the stumbling block for time, because they don’t realise exactly how much time it is going to take them. So I think sometimes if you know or have an idea that the client might be going that way, set the deadline a bit longer than you originally would, just for your build, because you know there might be a hold up on their end, and then obviously it’ll get to a point where it does become their fault, as it were, because they know they should have provided it to you on time.
MEG: A lot of clients are very visual and they cannot really imagine what the content is going to be, so maybe do a little bit of research and find other websites that have similar content or content structure and say: “Look these over, and this might give you a really good starting point to devise your own content.”
RACHAEL: We’ll come to you.
FROM THE FLOOR: Hi. I’ve got a 78-year old client who has just started a new business, and he has got — he had a Facebook page which I didn’t know about, and he asked me to do a website for him. I know he has been using Facebook for his other businesses, so instead of having a blog page, it’s a good idea to just put in a plugin called Facebook feed, and make that a menu item on his website, just a point, for news, and that just shows his Facebook feeds so that’s an idea if anybody wants to.
MEG: That’s a good idea. We’ve done that for a couple of clients as well. We have a client who is a pilates teacher, and she has a phobia of technology, and pretty much the only thing she can manage is the Facebook page. And when we were talking about blogs and stuff I could tell that that was just going to — she was just going to go home and go into dark room and lie down and stuff. So we suggested exactly what you said, and it works really well for her, so thank you.
FROM THE FLOOR: Hi. You’ve said you prefer to deal with an individual person in a company rather than have a whole committee bombarding you. How do you divide your side of the communication with clients up amongst yourselves and how have you developed that method of working?
RACHAEL: That’s an interesting question. We tend to have one of us as the lead project manager, and that depends what functions it requires. So really, my part of the business tends to be the marketing, PR, copywriting at search engine optimisation, whereas if it is any graphic design and web build or social media, then it is Meg. But it also can depend on where that client came from. So if it is a contact, perhaps Meg has met them networking, but this is marketing, it might make more sense. They might feel more comfortable to deal with her as the lead, but they may get communications from me as well. As long as the client knows, I feel it can work either way. It does for us, certainly.
VINEETA: Any more questions? How do clients react when you say, “We want one point of contact?” Do they like it? Because some struggle with that.
RACHAEL: It depends on the client set-up, because if it is not immediately clear, or if they have several people in the same function, it can become a bit of a bun fight for them to actually want that job or not want that job, depending on the situation. But it just has to be the case, because things have dragged on and past experience has led us to that conclusion where that is the best way forward, and if you’ve got too many people, you’re getting different answers for things, and you get passed around the houses, it is too difficult and you have to.
MEG: As long as you set out with a good plan and structure, it is never going to go smoothly, and it is always going to be different depending on the project. We work with a lot of charities and non-profits, and they make their decisions by committee, and a lot of those committee members and board member leave and new ones come in. So it is really hard to maintain that one point of contact all the time with those types of clients.
RACHAEL: Thank you.
MEG: Thank you. [applause].
Owen Cutajar
How WordPress Malware Works and How to Clean an Infected Site
A talk about keeping WordPress secure, how sites get infected and how to clean them when they do.
MARK WILKINSON: Come in, find yourself a seat. Afternoon. Got your water, had some of that delicious cake, the Victoria sponge was rather nice, plenty of seats.
Just a few announcements, just to tell you the dinner tonight will be slightly later, at 7.30, if you are sharing something on social media, please hashtag it with WCLDN and don’t forget to collect your event T-shirt if you have not done so.
So, our next talk is from open, on WordPress malware. So, open has built his career, on the understand and dissect organisational challenges, he’s been WordPress since version 2, which I think was in 2005 so really experienced and he’s a certified ethical hacker, over to you open on WordPress malware.
OWEN CUTAJAR: There goes my introduction, my first slide would be an introduction, that’s done.
Hello everyone, I hope you enjoy what I prepared for you today, I decided to talk about malware in WordPress, because it’s a problem that effects a lot of people, I’m sure some of you may have come across some problems, we’ll talk about those in a bit. The first time I had a website that was affected by malware, you end up being in this black hole where you don’t know what’s going on, you don’t know what to do, you don’t know who to call, it’s especially true five or six years ago, where these things were emerging, these day they are an everyday occurrence.
What we will be seeing in these slides is how malware works, what to lookout for and what to do to avoid it the reality is that it’s not rocket science, malware at the end of the day is just code, code in the same type of code that WordPress is, if you understand what it does and how it does it then there are steps you can take to avoid it.
So, just a quick show of hands round the table, does anyone remember the joy of the first WordPress site and how great it looked? This was, this was one that we created recently, looked fantastic, client was really happy, everybody was raving, woke up one day and the site looked like this. Has anyone had an experience like this, can I have a show of hands? Okay.
Has anyone not had that experience? Okay, that’s good that there are some hands in the room.
Now according to the FBI, there are two types of companies, those who have been hacked and those who will be. Some people actually made this a bit more scary, saying those companies that have been hacked and those that don’t know they have been hacked yet. The reality is there is an element of scaremongering over there, the community has been very good at getting people aware of the problems of the internet, the realities that there are out there, the bad people out there, they live around us in the way we do, there are things that we do that make us more susceptible to be attacked, if I walk down a dodgy alley way at 4am, carrying a big bag of gold, your kind of expect that something bad will happen to you.
So, why are the WordPress sites affected, why do people do it? The first reason that people do it is for profit or propaganda, there is some really money to be made for attacking websites, teams, companies and bad guys that do this for financial gain, so, let’s say for example, I run an e gaming website, the e-gaming website makes thousands of dollars per hour, if somebody can take my site off-line they can then hold me to ransom and ask me for actual cash for actual money to get my website back.
If somebody has got some sort of propaganda agenda, you know, there is some sort of pressure group, they can deface my website if I have a popular website and their message is being spread; so, there is some real reasons why people do these things.
When WordPress, why WordPress though, WordPress is an attractive target for a couple of reasons: the main one, specifically — whoops… the main reason why WordPress is so attractive is because there are literally millions of WordPress websites out there, if somebody finds a way to break in too WordPress site they can apply the same methods to another site, to another site, to another say and literally affect half the web if they wanted to.
There is also a problem with WordPress, if you have an old version of WordPress, if a site was built for you and you never maintained it, your version of WordPress tends to get outdated, as people find vulnerabilities and problems with it, your site becomes more susceptible to being attacked.
Because of the way WordPress works, there are a number of, large number of plugins and themes that live on WordPress, it becomes a large surface of attack, there are literally thousands of themes, if I don’t find a bug in WordPress, I can find one in a particular theme that will give me access to somebody’s website.
So, I’m going to talk a bit about the types of attack that you tend to find on WordPress sites and these are a bit more general, talking about attacking sites in general, so WordPress is just a small class of those.
You get targeted attacks, the example I mentioned before of an e-gaming website or a bank where hackers go out and naturally target a specific site, it tends to be a very sophisticated attack. Most of us have WordPress sites that kind of don’t fall in to that category, but I just wanted to mention, it’s one class of attack you can find with targeted attacks, hackers and attackers try to find out more information about the site, more information about the person that runs it, more information about the person who uses it, to try and get access into that, there are different types of attacks like social engineering, monitoring people, we’re not going to talk too much about those today.
Another type of attack are password cracking, so one problem that WordPress used to have in the past that the default user name used to be, “Admin”, you still find a lot of installs that use the word admin as a user name, if I use the admin user name then I’m halfway there in taking control of that site, all I have to do next is guess the password you can actually download programmes that have dictionaries of common passwords, normal dictionary words that can hit your sites a hundred times per second to try all the different user names and passwords, they are called brute force attacks.
Another kind of attack, is DDOS attacks, DDOS are attacks, they are distributed denial of service attack, it’s a type of attack that is used, uses a number of different computers or people around the world hitting the same website, as you know a website runs on a web server that uses resources to serve pages. If you have one, two, three people hitting a website at the same time it will take one to three seconds to load if a thousand people hit at the same time, the web server will slow down and eventually slow to a crawl, it is, DDOS attack you have thousands of attacks at the same time, basically killing the website with the amount of load on it. With DDOS attack there is pretty much we can do from a WordPress site to prevent that but there is measures that we can do to prevent that, I’ll mention that in a second.
What we will talk about today malware, it’s specifically types of programmes designed to take over a site, to use your site for some other reasons, there is difference classes of malware, some you might have viruses and worms that run on your computer, on your desktop, but we are specifically going to talk about the ones that run on the WordPress.
So, just to go into a bit of terminology over there, viruses and worms are types of programmes that attack different systems, they typically have two types, they have a spreading mechanism and they have what’s called the pay load, i.e. what does it do, what does it actually attack, the computer.
A trojan horse is something that we need to talk about also, trojan horses are programmes that masquerade as one thing and then do something completely different, the reason I mention them there is a bit of a problem where people decide, ooh, here is a plug-in a premium version, don’t want to pay for the premium version, I’ll go to a dodgy website and download it for a free, it’s a very popular attack vector that people use, they can embed code in the pirated version of that software, if you are using gravity forms for example, what this has done is set up a back door on your site for the people to access.
The last two terms we are going to, that I want to define as Botnet and Malnet, a Botnet is number of different computers under the control of one hacker, so when you are launched a distributed denial of service attack you don’t just have one machine attacking you have thousands of machines they’re called the Botnet. Botnets look at a central point, the command control centre, it’s that central point that tells them what to do. A Malnet is something, similar to that, but rather than taking down a site, what Malnet do is try to distribute malware’s, I’ve come to those and how they work in a little bit.
So, there is different types of attacks, you might find, on WordPress sites, so the attack you saw before is called a day facing, and that’s where content is changed on a particular site, you wake up one morning and your website looks completely different. Is the is a good type of de facing, soon as you look at the site you know there is something wrong with it, but if someone is more subtle and actually goes in and changes some of the word on a site, they can actually cause real problems for companies that haven’t noticed that their site has been taken down, so for example if I change some of the terms and conditions on the site, if I put up illegal information on that site, could cause really problems for a company who doesn’t know that their site has been de-phased. Another attack is spam attack, they load content on a to a site that effectively redirects people to spam. It was a particular attack that happened a couple of years ago and what you can see over there, is that those searches are coming off number of different WordPress sites and what has happened was that a set of, a Malnet had attacked WordPress and had injected all this content all over the web. So, if you Google for, “Pharmaceuticals’, you end up with all the WordPress sites pointing at the particular dodgy website that sold pharmaceuticals.
There is another attack where the computer downloads software that harms your computer, nowadays, browsers are very good at identifying it, you get a warning rather than a download, if you don’t have the latest version of windows with the latest updates on it, you are still susceptible to this style of tack.
Back doors, are another interesting attack, with back doors a malware, a piece of malware will drop a piece of code on to your website that then let’s somebody else come along and take control and two things on that website, whether it’s loading pieces of code that don’t interest you, or loading actual dangerous things for other people to download.
Another type of attack, which is actually quite sneaky, is where redirects and embeds are actually added to your site, so the problem with this, most of the time you don’t notice that there is something wrong with your site, so on the top example over there, there is actually an i frame in the web content over there, it’s loading content from another site, that iframe is hidden so anybody hitting the website will not notice that there is a piece of code over there and pages being loaded. However, that could be dangerous code that could try and download something on your machine or could actually be making the person who put it over there, some sort of money in terms of advertising revenue from showing that content on your set.
The second one over he is a bit more sneaky, what it does, if somebody types the name of your website in Google and end up on your website, it actually redirects them off to other websites that will try and download you porn or sell you a subscription to something on your computer. If you try and type in the name of your website on your computer and go straight to it, it shows you the site normally. So, what it’s doing over here, there is a condition that says, “If the referrer is Google or Yahoo, redirect off the other site”, but if you just navigate around you wouldn’t notice there is something wrong, a pretty sneaky way of doing things.
So, how does this malware end up on your WordPress site? The first entry point is exploits and vulnerabilities. Over time people have discovered problems with WordPress code, plugin code with theme code. These, these vulnerabilities are called [Inaudible] those remain, holes for people to add code to the website, to load malware on to your website., so there was a really interesting one recently where there was a problem with WordPress and it got disseminated by a hacker group before WordPress themselves had a chance of patching the code and the number of sites got de faced before an update was put out.
Soon as a patch comes out, soon as the maker of a plug-in for example finds a vulnerability in his plugin he will release an update to it, if the update isn’t applied straight away it’s vulnerable to attack if you managing your site and you are running updates often, that’s not a problem, but what tends to happen in the world, is that a client comes along, you build a website for them, they go off into the sun… into the distance and go off on to the horizon and you never hear from them again, three years later they call up and go, “My site has been hacked”, and you realise they have never updated their software, they’re running a version of WordPress that is three years’ old with plugins that would turn your hair white.
So patching your software is extremely important. Secure credentials, does anyone in here have a password that is ‘password’? Those are the sort of things you find on these brute force attack things. A lot of you laughed when I asked if you had a password called password, but I am going to ask you another question do you have a user name and password that you use on more than one website, most people will say yes to that there are so many websites out there, unless you are using a password management package, you will have to use the same user name and password otherwise you will never remember what to do. This is one place that can be extremely dangerous specially if you are building websites for other people that could provide a key into that place. We keep hearing of companies who have got hacked and their user password database has been leaked, that’s a problem in itself. It’s a bigger problem if you use those user name and passwords on other places, because there’s botnets out there that are trying actively trying to use that to login names and passwords on different sites round the web.
The big problem on WordPress sites, especially if you are running on shared hosting is a compromised host. So, if you are running on a supplier on oven door who is hosting you who doesn’t have proper controls in place who’s put you in the same place as you whole bunch of other people if one of those sites gets compromised malware will try and spread on to other websites on the same machine, and you can find that you are following all best practices, you are keeping your software up-to-date but your sites still gets compromised. This is a big problem, especially for people who choose hosts based on price usually because the reason a host can be quite cheap is because they can put hundreds of websites on to the same container, shall we call it. The problem is that those can all see each other and malware can spread from one to the other.
So, I have got some code samples of what man we are actually looks like. Now if you don’t code in PHP this will be a bit over your head but I will explain what it is as I go along.
So, here is what a typical piece of infected code looks like. Looks like gobbledegook doesn’t it, what we have at the top there is an instruction to PHP, to execute a piece of code. The second instruction over there base 64 decode it’s what converts this gobbledegook into code. So, if we take that gobbledegook and stick it into this website over here, so I have got gobbledegook in that window over there, and this website will decode from base 64. If I click decode, what I end up with the bottom over there is a chunk of PHP code. That’s really tiny, don’t try to read it, what I have done is actually stuck it in here and added some comments. So, what that code does, is if you don’t know PHP just look at the comments at the top over here. The first thing is does I try to make itself read write by anyone, that means that somebody can come along later and override that file with some other code. But then what it does is something really clever. It hooks into WordPress, so I can be the WordPress database, it looks at what query string it has and then search the WordPress database for that user name. If it finds a user with that user name, it writes a cookie on the person’s machine, saying this user name is logged in then redirects to the admin page, of that website.
So, if somebody manages to get that code on your server if somebody knows a user name of your website, what’s that done? It’s let that user log in without knowing the password of that user. So, this is code actually taken off a compromised website, just to show how this stuff works. It’s not magic it’s smart, but it’s not magic. You know what it’s doing, it’s fine.
Just going to show you some other bits of code if I can minimise this … ok here’s another chunk I have got my gobbledegook at the bottom it’s decoding it and compressing it. This has a lot more code though. So, we’re not going to walk through it but you can imagine what kind of damage that can do.
Ok. Just showing you another one. Does anyone recognise this type of file? It’s a WordPress config file. But what’s interesting about it, is that at the top, someone has injected a whole chunk of code in there. Ok so as that has been added to the w config file does anyone know when the w config file is loaded? It’s loaded every page request. So that means every time somebody calls one of you pages, that chunk of code is executed.
So, I think I will stop there. on these. So, let’s jump back into here … so I have cot some samples over there, what I will do is put these up so if anyone wants to download the slides you can get those codes also. I have linked off to two websites that can help you decode and execute PHP.
Now, was it dangerous my looking at the code on my machine? My machine is not running WordPress, that is fine there is not the stuff that I needed for that code to run, but you have to use these things responsibly, you have to know and be aware of the damage they could cause. The nice thing about snippets I showed you is that they are old exploits, old worm and malware, any proper detection software will pick them up. The big problem I had, I had to turn off my anti-virus otherwise that wouldn’t have shown.
So how do we clean an infected website? There’s two ways. There’s manual way of going in and finding all the bits of code that have infected your site and removing them and that’s what we used to do in the old days. Nowadays there’s a number of security plugins that can do that for you and what I wanted to do is to demo one of these. The one I like using is one called Wordfence, I don’t work for them but they have saved my backside a number of times. So, showing you I have had a website running for the last few months without being updated just so I could use it for this. So, this is an example of Wordfence running on an infected site. Ok, so Wordfence will do a number of different things. That’s going to be too small to see, but I am just going to read some of the things it’s done.
One of the main things that Wordfence does which is really, really, really useful is it looks at all the PHP files on your server, then compares them against the WordPress repository, if it notices there been any change on any of them it goes oh you have got a problem over here. That is very, very useful, there’s no chance of something hitting your server and you’re not noticing it. It’s also scans for any files that shouldn’t be there. So, if there’s a file over there called ABC.PHP it’s not part of the WordPress core it will raise attention about that. There’s some interesting things that checks your .htaccess file, it also checks I don’t know if you have ever opened Chrome up on to an infected site you get a big red window saying this site is flagged as being infected. It also checks that list to make sure that other people don’t have any warning signs on your site. And all this can be done automatically you can schedule this to run every night and email you if there’s any problem, that’s why I like Wordfence. What it’s found over here it’s found a couple of problems. My WordPress version is out of date, it’s found a malicious file called index3. php, and it’s found something dodgy in my WordPress config file. Now ok, again the nice thing about word fence it gives you a one click so I have here got a file that’s malicious let’s have a look at this file.
So, looking at this file, into that again, so this is that second piece of malware I showed you before. Get content blah blah blah. So being an extra file I don’t really need that, so I am just going to delete this file. Wordfence cleans that up for you. I have got my wp config file again has some malicious code in there. Now in this case I don’t want to delete my file because if I delete wp config it will delete my server I need to believe that manually. It also warns me if there are other things that need up-grades. The nice thing about Wordfence it’s all the checks it does so sorry just to run top window … so over here there’s a list of the all the checks it does. So, it scans file contents for infection and vulnerabilities, that’s where it found something. But it also scans URL and Google safe list’s scans for weak passwords, and scans for another thing over there. So, it you’re not quite sure what you are doing but you are sensitive to fact your site could be hacked then just running one of these security plugins is a good idea, because it tells you if you need help or if you don’t need help.
So, this is the free version of Wordfence and is available to download off the WordPress plugin store. Ok. Switching back …
So, what do we need to do to protect our sites? There are some simple things we can do to make sure we don’t get caught out. Automatic updates in my mind are a necessity. Unless you are checking your sites every day, every week, every month to make sure you’re not running old versions of plugins if you can automate that and since WordPress 4.7 or 3.7, in WordPress nowadays you can automatically schedule updates. This could create a problem for you from a testing point of view because technically you should always test your site after you upload any updates so doing it automatically may cause changes you’re not aware of but which is the bigger risk? Security plugins I mentioned wordfence before, I don’t have any website without Wordfence on it just to get alerted if something is there. External scanning is always useful. So, there’s a few websites out there where you can give the URL of your site it just scans to see if there’s anything wrong with it. There’s a number of free options around out there, there’s no reason not to do it.
User education is paramount so why should users have strong passwords? It’s annoying because you have to stay remembering them, but the downside of not having a good proper password and a password changing system can be bad for the site. You can even implement what’s called two-factor authentication, which means that you need some sort of device like a phone that gives you a code log in, there’s plugins that help you do that. Backups are really important, so if you site gets compromised a backup is the best way to bring it back. Another thing you can implement is SSL on the log in page so information you’re in a public WiFi spot for example, and you are typing in a password there no chance of anyone eavesdrop on that.
So, these are some basic things that shouldn’t be too hard to implement but I hope you guys take as a some advice moving forward. To close off, here are some references that you might find useful. There’s a vulnerability database that currently lists 6600 vulnerabilities for WordPress, there’s a link to Wordfence the plugin I mentioned before. Securi is one of these external scanning solution, CloudFlare as a free offering to let you put SSL on your site if you want to a here’s my contact details if anyone has any questions. But I think we have got some time for questions? (applause).
MARK WILKINSON: We have got a few minutes for some questions I’m sure you have got lots of things to ask we have got a couple of mic runners if you could raise your hand if you have a question a can I mic close to your mouth. Any questions?
FROM THE FLOOR: Hi there, you recommended automated updates, how would that compare to say, disabling the ability to edit the files, like a file system level.
OWEN CUTAJAR: There is different options around things, disabling the files umm… certain parts of the website are going to need access, if you look at your wp uploads for example, you are going to need to be able to write into that, so if one of your plugins can write into that area then there is still an option for somebody to execute that, especially if there is a way around the execution. What you really want is defence and depth, not just one way of preventing somebody attacking but the more things you can layer on, the better. With automatic updates you can also config it so it only updates minor versions for you, so you don’t have the big changes when WordPress jumps from one version to another, in my mind security patches should always be applied, there is no yes or no on that.
FROM THE FLOOR: Okay, thank you.
MARK WILKINSON: One that front here.
FROM THE FLOOR: Just wondering have there been any incidents on, random ware. Where the entire thing gets encrypted.
OWEN CUTAJAR: So, there are I’m not aware of any on WordPress sites, I do know that banks, e-gaming companies and Fox, I think there has been number of places that have been held under ransom from various attacks, one thing I mentioned was cloudflare a DDOS providers, if you set up the site behind cloudflare, when you turn on the services it’s always programmed to do that, there are companies like cloudflare that are designed to mitigate against those DDOS affects, there is a group, anonymous, six months a year ago, doing a big thing about DDOS, saying big names, essentially.
MARK WILKINSON: We’ll just go over there and then come back to you.
FROM THE FLOOR: Out of curiosity, what’s the biggest source of those snippets injections? PHP snippets… plugins?
OWEN CUTAJAR: You need somebody to write the code so you kind of need somebody to come up with the idea how does this happen, you kind of get hacking groups that actually compete against each other, the next thing is how does that serve end up on your server, those exploits or compromised code I mentioned before, if you look at WordPress vulnerabilities for example, I’m just going to take you out to the vulnerability database, there is number of vulnerabilities over here, some of which will allow writing on to a server, for example. There was a big one around two years ago, a plug-in called in the thumb, an image, there was a plug-in that used that to resize images, all those plugins were vulnerable for people up loading random fails to people’s web servers, because of the flaw in tin thumb, the funny thing was it had been used for years before that, but someone discovered a vulnerability. Someone might say, the problem with using WordPress is everybody is looking for vulnerabilities for it, let me use this other software that no one has had of, it’s better to use something that everybody else is using and then soon as a vulnerability is found it’s patched, then to use something on the assumption that no one is using this, it won’t be attacked, it’s the whole Open Source ethos that it can be tested and patched and released for everyone to use.
FROM THE FLOOR: I have a question actually. You mentioned about the Wordfence checking against WordPress as to when something is injected into the config file, our setup uses version control we slightly enter the config file, it’s not the default, would that always flag up in Wordfence as a problem, is there a way to say don’t check that file.
OWEN CUTAJAR: There is number of configuration settings that set to what to do or not to do, if you’re running an older version of something you need to make sure that all the security patches have been applied on that.
MARK WILKINSON: Okay.
FROM THE FLOOR: Hi, I’m Yanis, not as much WordPress but a bit more generic, something that I noticed recently is Google Analytics spamming, I don’t know why they do it, but it really excuses Google Analytics, do you have any idea about that, do you know anything about it.
OWEN CUTAJAR: People are chucking, loads of it, Google spam, analytics spam, whoever is looking at that can click on those links and go and look at something, I can imagine they’re very effective, but I don’t know what your attitude towards WordPress comments and the spam that lives around that whole echo system is, I’m still getting even though I use a kiss met I’m still getting lots and lots of spam, I’m sure no one is clicking on those links they must be, 0.01 of effectiveness, other ways they wouldn’t do it anymore.
The problem width on-line security there is lots of people out there, launching these attacks, because they have got time on their hands, because they can get something out of them, it’s a very in balanced thing, when you are defending a site you are defending against a whole host of different things, a big imbalance between the effort to attack and the effort to defend, that’s why this whole sphere is taking off. The great thing nowadays that plugins like bullet-proof, like Wordfence make it easier for people who don’t need to understand what is going on to defend themselves. In the past it was much, much harder.
MARK WILKINSON: We have time for one over there.
FROM THE FLOOR: Hi, I am Eva, I’m from Poland and I seen on WordCamp Poland list here a presentation where a guy showed it’s really easy to hack the WordPress plugin because it’s not very, because it seemed like the alphas of the plugin didn’t know how to correctly use WordPress hooks so it’s really easy to cheat this plugin so that you feel you are very safe but it’s not very, not, it is not really the truth. So, what I would recommend is to be very careful because no plugin can make you feel or be actually safe if it comes to any attacks, so it’s always better that they can be, to think that they only your help, not to be very — not to rely on them. So…
OWEN CUTAJAR: So yeah, the risk is not for everyone in the same way I can walk out of here and be run over by a car. If you are going to be on-line you are going to be a target. But if you follow good practice, you are reducing the risk of everything you do reduces the risk of anything bad happening. If you do things like taking back-ups, making sure passwords are secure, running on the latest version of software, it doesn’t mean you are never going to be hacked but it reduces it considerably. A lot of people were surprised by the most recent exploits in WordPress where people could go in deface websites, it spreads so quick that people were looking at the post revisions and seeing one group defacing, another group defacing and this was before WordPress has a chance to release a fix for the exploits. But the security in numbers, the fact that you were all using the same platform, the fact that there are tools to sort out these problems helps reduce the risk of what we are doing.
MARK WILKINSON: Last question up here.
FROM THE FLOOR: Apologies if you have covered this, but can this nasty stuff get in your database, if it does is there a different strategy to fix it?
OWEN CUTAJAR: When you say database, do you mean WordPress database?
FROM THE FLOOR: Yes.
OWEN CUTAJAR: Yes, I have had one case, this was a couple of years ago, pre-this, where a piece of malware, instead of just changing the team file and defacing the site, actually wrote the spam pharmaceutical links straight into the content of the database, which meant that the only way to eradicate it was to run Search & Replace against the database or know in and change the posts one at a time, it was a nightmare to fix, so prevention is always better than cure.
THE CHAIR: Thank you, let’s have a round of applause. [Applause]. So, we have got a short break, next in here is a panel discussion about building customer theme it should be really interesting. Grab yourself a coffee. Just to remind you dinner is slightly later at 7.30.
Monique Dubbelman
The Importance of Information Architecture: How to Organise Content to Improve User Experience
The most important factor for people in web design is, that it makes it easy for them to find what they want. Yet, so many websites are so poorly structured, that it’s impossible to do so. If you want to learn what content should be on your site or how your menu should be structured: this talk is for you.
Information architecture is something serious, however, the majority of businesses have structured their sites in an bad way, using the ITTIR-method – “I think this is right”. While common sense is a useful tool and a lot of sites are very simple (e.g. 5 pages total), there’s a better way to go about it. If you already have tens of pages on your site, you should do proper information architecture analysis. Guiding people through the vast amount of information on offer is something that requires thought and research. Intuitive navigation doesn’t happen by chance. So don’t jump the visual part of of your webdesign too quick, but take plenty of time to think about the architecture of the information you offer on your site.
This helps you answer user’s four most important questions when they arrive at a website:
After this talk you’ve learned what content should be on your website and how you should structure it.
More resources from Monique can be found at https://www.boemedia.nl/resources-information-architecture/?lang=en
VINEETA: Hello, Everyone had a good lunch? I hope you’re not too sleepy because Monique has a really fantastic talk lined up, she is here from the Netherlands, all the way, and she is the first speaker this afternoon and will be summarising how important information architecture is in websites and in web design projects. She has a degree in applied — sorry, she has a degree in — sorry, you’ve got a degree in information management and you’re going to talk about information architecture.
MONIQUE: Thank you. Can everybody hear me? Okay, welcome to my talk on information architecture. This morning I sort of woke up, that’s what happens when you do your first WordCamp talk, and I thought: ooh, I’ve picked the most unsexy subject on earth. It is. We all want to jump to graphical design because my background is in graphical design, but I’m really pleased for this.
So yeah, be kind. It is my first talk. I’ve got a lot to share so let’s hit the road. This is me, one of my favourite pictures, you can find it all over the Internet. I once got turned down for a freelance job because people thought they couldn’t take me seriously having this as a profile picture. I think it is a good shift on picking the customers that fit you. At present since 1971 and self-employed since 2007, first starting off doing a web shop on organic gardening, and I’ve been using WordPress professionally since 2011. So, as I said, my background is in graphical design, graphical engineering. I’ve done a lot of marketing over the years, and communications, and, well last year I got my degree on information management, and actually that’s where it all comes together, for me.
So in this talk I will cover what it is, why it is important, at least why I think it is important, what information systems are, and how to do good information architecture, which I think is the hardest part of my talk. But let’s start out with what it is. A great deal of the information I got from my talk comes from this book, Information Architecture for the Web and Beyond. I think it is an excellent book as a starting point. It digs into the subject really, really deep. So if you’re interested in this, get the book.
Wikipedia has a very extensive definition on what information architecture is, people often confuse it with the navigation of the website, but it is a bit more than that. I will save you from the long definition but in short, I think this what it is all about. The architecture of a website makes the information findable and understandable, which I think is important as well.
So, about finding and managing. Findability is a critical success factor overall for usability, because if users can’t find what they need through a combination of browsing, searching, and asking, well, the system actually fails, but you also need to think organisations and people that manage the information. That’s an important aspect as well. I was going to treat you to a nice video of this library, The Two Ronnies, famous couple, maybe the English people know it. They’re in a library where the books are sorted by colour, and it is going to show that is not really working for everyone.
What I really liked about the book I mentioned earlier, they gave this example of iTunes, and they share a story about two people working on a building, and the story has this metaphor of a minister passing by, and he looks at these two guys who are laying bricks. And he asks them, like, the first person “What are you doing?” And the guy says, “Well I’m laying bricks.”, obviously. And he asks the second person and he says, “What are you doing?” He says, “Well I’m building a cathedral.”
The minister is really impressed with the answer of the second guy, and he keeps thinking about it, and he decides to go back to the building site the next day to ask more about this guy who was building this cathedral. And he is gone. And there’s only the one guy laying bricks. He says, “Where’s your colleague? I want to ask him more questions about the cathedral”.
And he said, “Yeah he got fired because he thought he was building a cathedral but we’re building a garage, actually.”
That’s what you should think about before you start designing a website. Are you building a garage or are you building a cathedral? Or are you just laying bricks? ITunes, they mention in the book, is a good example of a garage that turned out as a cathedral in the end. First, it was a management system for just your local music, then you could buy music, then you could get podcasts, videos, whatever, but the original architecture of iTunes wasn’t really made for all these functionalities and as well, when you look at iTunes on your phone, well, no music on iTunes there. You’ve got this app called music and an app called podcasts, so it is all in different sections, and there’s not really an overall experience that gives you the same experience with iTunes on your computer or on your phone.
So that’s what’s called system thinking. Think about your website as part of a system, and give people the same experience on all platforms that you use it, in real life or online.
The next section is why it is important. Small joke there. I first had information gap, but I was at the tube when I saw “Mind the gap” and I thought: oh, I can use that. Why is it important? Well we suffer from information overload. That’s not a new thing. It has been a problem of centuries. People were complaining about too many books like ages ago, and actually, the phrase “Information overload” was popularised by this guy Alvin Toffler in 1970, before I was born, in a book called Future Shock. But it has really become a problem, the growth of information is disputed by computers and the Internet as well, and you can imagine that the findability techniques by the end of the 20th century are not really effective today.
So when you look at information architecture it actually covers three sections in this diagram. That’s context, content and users. And when you make decisions on the information architecture they will help you ask the right questions to your clients.
The first thing to start with is the context. Without the context, it doesn’t really have a meaning to design a website. So whether explicit or implicit, each organisation has mission goals, strategy, stuff, processes and procedures.
They also have physical and technology infrastructure, budgets and culture. So this mix of capabilities is issued each to organisation and that’s why you have to look into the context every time and the key to success is alignment, like I said before, and websites really should reflect the organisation because you don’t want your website to look like a competitor, do you?
The second part, there’s no website or information architecture without content, and when you look content from the information architecture perspective, think about these six things: the ownership, who creates and owns the content? And don’t forget the management of the content. What types of documents will there be?
The structure, and think about some structural mark-up, like XML to exchange with other tables. The metadata very important for structuring, and to what extent will it describe the content in your system? And what is already there?
The volume of the content, as well. Think about growth. Is the information that’s there now, will it still be there in a few years’ time, or will it be a lot more?
And at last, how dynamic is the content? Will it grow old very quickly or — well, you think about the age of the content as well, when you think about dynamism.
This is actually what I was thinking about when I was thinking about information architecture. And as well, with people who design websites, I find myself guilty of that as well. You think you know it better than your users do. Well, you don’t.
Does anyone know what these paths are called in English? Design lines. The Dutch have a far better word for that. Anyone know the Dutch term? Elephant lanes. Maybe the Dutch think they’re elephants. I don’t know where it comes from. There is a great book with all pictures of elephant lanes, but it really pictures that the designer thought a different thing than what the users would do, and maybe elephants are smarter and taking the shorter route, or I don’t know, they’re heavy to sort of make the hole in the grass.
But remember, when you design, you’re not your user. And Crispin Reed was talking about that this morning, as well, he was talking about hippos, and I’ve mentioned in my introduction of this talk that ITHR method. I don’t think this is right in stages. What you think looks nice, is the best option, the user might think different.
Information systems. I wanted to look at the more systematic approach on user experience and design. From what systems there are, and you can use to organise your information, or your content.
I can’t go into it really deep. The book does, but I’ll try and talk into some main aspects of information architecture, that concerns information systems. First, I want to show you two forms of information architecture, and I’ve used the WordCamp London website as an example for top-down information architecture. And when you approach it from here, it usually answers questions people that visit the website have, like where am I? When you look at the website, it makes it clear.
How do I get around the site? What’s available? How can I contact a real person? How can I engage on other digital channels? Well, that’s clear a Twitter feed on it, so you know WordCamp London is on Twitter. So these questions are answered by using top-down information architecture.
Another form of information architecture is bottom-up. And recipe collections are quite a good example of that. It is nothing about information architecture there. You see the clear chunks of the recipe, the ingredients index, the methods. That is all information architecture. It structures a recipe, and the photo app on iPads are a good example of that as well, because I took a screenshot of my own iPad, and you can tell like that it’s sorted by date or geolocation, you know, where I have been on holiday last year, but from there, you can sort of like run it through, and it actually sort of calls on questions bottom-up information architecture. That’s a different approach.
Information systems consist of four components, and the organisation systems is the first one. And there’s a few challenges there. Alice Still will do a workshop later on, and it is a great deal on information architecture as well, and let me pronounce this right. Ambiguity. A difficult word for me. Classification systems are made of language, and language is ambiguous. And you can have so many different meanings for one word. So to conquer this challenge, make sure the context is clear for people in which you use these words.
Difference in perspective. I already told you about The Two Ronnies library, sorted by colour. There are people that sort their books by colour. Anyone does that in here? Sorry, that’s not — my boyfriend does.
It looks nice, though. But whenever I want to read a book that’s in his bookcase, I always have to ask him: what colour is it? And he will go “Red.”
And his red section is a bit bigger than this. This is not his bookcase, but it looks like it. It looks nice, though.
What you think about when you organise content, think about difference in perspective, because what might seem logic to you may not to another.
And I’m labelling an organisation systems are incredibly effective by the creator’s perspective.
Internal politics, that’s a challenge as well, and there’s always a tone of voice or the way people want to be seen by other organisations or users. I was talking to a client and they did telephone services, and she didn’t call herself a call centre because that was something different to her, but not to me. I think if you answer phonecalls or call to people, you’re a call centre. But that’s like within their own branch, that’s something different. So think about these things, how it affects your users.
Another part is organisation schemes. I’ll go through a few examples of this as well. A very simple one is exact organisation schemes, also known as known item search that really works for directories. If you know you’re looking for someone’s name, if you just type it in, and there’s the result. That rarely happens. Not everyone knows what they’re looking for. So here we go with my ambiguous organisation schemes. And I’ve looked at two English websites of museums to show what types you have, and we can distinguish three types: topical, task oriented and audience specific. And here is today’s website, let’s see if it works. Yes. “Art and artists” is definitely topic based. “Plan your visit” is task. They want you to do something. “Book now”, task as well. And “Become a member.” Task as well. This is quite a simple navigation. You can’t get confused easily.
Museum of National History, also tasks, like “visit”, “discover”, they want you to do something but here we have another one “Schools”, and that’s audience based. And still this a small navigation here, but I find this very confusing within like this navigation there, so make it clear for people when you use hybrid schemes like these, there is never single topic navigation or audience based. Make sure, if you mix it, do it right, because people want to make a mental map of where they are and they get confused when you mix it up too much.
I have to rush a bit. Labelling, it is one part of information systems as well. And actually, without knowing it, everyone who makes websites makes labels. They convey meaning without taking up too much space.
You have to know what is behind the door, and websites aren’t always as transparent as these boxes of herbs, so to minimise disconnect, you must do your best to design labels that speak the same language as the environment the users are in, reflecting its content.
So when we talk about labels, there’s different varieties. Crispin Reed mentioned contextual links this morning already, and actually in your text you navigate through context actual links that are in block texts. Headings are a very important part of the infrastructure, so you know where you are in different sections. Already talked about navigation earlier on in websites. Index terms can be a good way of structuring a website, and there’s iconic labels very often used on small devices, like phones. But often, for the house or the burger menu, they’re iconic labels.
But labels can be ambiguous, like I said before. The general guidelines to make it more clear is to narrow down your scope. Make it understandable for people, reduce their perspective, and keep content user and context simple and focused. If you’re designing a website for a large group, or different groups, it is very hard to stay focused.
Develop consistent labelling systems. Think about the labels that aren’t necessary now, but may be in the future, so you will have space for them to add. And think about style presentation, the syntax. Don’t use noun or verb based throughout each other, and think about comprehensiveness and what your audience would like to see. Navigation systems. They’re actually one of the most important parts on websites of being structure, like the global menu is always there, so you need to pay attention to that. And navigation is really important, because it prevents us from getting lost. The signage here at the conference is pretty good, you always look for where to go, and think about it that way, when you design your navigation on your website.
There are three types: global, local and contextual. The global menu is of course the global navigation on your website. Local are usually subnavigations and contextual is like contextual links on your website.
Then we go on to navigation. We actually end up in a grey area. And you see information architecture right here, and under one big umbrella with different aspects of user experience design, because you can look at it from so many perspectives, doing interaction design or visual design is very different knowledge area than information architecture.
If you want to test your navigation, look it up on the Internet. There’s the navigation stress test by Keith. Go to the website, ignore the home page and pick a random page. Figure out where you are, and get rid of the URL, and think about where you should go next. If you end up on the page that’s logic from the navigation, you’ve done the right job. Most of the time, you won’t, unfortunately.
Other parts of navigation you can think of as supplemental, like site maps or indexes, but guides as well, when you do a checkout process for example on a web shop like Woo Commerce, you get all these steps that guide you through the process, so you know where you are. It gives you context.
At last, don’t let navigation drown the content. Sometimes websites are so full of links and navigation that it really distracts from the actual content.
Another important part of information systems are search systems. That’s a talk on its own. So I’ll leave that for now. But there is a big question you should ask yourself when you implement a search system on your website: does it need search? Or maybe it’s just a solution to poor navigation. I know on my computer I use the global search a lot. You can imagine what kind of mess it is. It is not very well organised.
Basically, when you need search, it is when you have lots of information, or fragmented websites, that consist of different subsites.
The last part, how do you do good information architecture? I’ve no answer to that. I’m sorry if I disappoint you here. Like I said before, the context is really important, and every time you work with a new client there’s a new business context. So there’s no one way of dealing with it. There is a small process that you can follow to have like a way of structuring your information architecture. Always start with research. Most clients find this a really boring moment in designing websites, and they ask you questions like “When are we going to start the real work?” They mean graphical design by that, because that’s more visual and appealing, and this is all very abstract to people, but when you do research it doesn’t really have to be extensive, even for small projects. It is interesting to look at a research and look at existing materials that are there already.
Think about a current website. Most of the time we don’t have to build from scratch, so look at the content that’s already there. Most clients tend to think that’s rubbish and they want it all new, but there’s probably stuff you can reuse.
After that, you have to move on to decent strategy. The research provides a contextual understanding that forms the foundation for development of the information architecture strategy.
Let me see.
Here’s the three circles again, and when you do research, well, you work with these three circles as well, and the process I showed before looks really clean, but in the real world the process is far more messy, especially with smaller projects and when time and money are on a tight budget, you have to make choices about what to include.
Good research means asking the right questions and these circles will help you do so.
Starting with the context, put some rugby in there, for the Six Nation lovers. This guy knows where he is going. He has a clear goal. So I really believe in business context as a starting point, and not knowing what the strategy of the organisation is. This is just as dangerous as ignoring your users so at least find out about a mission, vision and business goals.
The content, actually, the stuff inside your information environment. Users need to be able to find content before they can use it. So findability precedes usability. So spend some time on studying objects and look at existing information architecture. You can do content analysis, look at structural metadata, administrative metadata, and Crispin was doing subject oriented UX what is the object, how can you describe it? What distinguishes it from others? Think about these things, and how can you make the object findable for people and machines? Because it always really helps by good information architecture.
So, I told you, information architecture is not very sexy. This actually is information architecture. So there’s no wireframes or prototyping involved. You just make lists of content and create the relationships and where it should be positioned in your website. So I can imagine clients can’t really deal with this. How is it going to look? Not there yet.
So eventually the users are the ultimate judges of your information environments. You don’t want them to do this when they look at your website, do you? So when you do research, do use this analysis. Look at the content performance, visitor information, or search analysed. I’ve recently been installing relevancy plugin for a few websites. It gives you a good insight on your website if you have such function. So find out about information projects that are already there.
Another good method is card sorting, and you can do it by hand, but there’s this website called OptimalSort, optimalworkshop.com, and they have good explanation on how it works. It is free. Up to 30 items you can put in there and invite people by e-mail, doing card sorting tests, and what you’re actually asking them is to group information, help you build the structure and you can get all nice analysis from that and sort out if what you thought was right, the user thinks that as well.
Resistance. There was a question this morning with the other user experience talk. If your client does not want to work with you on the project, how do you deal with that? And the good answer was fire the client. I think that’s a good one.
Common arguments for extensive research and really digging into information architecture can be that they don’t have time or money to do so. They already know what they want. I mean, the clients know what they want. They have already done their own research. But you will be likely to convince them that they can save time and money by doing research, and if you have this all sorted out, the process of design will be more easy and short, because you don’t get discussions on what should be where and what relations you should include.
The other thing is that managers don’t know what the users want. I think this is right. So involve them in user testing like card sorting. Let them do the card sorting method as well.
I really like doing research. Like I said, I did my thesis last year, and I couldn’t stop doing desk research, but at some point you have to get it together and make your story, make your strategy. Because the more you learn, the more questions you have. Usually, as designers, web designers, we don’t have the luxury to do extensive research, so make sure you turn it into a strategy and bring that to your client as soon as possible.
Another question arises there, because how can you develop an information architecture strategy when your client doesn’t have a business strategy? Or how can you develop information architecture strategy when there is no content in place? Business strategies, content collections and information architectures don’t exist in a vacuum. They co-evolve in a highly interactive manner, and one cannot do without the other.
But developing alone information architecture strategy, it can help expose gaps in business strategy and content collection. So it will give back feedback information to clients, and the process of making a strategy will force people to make difficult choices they’ve managed to avoid up until doing it.
I’m running out of time a bit, am I? Okay, when you develop a strategy, there’s four parts you should consider thinking about. The first thing, after research, is think. Create some time to think over what you’ve learned, and digesting all that information you got in your strategy. The good thing about thinking is you can do it anywhere. So pick a nice spot to do your thinking, like a sunny terrace or a good park.
The next thing is articulate. Trawl down, make mind maps, write down your findings. After that, communicate with your client in an early stage so they can give you feedback on what you’ve discovered thus far. The last part is testing testing, one, two.
Even running an informal test with one friend is better than not testing at all. So testing is within reach for small projects as well.
After you’ve done your strategy, you need a plan to move your findings on to the people who are actually going to do the design, so you write a project plan. It will force the team to ask the questions, and it is actually the bridge between the strategy and design. So after this, you’ll be going to the designing part and that’s not part of my talk, so I won’t cover that. But that’s when you go to the actual site mapping wireframes, navigation systems and prototyping.
Wrapping up, I hope I’ve given you some understanding on what information architecture is, why I think it is important, and the components that you stumble upon when you design information systems. A bit short, but how to do some research and strategy. How you maybe can convince your client that this is a part you should cover, and that was the end of my talk. So thank you. [applause]. Maybe there are questions that I can hopefully answer.
FROM THE FLOOR: I have a question. Where do we find your slides?
MONIQUE: I don’t know. (Laughter) I can upload them.
FROM THE FLOOR: That would be great, because it was such a good talk.
MONIQUE: Okay, thank you. My own website is currently undergoing construction. [Laughter]. It is very hard to do your own information architecture, I can tell you that. But I’ll post a link to the slides on Twitter, is that good? Or you can e-mail me, if you want some more information on the subject, and I’ll put it on Twitter, I’ll put it on there.
FROM THE FLOOR: What’s your Twitter handle?
MONIQUE: @boemedia. Okay?
Question? Sorry.
FROM THE FLOOR: Hi, thank you for your talk. That was — I found that really very interesting. I would like to know, how do you deal with clients who are so hooked on what they think is the latest method of presenting their website and navigation, but maybe you know that’s not going to work in the way it should work?
MONIQUE: You’re talking about design fashion, trends? Stuff like that? Okay. It depends. That’s always a good answer to give. No, it depends. As I said before, I’m really hanging on to strategy, business strategy. So if that trend doesn’t fit their users or clients, don’t do it. I mean, always follow your goals for your business. So I convinced them not to do — like search, they say every website needs search. Well, maybe not all of them. If they do want it, at least consider why they want it. Don’t do it because it is a trend. Do it because you think it is useful for your website. Just make people ask the questions themselves.
Is that a good answer to your question?
FROM THE FLOOR: I was just wondering, when you’re looking deeper, taxonomies, identifying the language of your audience is quite tricky to dig into that. Do you have any tips for that?
MONIQUE: Digging into the language of the audience?
FROM THE FLOOR: Yeah, you’re talking about the individual language, certain words.
MONIQUE: Okay, where will you start for taxonomies. It depends, if you do a medical website, there’s a thesauri for that, so you could do those. Most of us are not designing websites for really new businesses. They’re unique to, you know, whatever. So look at competitors’ websites and do research on social media. You can see what they use, and what the users use.
FROM THE FLOOR: As an example, you’d develop this site for generation Z? They have their own language.
MONIQUE: Yes, I’m not very good with children, I’m sorry. It’s true. I do marketing, but I don’t really do marketing for younger people because, I’m sorry, I don’t speak their language. So maybe get someone involved who does. Use younger people, maybe. Testing as well, and what you can do with card sorting as well, is you can do open card sorting, and don’t present them with titles but let them fill it in and see if you can see structure in the words they use. Maybe a good one.
FROM THE FLOOR: I had a really quick question about other recommended reading. Is there anything else you recommend?
MONIQUE: I’ve got quite a few books, actually. I was going to — I thought I had more time before doing this talk, but actually, up until Wednesday, I was working until 1.30 in the morning to finish it. I wanted to do a sheet with resources, but if you e-mail me or send me a message on Twitter, I can give you some resources. Finished? Thank you. [applause]
VINEETA: That was a fantastic talk. It did sound sexy, it’s okay. That was the intention, wasn’t it? No, it was very informative. It was fantastic.
Heather Dopson
Lightning Session
Have you read the Code of Conduct? It’s mandatory when you buy a ticket to any WordCamp so I guess you (should) have. I have been to several WordCamps but I never really understood the impact of it until WordCamp Europe 2016:
The Code of Conduct is not just a set of rules, it’s a declaration of love.
In this talk I will share what happened in Vienna, what it did to me, how it impacted me personally and how it changed my view on life. I’ll show you how I implemented a Code of Conduct in my business and in my life and why you want to too.
WordCamps are a fantastic opportunity to get to know the WordPress community better, make new connections, start new business opportunities and elevate your personal or company brand. Yet, as they get bigger and bigger, navigating WordCamps, especially for first-time attendees, might be challenging. In this talk, I’ll be covering 4 key steps that will help both individuals and business owners on how to prepare for a WordCamp, what strategies to implement for the best results and how to take the most from the event after it’s over.
Using both recorded video and live broadcasting are HOT ways to increase your visibility, share information and solve problems. All this can lead to more clients and more dollars in your pocket.
In this talk I will share examples from multiple social platforms and give specifics on tools and resources to make it simple to add this into your business plan.
ANT MILLER: So I am Ant Miller I am your MC for Track A this morning going all the way through to lunch. We have Carol at the back, Carol you will have noticed holding, wearing the localhost T-shirt, Dave at the front is time keeper, then Q&A session at the end of the other sessions, these guys are mic running, watch out for the microphones, we do ask when we get to Q&A you use a microphone, helps enormously for these guys doing the transcription and also for accessibility purposes, and the video that gets recorded too.
Are we there, or thereabouts? We might get a video clip, you guys are okay with aspect-ratio fan-dangling, you are a tolerant bunch.
This is a really great start, what we have got is a couple of very quick sessions, introducing you to WordCamp as a whole, WordCamp London is a first for a lot of people and an explanation of the value of codes of conduct, real world examples, how to get the most out of WordCamp, WordCamp code of conduct, then an example of the classic WordCamp presentation, how you can use specific technology in the business, in the way you use WordPress as well, three fantastic speakers coming up, before you know it they’ll be here on the stage!! In fact they could wave and say hello now, so here is Wendie Huis in ‘t Veld, Wendie will be up first, then we have, Marco, the pronunciation has gone again, Marco Calicchia and Heather Dopson, will be up with the video piece in not very much time of course, everything I’ve been saying is being relayed by the lovely, people the transcription team, they’re fabulous, they will be hammering away on their keyboards all weekend, their value is amazing, you can check on Twitter, check up on the last few minutes of what has been said on the stage, it’s rather subliminal, fantastic. Gosh. How do we think we are doing? That’s about the patter for this time in the morning. Is that all you needed to do, press, “Play”, okay, so that worked! [Laughter] — great then!! No, no, that’s fine. If right well then, welcome to Track A, [Applause].
First up we have Wendie Huis in ‘t Veld, who is going to tell us all about the real value of codes of conduct with some real-life examples, some harem-scarem examples, we will do them all together at the end, with all three lightning speakers we will be a little bit squeezed for time on those, just to give the guys Tom to get them out, we will try and finish on the dot so everyone can get to and from the session. Wendie, would you like to join me on the stage and away we go with Track A, thank you Wendie. [Applause].
WENDIE HUIS IN ‘T VELD: Great, so this is awesome. My name is Wendie, my talk is going to be about love, I hope. Let’s see if this works… it’s not going to the next slide… which would be nice. This is my name, Wendie Huis in ‘t Veld, it’s Dutch name, well I am Dutch, so that’s logical. It’s a full sentence, I translated it for you, it’s ‘house in the field’, if you translate it. My company is called websiteclub, I teach people how to use WordPress and build their own websites and nowadays I usually use page builders to do that, my Twitter handle is called @dolgelukkig, I tried changing it to websiteclub, then it didn’t feel like me, so I kept it for the English-speaking people, it means ‘extremely happy”, or ‘ecstatic’, it’s a Dutch word, it’s untranslatable, I like it so I’m keeping it.
Today I want to talk to you about the code of conduct, the code of conduct is a piece of information which I assume you all read, buying a ticket means you have to agree to the code of conduct. The code of conduct is a big list and t mainly says this, “Our community should be truly open for everyone. As such we are committed to providing a friendly, safe and welcoming environment for all.”
So why do I talk about the code of conduct? I read it, I’ve been to several WordCamps, I read it, every time I thought oh well, great. It didn’t really, the impact of the code of conduct, it really didn’t hit me until I was at WordCamp Vienna last year, WordCamp Europe. Who was there? Was it great?
FROM THE FLOOR: Yes.
WENDIE HUIS IN ‘T VELD: It was such a great event, I had such a great time, I was one of the volunteers, like these guys, you see them at the back. The day before the event we had a meeting to get all the information as volunteers and we also got these awesome green T-shirts that, like the localhost T-shirts that you have here in London and the set crew, so everybody knew who to talk through when they had a question. There was one, tiny little problem, I didn’t fit in the shirt. The sizes they had were not my size. So, I had a different shirt. This is me, in the middle. I am surrounded by Wendies because there are three Wendie volunteers in Vienna. As you can see my shirt is quite a different colour. Did it bother me I had a different shirt? Well, kind of, did I share it with anyone? No, when you are more size the world tells you, the voices in my head were more ruthless, it’s my own fault, I shouldn’t have got this big, I should have been more aware, suck it up, take care, laugh about it and just move on. So that’s what I did. Together with the other Wendies we had lots of fun, we had fun about three Wendies being there, we had fun about the T-shirt, because to be honest I was the only one in the light green T-shirt and it’s still touching me. Every time someone asked about why I’m in the light green T-shirt, I said, “I’m the only special volunteer, I am the special one”, as you can see it did show quite a lot, I made fun of it, I had a great time at the, at the event and then something happened, so what has this got to do with the code of conduct and what has this got to do with love?
Well, thereafter first day of the event, Luca, came to me, he said, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry you have to wear a different coloured T-shirt, I’m sorry that we didn’t take care of it to have a same colour in your size” it made me cry. It made me cry because, his apology made me realise how vulnerable I am and it made me realise how fragile my confidence is about my body, but it also made me realise how awesome the WordPress community is, because I was the only one wearing the shirt, I was aware of it but nobody at WordCamp Europe, nobody, there were over 2,000 people there made me feel uncomfortable. No one. So, it made me cry, big time. I don’t cry. All right, it started in Vienna, I’m still crying about it. Usually I don’t cry, I cried. Someone took over my afternoon shift, I couldn’t stop crying. Him noticing and taking the time to tell me, it touched my heart.
After I stopped crying there was a ball, he was there, we had a party it was great.
When we went home I thought about what happened, it was like a tiny incident, but it was a big massive thing for me. I cried some more, I really, really, cried a lot. Then I started talking, I started talking to my friends about what had happened and how do I make this, all those tears into something that was worth sharing? The best thing I learnt about Luca, the T-shirt there are three things when you want to create a safe, friendly environment for all, I wanted to be like that. I wanted to be like in my home in my work, in my own environment, I wanted to create that. I brought it down to three things that you need to do to create an environment like that, first of all you have to care, you have to care about people, but to start you have to care about yourself. You have to care, if you don’t care it’s never going to happen. Second of all and this is where the code of conduct comes in you have to write down your intentions. You have to write them down, because if you don’t write them down you are just, they are just flying in the air, if you write them down you know what is expected to be a person who cares and… something else, which comes with writing down, you can make yourself accountable, did I care? Did I do the right thing? I expect myself to be someone who cares, I wrote down the rules for caring as I want them to be and I can check did I do it. Last of all, you have to be aware, what makes it so special and what Luca did for me every time life gets in the way, I start yelling at my kids yelling at my computer, I’m upset because there is a line, I’m aware that that is what happens and I’m aware that I want to be a person who cares, so I go back to my list and I check, all right, I want to be a person who cares, how do I do it? Then I can go back to being a person who cares. Bottom line for me is that I want to be a person who loves. I love WordCamp, I love the people who are in WordCamp, the code of conduct gives me a guideline to be the kind of person that I want to be, the kind of person that I would love to be and a kind of person who loves to be around you guys, and the bottom line for me is, after the T-shirt incident, what I learned it’s not about making someone feel special, because that is the easy part, it’s about taking responsibility to make everybody feel normal. Thank you. Thank you. [Applause].
ANT MILLER: I now have something in my eye. Thank you very much Wendie. What a marvellous way to start these things. I am not going to waste much time keep cracking on, so questions at the end. Marco, take it away.
MARCO CALICCHIA: Everyone hear me, can we get another round of applause, it touched me that was amazing. (applause) I guess I will just take it continue from where you left it off, this is pretty much what we’re here for. To present myself, my name is Marco Calicchia, I work for SiteGround, enterprise manager, that’s better, I live in Sofia at the headquarters, actually grew up in Greece, I am Italian American but my parents grew up in US I have travel Ltd. round the world, I attended my first WordCamp back in October, and now I have been to three WordCamps. So, I mean it’s a journey, it’s quite a journey. We’re SiteGround we’re 430 employees we sponsor over 40 WordCamps, this is why we attend a lot of them, we try to contribute back to all the events and to make what Wendie just said to try to grow this love. So, what I want to talk about is the things that you miss if you don’t really research well for the WordCamps. I mean I have come from a corporate background I used to work at EventBrite, used to work at Samsung, Sony, I have a then attended a lot of expos. This is going from corporate events and coming to WordCamps, there is certain things I want to teach you how to make the most out of, how to do it before, during and after WordCamps and how to contribute back to these events.
So, the first thing I want to talk about is researching the schedule, we’re here like we, this is a very cheap event – I mean it’s a very expensive event given us to at a very cheap price. You want to make the most out of it you spend three days coming here, you want to make sure that you research all the leads that you research all the sessions that you want to attend so there’s a lot of conflicting sessions, so even this morning I have my session with Wendie and Heather, but there’s another three sessions going on. So, you want to make sure that you see which sessions you want to attend and which ones are most important for you. Usually the schedule is up two months before the event, we were confirmed I think back in January, which was already a little bit on the verge, a little bit late, so you want to make sure that you go online and see what the schedule is like, and select the sessions that you want attend.
The other key things are the side events, yesterday we had a volunteer event, there’s also a lot all the major sponsors through after parties that you want to make sure to check on Twitter, see what’s going on, ping people, make sure that you want to see all the events that you want to try and attend and meet all the community, this is what we’re here for after all. We want to try to meet everyone that is attending here. It’s also the contributor day sometimes it’s after the event sometimes it’s before the event, the actual WordCamp. So, in WordCamp London today so it was yesterday. So you want to make sure that you arrive before the contributors day because it’s actually really important to be there, the community gives back to WordPress a lot so you want to make sure that you try and attend, meet a lot of people, see what’s going on. There’s a lot of insights anything, I would say try and fly in either before the contributor’s day or if it after the WordCamp, try to fly out the day after and attend it for a few hours, even for an hour makes a big difference.
The next thing is attendance the attendee list is really important it’s usually online, the organisers will put it on you can see who is attending, but there’s also lectures, you want to be certain see which lectures are important for you based on the knowledge, I have already spoken to a lot of people this morning, who are here I prefer developer, or in my case some people are here more for the business talks to try to get more community involvement also with volunteers.
So, you can see exactly who is talking where to attend your event and try and also schedule meetings, and that’s my next point. The next thing you want to do is to try to schedule meetings, there’s always something going to happen. I mean I have a massive list of things that I want to do and people that I want to see in sessions that I want to attend, but it’s not always the case that I get to all of them. What you want to do is try to schedule the meetings with people that you want to see, the sessions you want to go to and try to stick to that. It’s not set that you have to, but it will keep you in line with the sessions and the people you want to talk to.
During the event, I would like you to engage in conversations, so like I said you will have a list but don’t stick by it. This is just guidelines, I would say this conduct of the guideline that you want to follow. But you will be going to want to engage with everyone. This morning when I was sitting down having a coffee at 7 o’clock in the morning, I was already talking to all the volunteers, all the organisers, they are here from 8 o’clock in the morning until 6pm, so we’re going to get stressed out pulled left and right you will want to engage with everyone that comes and talks to you, everyone has something interesting to talk about. Like Wendie says here sharing love, this is what we’re here for we’re not here to stand out or to trying to be insecure to anyone else, we’re trying to give back to community so engage with everyone that comes up to you asks you any questions, give them some time, some people are first timers. Some people have been here for over 10 WordCamp if not more. You want to make sure you are given them your time they also give you the time back.
Last but not least, drink before and after the event. I would like you to all be on Twitter. And also keep in touch. So, the best way we all have handles, Twitter handles so I would like you to keep in touch on Twitter if you don’t have one, make sure you create one. The WordPress community is there it’s not a convention it’s a community and this where I think most of us spend our lot of our times it’s on Twitter. Already posted 5 tweets, everyone from this morning that I have seen the sponsors has been on Twitter, already posting you can check out pretty much all the news who is giving out swag, who is talking about any sessions that are gone on, organisers, post the latest news on Twitter you want to make sure to be there. Then you want to follow a lot of people, once you do the event you want to follow up with the people that you spoke to, so you spend days and days meeting with people, preparing yourself for this event, so you want to make sure that you follow up with that person. You know it’s going to be time lost, you have come here for several days talking for hours and hours, about partnerships, collaborations, making friendships, and all of a sudden you go home and forget about it. You want to keep in touch with people, either have business cards – that’s another point, bring your business cards keep in touch of Twitter, ping them, let them know you had a good time you would have love to meet with them at other WordCamps. We always keep in touch, and pretty much everyone I have met at WordCamps we always talk on Twitter or Facebook we try to organise trips, I don’t know, well I have a lot of people from Serbia, Greece, Italy, Spain, US, I have met people that grew up in my same town, who are from California we all grew up in Greece together. You meet people you actually never knew that just lived close to you and so the world is really small. You want to make sure to give back to the community what they give to you.
Be more involved. So, I am very glad thank you for accepting me to be a speaker I am very glad to have this opportunity it’s great to give back to community you can apply with as many talks as you want. Mine is a very light one, it’s literally ecstatic for me when I heard I was accepted for WordCamp London I am really pleased so this one way to give back join the contributor day as I mentioned and also try to be a volunteer. If you want to organise your next event, the best ways to volunteer to this, and so you can apply to any event that you might want to attend so when I spoke to Petya from Human Made she said Marco we have over 200 people we need at WordCamp Europe it’s a good opportunity, then once you volunteered, you are more likely to organise your next event in your town so today might be London, tomorrow might be Brighton, I might we might do one in Sophia I might do one with the guys in Athens next year, they have the first one last year it was awesome, they had 400 people, gives me an opportunity to go back and relay I have the experience, we all have experience do another one.
That’s pretty much it. I hope next time I might create one for volunteers and speakers, and just keep growing, but I hope to see you all at different WordCamps from now on. Thank you. (applause).
ANT MILLER: Thank you Marco. Next up, we have Heather Dopson, this is if you like, transitioning from what is this all about the meta of WordCamp! And the code of conduct, now I believe this is kind of we’re into the meat of it now, this it. Brace yourselves how to use video in your content, and why you should be doing it as well. So please welcome to stage, Heather.
HEATHER DOPSON: Good morning. Thank you so much, this is Manny our mascot, I’m going to sit him up here he’s my good luck charm. Good morning my name is Heather Dopson I work for GoDaddy I am what’s called a community builder at GoDaddy, so Wendie and Marco amazing way to open the session this morning because I love community and what you just said it’s not a convention it a community, really touched my heart. Wendie you made me cry first thing in the morning, I don’t like that. But thank you. Seriously, fantastic.
So, what I am here to talk about today is how you can be using video, both live and recorded video, not only in the marketing, but also to use to build your community as well. One of the things that I do in GoDaddy I host a weekly live show on our Facebook page, that is designed to help people understand all of the elements that go into building a business. I don’t talk about products, I talk about how you can quit your JOB and find your JOY. We talk about what are the elements that should go on a website. The most viewed episode so far has been one with an attorney, belief it or not, because we talk about all of the different rules and regulations that you need to abide by. So we’re going to talk a little bit, very quickly today. This is a 60 minute session it been distilled to 10 minutes.
So I had some interesting conversations last night at the ping-pong place which by the way, how lucky are you guys to have a ping-pong place here it’s amazing. A few people said to me, I don’t understand why I need to be using video I am a developer or website professional, I don’t understand why I need to be using video in any capacity, especially live video. My question is, do you want to make money? Are you doing the things that you are doing to create income for yourself? If the answer is yes, using life video is a fantastic way to build a foundation of trust. If you can become a trusted authority in your field, you can absolutely create community, that trusts you and comes to you to find solutions for problems or to find information that they need, for themselves or to share with other members of your community.
When you get on a live video, you can create emotions, and those shared emotions are very powerful. I am not going to lie, Wendie, last week I was on Facebook live on my personal profile, and I was very tired after several days of work I don’t know how many days I have been gone now from the US on a trip, and I cried. I was so tired I cried. It creates this deeper bond and trust between you and your community. We do business with people because we know them, we like them and we trust them. So, I am going to challenge you all to get out, I am from Texas I am going to say y’all, to get out from behind your computer scientist screen and get in front of your computer screen and start using video in some creative ways, you can start doing it right here right now while you are at this great event.
One of the things I love the most about live video whether you are doing Facebook Live, Twitter Live, also known as Periscope or YouTube Live is you get instantaneous feedback. The difference between live and recorded video, is that you are actually having a conversation with the people who are watching you. It’s phenomenal because you are learning how they are reacting to the things that you are sharing in real time. How much money would you pay to have real time feedback for every single thing that you are doing. Real time feedback is so powerful, it also allows you to ask a question and help understand what your community needs from you, how you can improve the content that you are creating, not just from a video perspective, but what you are writing your blog posts or what you are writing in your social media posts, if your community is asking questions, you know that that is content you are creating, right there. The feedback is one of my favourite parts.
Consumption, so if we just look at Facebook live video only, in one year the amount of videos that have been consumed in only Facebook Live has almost doubled to eight billion views. Just on Facebook Live videos, eight billion views in one year. That is a massive amount of views. There is a very low barrier to entry to use any of these live platforms, all you need is your phone, provided you don’t have a flip phone, I don’t think anyone in here is using a flip phone anymore.
So, it’s important that you have a plan, you know, you need to have some type of guard rails, instead of just waking up and saying am going to make a video today, have some sort of structure, to discover what my audience wants, needs or if I even have an audience. Somebody said to me last night, “I don’t know if anybody would even watch, I don’t know if anybody would even care what I have to say”, I guarantee you 100% that people care what you have to say, I promise you, they do.
What there are ways that you can use video is to educate, so we all know that there are things that are far too complex to be understood if we are just typing them, or only using text. So, video is a fantastic way to be able to explain to people how to do something, how to create something. You can also share your screen when you are doing live videos, you can share visual aids that help your followers, your community, understand exactly what you are talking about.
FAQs, every website, every website has a FAQ section on it right? We know the questions that people are asking, this is a great way to create the videos, to create the content. If you hear at this event, you keep getting the same question asked multiple times or you get a very interesting, intriguing question where you think, I never thought about that, that’s an opportunity for you to create a video around that particular piece, that particular question. If one person is asking it, there are more people thinking it but just afraid to ask it.
One of my favourite uses of live video is for special announcements. So, if there is some hot and breaking news in the WordPress community, or in your community, or if there is some kind of ruling that impacts your on-line presence or the on-line presence of businesses wherever you are, using Live is a fantastic way to get on, really quickly, get in front of your community and share with them before anybody else does. This deepens your level of trust, you are becoming a trusted resource, sharing information, not selling, got that, share information, solve problems, stop selling.
Also, live events, so, there is a tremendous opportunity for you, here, while you are at WordCamp London to start using some live video. I don’t want you to record or broadcast the entire sessions without permission of the organisers, but snippets of sessions, or have a conversation with Wendie, find Wendie and have a conversation with her, because what she said was so compelling, do a live video with her. Go to the different sponsors that is correct here, use that as a live video, when you are using live video it save to your phone or to whatever platform you are using you can use it later and chop it up and repurpose it for different types of content, I’m going to challenge you all out here to do some sort of live video while you are at the event for two days, any questions, concerns or problems find me, I well be mostly be at the Go Daddy booth I’m happy to help you, we’ll get you up and running really quickly my challenge to you is to be brave, okay, I’m going to use Wendie as an example, getting up here and being vulnerable and open and sharing her heart and fears with us today, okay. If Wendie can do, everybody in here can do it! It’s true, Wendie said, it’s true.
So, get over your fears. Okay. Get over it usually use the word BS, fears are BS, dangerous, real fear is BS. Everybody out here’s, everybody has something that they don’t like about themselves, I don’t like voice, my face, my hair, my weight, my clothes, I don’t have anything to say, nobody will care about what I have to say, it’s all bullshit you guys, it really is. Get over the fears; brave, take a risk, take some risk I want to see everybody do a bit of live video while you are here, I’m here, if you need help, guidance, I’m happy to help you, you guys have a fantastic WordCamp, thank you for welcoming me to London, it’s my first time to London, I’m having such a blast, thank you for inviting Manny and me to the event, you guys if you need anything I’m here for you.
NEW SPEAKER: Thank you very much Heather I’m going to invite all our speakers from the lightning talks back up stage, we have a couple of mic runners, we are a little bit squeezed for time, can we take questions from the floor, do we have questions from the floor for our presenters this morning. Oh yes, her we are, we have a question from the floor. Yes Sir, can you just say who the question is for.
FROM THE FLOOR: For Heather.
HEATHER DOPSON: Yes.
FROM THE FLOOR: Just wondering, with your live broadcast do you just, are you just using your phone or do you have other platforms to use, Go Live, are you more website based?
HEATHER DOPSON: That’s a great question for the weekly live show forego daddy I have a studio and software that I use, live streaming software that allows us to do some lower thirds and all of that, however, I’m not in the studio this week and I’m not in the studio next week, when I’m not in the studio I use my phone, I have a Galaxy S7, I use a RDE microphone, you don’t need high level production levels for your videos, when you are starting out just use your phone.
NEW SPEAKER: My first ever WordCamp was WordCamp Europe in Seville, massive, very daunting, I used, sort of interviews and stuff as a way to sort of get into it, now I have a face for radio, I do podcasting, I did, I just took a little audio recorder, each speaker that I found very, very interesting came off stage, I said can I do a piece with you to put on my podcast, on my blog I put together a podcast series from all the talks in Seville, video can be daunting, it’s a medium that people get, these technologies don’t need to be a barrier, they can be a door to have the conversations you want to have and share the conversations wider, you are being really generous when you do this, if you have a conversation with one person at WordCamp, you absolutely should as Marco says, you record that and share that wider that makes the whole community benefit even more from the meeting, so, it’s kind of good thing.
HEATHER DOPSON: Right if you have a follow-up come find me and I’ll answer your question.
THE CHAIR: There is a chap, just another one band. Oh, and then.
FROM THE FLOOR: Hi, Paul, I just wanted to ask you something, how much you prepare for each live video, because you probably don’t do it on the fly.
HEATHER DOPSON: So for the weekly live so I prepare a week in advance I generally know who my guests are going to be a month ahead of time, I do one, one hour show per week, I take about three hours ahead of that to prepare that and I take two hours afterwards to do post production and some other things, I’m about to turn to the show into a podcast as well, I also go live on the fly, I do that, but when I come to an event like this, I do what Marco suggested, I look at who the presenters are, what the sessions are and make a plan, an outline of what I’m going to do, so I kind of have an idea in my head, I have moments, ‘parking lot’ moments, I’m in the parking lot, I’m going live right now, I do both from Go Daddy Facebook as well as my own personal stuff, so it’s a mixture.
THE CHAIR: One more in, yes, I think.
FROM THE FLOOR: Hello, yeah, I know all three of you and I like you as much I’m going to ask a super short question for each and every one of you. Wendie, let’s start with you, I’ll just ask my questions: was it hard for you to share, we spoke about the volunteer stuff and everything, was it hard for you, I want you to, your talk encouraged everyone, was it hard for you to just share what you felt.
WENDIE HUIS IN ‘T VELD: It still makes me cry, of course, it’s hard.
FROM THE FLOOR: I tried, again.
WENDIE HUIS IN ‘T VELD: It’s important it gets told, it is what this community is, so I wanted to share and I was praying last week, I shared it with a friend and I was crying, I was hoping not to do it today, I just have one nice tear, so that’s okay.
FROM THE FLOOR: Heather for the first episode and to help to encourage people to start using live, what should it do, what should it talk about, as you said, no one knows how to start, I don’t have anything to share, what do you suggest.
HEATHER DOPSON: So my advice is in the wisdom of Nike, just do it. It’s getting past that very first one that helps you to move on to the next one. Think WHO your audience is, think about what you want to talk about, what would you sit down and have a discussion with me on over a beer, what would you talk about? Just do that. Be casual, you don’t have to be presenting and presenting, be casual, have a casual conversation.
FROM THE FLOOR: Marco, your favourite WordCamp, your favourite WordCamp so far?
MARCO CALICCHIA: My favourite one…? Umm… yeah, it literally just started, so I’ll give it a few days, I’ll let you know tomorrow, so far, I would say Athens it was the first one for them, they put a lot into it, it’s where I met you guys as well. It’s my, I grew up there, it’s in my heart, they did an awesome job for the first event, big round of applause for them, definitely for me it’s Athens, if London takes over…
THE CHAIR: We have a lot to live up to, okay, okay, cool. Thank you for all are speakers for the lightning sessions getting Track A off to a fab start this morning, thank you for sharing, thank you for encouraging us all. We get a break now, we get half an hour to switch around, we will be continuing with tales from the client side with Tom Chute from Pragmatic, how to create and foster loving client relationships, it’s all about the love today in here. Track B if you want to head over to Track B will be getting your plugin ready for the new WordPress Plugin Directory, things are changing fast in the plug anyone directory, here Alexander track, object oriented user, we look at the editor and customiser over the next 18 months, this approach can be crucial as well, we’ll see you back here in about 26 minutes, with Tom Chute. Thank you very much.
Graham Armfield
Designing for Accessibility
The accessibility of a website is significantly affected by the underlying HTML, CSS and javascript that developers use to create it. But it is also possible to impact upon the accessibility of a site at the design stage – both the visual design, and the interactive design or UX. And it’s not just about colour schemes either.
In this presentation I will outline a few key points to keep in mind when you are designing your next beautiful website or theme. I will illustrate the points with some good (and bad) examples.
Good design and web accessibility can go hand in hand – come and find out how.
WENDIE: One minute to go, is everyone settled ready for the walk 2? In Track C, who is here for Tammie’s talk did you like it? For those who weren’t I will tell you what you missed I wrote some things down, beds, the research, the talk Tammie gave was about user research. No user? Know your users, Tammie Lister and I wrote some things down I wanted to remember, I will share them with you. Bad research is very easy to do, that was the first thing I wrote down. User research is a great business idea. Acknowledge the limits that user research give you. Mute yourself, which is for me is a tough one.
Knowing your users is really important and you get the best user research results if you just rinse and repeat. So that is what you missed, that was a great talk, if you want, you can watch it back on WordPress TV in a couple of weeks orb months.
Graham Armfield is also about user experience, he has been a user expert for over 15 years, and he is trying to get it in the head of everybody that works with websites so that is all of us, please put your hands together for Graham.
GRAHAM ARMFIELD: Okay, thank you all of you what are here for choosing my presentation, I am Graham, Web Accessibility Consultant, I have been doing for a long time. My day job these days is helping developers mainly improve the accessibility of their own websites or the websites of the companies they work for.
Most of my presentations including ones I have given to WordCamps before are about developer related subjects. However, this one has come about as most of you may know, that the accessibility websites is primarily down to the mark up.
But often I come across when I am teaching developers how to do this or training them with courses I have done, they will come back to me and say, yes, the designer told me to do this. This is what the specification I have got is. I can’t do anything else because I have follow this specification.
What I have put together is the presentation because it has become very obvious to me, that design decisions can also influence the accessibility of a website as well. Before it ever gets to the developers to actually do something with it.
Now I can’t cover everything in this time but I am, what I am going to look at is quite a lot around the use of colour in a variety of guises. I am going to look at how designers need to cater for keyboard users. That is people who aren’t using a mouse but rely on keyboard interaction and other tools that people might use that hook into the keyboard functionality of the websites.
I will talk about texts styling of text and content.
Then a little bit at the end on forms.
There will be time at the end for questions. So we will cover off stuff then if there is anything you are not sure about.
First section is on colour, the first thing I want to talk about is colour contrast. This seems to happen at a lot of organisations in their, they have like a brand pallette and it specifies all the nice pretty colours that designers are allowed to use in their sites. What often happens is in the brand guideline there is will be combinations of colours that are no good from a colour contrast perspective.
Now this is actually a website that I built some years ago. I was asked to build this website because I was, it is a referral from a previous piece of work I had, they came to me because I know I knew how to build an accessible WordPress website, you can’t see the whole thing. Then they said, by the way here is the designer, the designer came up with this. I was given the design, I ought uh-uh there are problems, on the website. In the initial version anyway, pretty much none of the text had the necessary colour contrast. Here I am using an analyser tool. It is available on windows and Mac machine, this is a colour picker, this is a slightly older version of it. Colour picker and run it across the website and do a foreground background check.
It is fairly obvious that the mustard colour has not a lot of colour contrast. The tool immediately tells you whether it passes or fails the guideline. WCAG web content accessibility guidelines these are the recognised set of benchmarks for accessible websites, there is an algorithm specified in there, which this refers to so this text fails across the piece.
Also, the grey text fails across the piece. I was in a bit of a quandary when I was given this design, I build accessible websites and so I went back to them and say, it is a lovely design, very attractive, but you have got a problem here.
At the end of the day, we said we like this design so much, we would like you to do it anyway. Had to tweak a few things, then do I do the work or say no? In the end I did do the work and they said they were prepared to take the risks, so if anyone went to them to complain about it. At least they knew the situation with the colour contrast deficiencies. Now the site is maintained by someone with poor eyesight, how they cope with that. Luckily the WordPress admin has a better contrast than the present end.
Colour contrast between elements, there I was talking between backgrounds and foregrounds.
Here I have got a form and the form elements themselves and it showing you here that the text is dark, very dark in there and also the background that the form sits in is also, light grey on the top. So there is no problems with colour contrast here with foreground, and a become ground, you can see immediately what is going on here is that the designer has specified that the border of or the input fields should be removed so it is actually someone with poor vision is going o to struggle to fill in this form with a mouse because it is difficult to see where the field boundaries are so you need to be aware of that.
With all the stuff I am talking about, I don’t want to tell designers how to do their job, I want to underline design decisions can make it difficult for some people.
And, it is not just a small group of people. A lot of people have you know, invisible impairments. If you see someone walking down the street with a white stick or a guide dog, you can be fairly sure they are blind or nearly blind. But a lot of impairments are actually not half as visible as that. Low vision affects around 2 million people in this country.
So that is not a small proportion.
So, good colour contrast is important. But, it is possible to have too much. I am going the illustrate that with a true story. This is my friend Tracey, she is a singer and here is her handsome guitarist. We perform together at open mic nights in Surrey where we live. Now, we mainly do covers, she wanted to do some of my songs, she said, can you print out the lyrics for these songs, I I did. I gave them to her on a piece of paper with black text. Printed it out as you would. She said, oh I can’t read this you pillock, I am dyslexic! I had to do it again and print it on her paper. This is what I gave her, so the original view, but what she needs, she needed me to print it out on Green Paper, if it wasn’t. She couldn’t read it.
I won’t say to everyone they need to go out there and make the backgrounds of the websites green because some dyslexics prefer blue or purple backgrounds as well. So the point is, is that black on white or white on black is actually straying into the territory of too much colour contrast.
There are browser tools that people can use to change background colours in certain browsers included the dreaded IE but it is something to bear in mind, dyslexia affects 10% of the population, my eldest daughter is dyslexic as well as my friend Tracey. A lot of people treat them as being stupid even though because they see their difficulty of reading, with Tracey also memory problems as well that the dyslexia brought her. Whenever we are playing her, she has to have the lyrics in front of her on the music stand.
The guy in the Beautiful South?
Yes, he has a music stand I think it is for the same reason basically.
Okay. So moving away, probably everyone knows what this is about. Colour blindness it affects very few women, only 1 in 200 women but 8% of the male population. That equates to 2 and a half million people in the UK. And there is probably I don’t know if anyone wants to volunteer, but probably someone in this room who is colour blind, anyone want to put their hands up? You as well sir? Excellent. Well, there is lots of people with dyslexia and colour blindness amongst us.
So key things to bear in mind is using colour to convey meaning, is quite important. This is a based on when I used to work in a large financial organisation doing this accessibility stuff these were reports that we used to produce. They are called rag status reports, red-amber-green. A table with this. If you produced this as a web table, and things with a green background, if you are colour blind that might be a series of grey scale tones right and so it is hard to tell the difference. So you shouldn’t ever use colour alone as a way of of conveying meaning. It is okay to use colour because a lot of people will get that straight away, but make sure it is not the only way to do it. The irony here, red green colour blindness is the most common type.
So here is a more leisure orientated thing, it is based on the coverage of something, the world cup I think it was, from the BBC. I met a woman at an accessibility conference I went to some time ago who ran a society for parents of colour blind children. She said her son got, who was very interested in football. Got frustrated whenever they showed these things on the penalty shoot outs he could not tell the difference between the green and red blobs they put out.
You know, that is fine, it is quite quick to see that if you are not colour blind, but what about doing something like this as a simple addition to that, so it is still attractive, obviously I put it together is so it is not beautifully designed you get the impression of what I am talking about there. You have got the colour which is a quick thing but also the symbols as well.
Okay, another way that colour is used on websites is to indicate links. Now this is a common construct I found in WordPress themes. It is having the links as just coloured text. Now there was a convention when the web was old, about 15 years ago, 20 years ago, a long time ago in the web; that people put underlines under their links right? Now if I flick backwards and forwards between those two views, see how easier, how much easier it is where the links are, when the underlines are present?
So think twice perhaps before you remove that especially if your green is quite close in the colour styling to the black text.
This is a nice good presentation screen here sometimes when I have given presentations like this to developers I am using a rather rubbish projector and something like that, it is almost impossible to see the difference between the green and that text there.
The next section is about the use of keyboard, some people rely on keyboard interaction, either can’t use a mouse or choose not to use a mouse.
So, this is a website for a function I went to last September, not sure if Dave is in the room? He is? Ha ha. Okay.
So here we go, this is the menu for the website for front end north I hover over this, change from yellow to blue. If I tab to the links as well as the colour change, I got a nice border around it as well. So that is really good.
Now if I am using my mouse pointer to move around a screen I am completely in control of this because I know where I am going to go with it next. If I am however relying on the tab key to take me from link to link to link, to button, to form field etc., etc. I don’t know where that is going to go next.
Hopefully no one has messed around with the tab order of the page and it is sensible. But the tab focus can jump around the page considerably.
For that reason keyboard focus should be as obvious as the hover state, web designers specify a design for developers to use, they will specify what the hover states look like, then they need to be specifying what the keyboard interaction looks like too.
Sometimes I mean the browsers by default put a focus indication around elements that is field forms, … by default. Sometimes the browser indication is not enough. In Chrome it is a blue ring, but in Firefox, I also use Firefox and Internet Explorer a thin dotted white line. In some situations that works nicely. But here, is a, a screen shot from a website from some, for a company I have been working with and it, this is actually a carousel and there is a button that controls left and right. This is what it looks like with no focus, this is what it looks like when it has got focus.
So it is quite subtle right unless you are right down the front you might not tell the difference. If I magnify this area, you will see, see the fuzzy edge? That is because it actually has the default browser focus indication. That plainly is not enough here. So, you need to be thinking about things like this and actually specifying how easy it would be if that button turned blue with focus, that would be a much more obvious change in focus.
Okay. And this is what some websites do is they take the outline off altogether. Someone has spotted that Chrome puts this nice blue line links. They go, I don’t want anything like that on my website. Let’s get rid of that, that makes it difficult. Here is a website, I will actually demo this in a second impossible on this website to see where your keyboard focus is at all. There is no way to see it. As I will demo now. I will quickly flip out of the presentation and go to a browser.
I have used Firefox here. Okay this is an example of a good example, this is gov.uk, if I hover, there is a subtle change in colour and these ones over here, watch around if I tab around. I will start at the top. Tab key, tab key, tab key, tab key, tab key, … etc., etc. You will notice that focus is a lot more visible. This is good. If I am in control of my mouse I know where I am. It is now obvious where it is.
An even better way of doing it is the M and S bank website. Used to be rubbish from accessibility perspective. I notice it has changed completely. What this one does is even more interesting because I have only ever seen this on one site. That was a website it was a site of some accessibility specialists now if I start at the top. A skip link to the page that is fine. But now I get this blue ring but notice how it actually guides me to where the next link goes.
Interestingly, now goes to the M&S bank logo, it guides peoples eyes to where focus is next. This is a real dream way of doing it because for someone with who relies on keyboard interaction with the site, with this site, who can see, this is a god’s send, they know exactly where everything is.
I mentioned the men’s health magazine website. I will just make sure that focus is at the top. How am I doing for time by the way? Fine thank you.
Okay, so now I am doing tab, tab, tab, tab, tab, tab, tab, tab, you can see that things are happening because this little location bar down here is changing. But I am not getting any information at all about where focus is on that page. That is true across the entire site. So a sighted keyboard user would have terrible trouble using that website.
Right let’s dip back in.
The next section I’m going to talk about is text and content and firstly talk about text resizing and zooming. This is from the TSB web-site – it’s an older iteration of it not long after the divorce from Lloyds Bank a couple of year ago. So this is what these panels look like. It’s a list of links at the normal text size and this is what it looks like when the user makes the text bigger. The thing to bear in mind is text resizing and zooming are not the same thing.
Now as you’ll see there is an exception to what I’m about to say is that often what happens if people do text zooming is that everything on the page gets bigger and that’s the idea. Now most browsers do this by default but what happens quickly is you start to get horizontal scroll bars, on a wide lap-top machine that’s not to true but if I’m running an older machine I will get horizontal scroll bars and you know they are not a good thing for people. And that is why people opt in some browsers to use text resizing. It’s readily available in internet explorer and Firefox where you make just the text bigger, and that can bring challenges like this.
But it’s quite possible when doing your designs to think about what’s supposed to happen and this is a great site for an example of how to do it properly – the Lego shop which is a fantastic site to look round. This is what it looks like at the normal size and this is what it looks like when I’ve made it bigger and what happens you’ve probably guessed here is that A, and this is both in zooming and text resizing there is no horizontal scroll bars but it progressively goes into the mobile view of this site and it’s great, in fact in this site I’ll show in a moment text resizing and zooming gives a ultimately the same view right up to quite large amount of magnification so that’s good.
So the sites you are designing, does that happen for them, is that going to work for them? You have to think about where the content is going to go.
So, let’s have a brief look at that. Here we go, Firefox. So this is the page about the Thai fighter in the Lego site. In Firefox options are controlled in view. Zoom, zoom text only, if that’s checked and then when I’ve checked that I use control and plus, I’m not sure what the Mac options are here in safari, but certainly control plus, it makes the text bigger but not the container. But in the Lego site it actually works quite nicely.
Now if I press that 6 times, that is about the equivalent of 200 per cent of the normal size which is what the accessibility guidelines specify that you need to do.
So that is good and you can keep going and, yes, obviously there is – you can’t see much on the screen at once but if I’ve got poor eyesight everything is pretty much there. It’s just there is a bit of truncation going on over here. But that is not bad at all and it looks almost the same if I actually did zooming instead.
But now let’s have a look at Evans Cycles. So I have got – check I’ve got the same setting on this browser. Yes zoom text only control plus 6 times – okay so here you can see in Firefox it’s actually helpfully telling me what the resize is.
You will notice at the top it’s generally not too bad. You’ve got some spillage of text over something else and that but generally it’s fairly usable at the top of the page even in where you’ve got this door mat navigation that’s pretty good, but when it starts to get a bit messy down in the product areas where there is some truncation and what have you.
Now to see what a real disaster looks like, we all like to look at a disaster don’t we – okay the Dyson web-site, quiet a stylish web-site if you want to buy your vacuum or hoover as I say, I am old-fashioned. Normal size. Press control plus. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Oh dear oh dear. I’ve got this white Panel which is now obscuring a lot of the page. And we’ve got all kinds of mess basically. If I rely on making the text this big to use this web-site, I am going to really struggle here because in some places I’ve actually got 3 layers of text superimposed here.
And so that’s not good.
So we’ve seen from the Lego site it’s perfectly possible to get this right. So just bear that in mind please when you are specifying your designs for what’s supposed to happen.
Next, text justification. Here’s a paragraph of random Latin when it’s left aligned and this is what it looks like when it is fully justified okay. It looks neater in some levels but you can see if I flick forwards and backwards you can see what’s happened here is that it’s actually stretched the gaps between the words and the tricky bit here is this is a cognitive difficulty for a lot of people but especially for dyslexics because on each line the amount of gap between the words is now different to how it was before and what can sometimes happen, not for all dislexics but for some people is they get this effect of rivers of white space – where words stretch apart there are channels and dislexics focus on the channels between the words rather than the words itself, and it makes the paragraphs really difficult to read.
Okay one small bit on forms.
This is one of my bug bears that I come across quite a lot when I’m doing testing and looking at people’s web-sites before I train their developers. Use of place holder’s here is an example from the consumers association. You’d think they should know better really. So, placeholders here. They didn’t use a place holder for that even though they could have put which train company used most often in the option of this select but there you go.
Now this is a real problem for some people and it actually specifies, if you look at the HTML 5 specification, it says here, in plain English: the place holder attribute should not be used as a replacement for a label. And then in the green paragraph afterwards it tells you some of the reasons why it’s a bad move to do this.
The problem is as soon as you start typing into a field that’s got a placeholder, the placeholder disappears saw if you’ve got people who have memory problems they can quite easily forget what the field is supposed to be for. And you might – in this room, perhaps we’re all sort of like very able people, I don’t know, but for some people that becomes a real problem saw they then have to delete the text and get a reminder of what’s there before.
The other reason – another problem there of course if I submit a form and then it comes back because I’ve got some submission errors like it doesn’t validate properly, there is no then prompt for each of the input fields because typically when you play a form back to a user it will actually then have what the user just put into that form and so you can run into problems there because people don’t know what it is that they need to correct. Obviously if your error messages are quite good they might not be so much of an issue.
The other thing with place holders is by default the text is very faint so people who have poor vision often can’t read what the place holder says. So a solution there might be to make the place holder darker but then you run into the thing that people can then assume the field is already completed so user studies have found that a lot of people will ignore form fields that have got place holders in because they think there a default value, not everyone goes line by line reading a form when it gets given to them.
Okay that is the end of my presentation. Thank you very much for the time. I’ve come in 2 minutes early. {Applause}.
WENDIE: Any questions? I see a lot of questions. Yes?
FROM THE FLOOR: Hi, Graham, what are your feelings on having an accessibility toolbar actually on the web-site where people have a button so they can change the size of the text and contrast. Browsers allow you to do that. What are you feelings on whether we need that or not?
GRAHAM ARMFIELD: A good question about browsers and options to change colours and fonts on web-sites. We’ve all seen that on web-sites but very, very few. In my view I don’t think it is necessary really. I think – I have actually installed it on some of the sites I’ve done for people where they’ve specifically asked for it, but if there is a designer you design where your content is going to go and get your developer to do it properly there is no reason why you need to have the text resize facility because people can do that in their browsers. Typically if people need colour schemes outside of the norm for example if I have very poor eyesight I might have a hi-viz requirement in that I have a black background with bright yellow text, that’s where people are going to be user browsers like internet explorer which readily offers you the facility to set an override browser colours.
There are tools available as well, assisted technologies to help dislexics read write gold is one and claro read is another and they can add a little overlay for you to actually help you and some of them will actually highlight lines of text as it reads it with hi-viz way of doing it or config rabble way of doing it. So the short answer is I don’t think you desperately need to do that. If someone asks you why not. But as long as you will allow the browser to master your web-site when it is required for users, then I think that’s okay.
FROM THE FLOOR: So, in some ways the browser has more options in anything you can put in a toolbar any way because you are limited in the space you can allow the different options whereas if they use browser they can pretty much do whatever they like.
GRAHAM ARMFIELD: Yes, that’s right because then the browser options will pertain across all websites they might be looking at. And that is why – a lot of developers especially curse internet explorer but a lot of people with access needs still internet explorer still because it offers quite good accessibility options and a lot of assistive technologies work best with internet explorer for that reason. Thank you. Anyone else? I don’t know who is governing the queuing. There is a chap down the front. Dave had a question. Is that Herb I can see?
FROM THE FLOOR: Is there a tool that enables you to automatically do colour contrast against a CSS?
GRAHAM ARMFIELD: Yes if you are looking at a web-site – if you use Google chrome or I think now Firefox as well, there is a plugin you can get for Google chrome called Wave and it’s an accessibility tool, and it basically – I mean automated tools can’t show you everything that’s wrong with the accessibility, but it does have a look at and will show you using a series of icons things that it knows are wrong about your site and, yes, it analyses the CSS of your website to actually look at colour contrast and will indicate with a icon on the screen exactly where it thinks there are colour contrast issues. There is also another tool you can use in chrome – Google chrome itself has an accessibility reporting tool and you can run a report on a page and it will actually then list out where it thinks you have problems with colour contrast. But Wave is the easy one to use.
FROM THE FLOOR: Sometimes when I make web-sites I cater for AI readers –
GRAHAM ARMFIELD: Aria? RAI? –
FROM THE FLOOR: Screen reading software. I never seen how they actually work can you give us a bit of –
GRAHAM ARMFIELD: I do demos of screen – I don’t think I have time to dig it out now. I can tell you about it. Screen readers typically are used by people who are blind but not always because sometimes – I’ll tell you how they work then I can talk about – okay thank you.
Okay so NVDA is a free to down load one that works on windows machines, it works on Macs if you have got a windows partition. Macs you have voice over the native one for Mac any way, kind of work in the same way. Basically there are a variety of tools. If I was say completely blind I would use the tab key to move round a page and it would take me to links form fields and will literally read out loads of information so when it lands on a link it will tell you what the link text is and tell you it’s a link if it’s an in page link i.e. a link to somewhere else on the same page it will tell you that too. You can use the up and down arrow keys to move a line at a time. There is also short cuts in NVDA if you have it running if you press the H key it will move to the next heading on a page, assuming there is one; if there isn’t one it will tell you there isn’t a next heading and shift H will take you to the previous heading and there is also corresponding key strokes for form fields, paragraphs and links and stuff like that. There is also functionality within screen readers that allows you certainly in NVDA allows you to list links on the page so if someone comes to your page they will do insert F 7 which is the default key stroke and it will actually bring up a dialogue box that lists the links on the page so then you can use the up and down arrow keys to move through the list and when you find the link you might be interested in you press the enter key and it will follow that link so sometimes people can use that functionality instead of browsing the page itself.
I mentioned screen readers are not just used by blind people, they’re also used by possibly dislexics although there are better tools for dislexics but also for people who just have reading difficulties because with NVDA – this isn’t a mouse but I’ll pretend it is. If I’m moving round a page with a mouse it will read out what’s underneath the mouse pointer and there will be {inaudible} start at top of content read me from here, so it will literally read me out the rest of the page from there. That in a nutshell is how a screen reader works.
WENDIE: A question at the back.
FROM THE FLOOR: Given the customizer in WordPress is getting more and more popular and within it we have a colour picker which we’re handing over to our users to use. Do you feel WordPress whether this is core or a feature plugin whatever it might be, do you think we need to move towards providing a simple colour contrast checker within the customizer or is that overkill?
GRAHAM ARMFIELD: An interesting idea. A note about default colour picker in customizer. I was involved with {inaudible} accessible team when that was looked at and it’s interesting the colour picker is fully keyboard accessible so I can go into the colour picker and actually by manipulating the up and down arrow keys and tabbing I can choose the colours using purely the keyboard rather than hovering over it with a mouse. The algorithm is published on the world-wide web consortium web-site, so yes it would be a fairly easy task to actually build a colour contrast checker in the customizer because it just uses the hex values that you specify or RGBA values you specify in your style sheets. Does that answer your question? Cool.
WENDIE: Is there time? Any questions?
GRAHAM ARMFIELD: Who’s got another quickie?
FROM THE FLOOR: Where do you see the future of accessibility going? How you can envision how it should be going?
GRAHAM ARMFIELD: My day job and it’s great because I love my work – as Wendie mentioned at the start I’ve been trying to get people interested in accessibility for a long time. I got into it 15 years ago when I worked for Nat West the bank and they asked me to have a look at this, someone demonstrated how a screen reader worked and I thought wow this is amazing then they showed me how easy it was to change the code within the page to get the screen readers to work perfectly and I thought the way it’s supposed to be for everyone – I am an idealistic but the web is supposed to be for everybody here and it’s so easy to get these things right but the challenge becomes because as developers and designers we’re thinking about user experience, we’re thinking about this and that, is it teatime yet, all kinds of stuff. Accessibility is not hard but it’s different. It’s just like thinking about solving different problems that are probably not in your requirement specification or you might not have thought about so what I’m trying to do here, and people like me, Adrian who is here from the yellow group as well, is to sort of plant in people’s minds the seeds that there are people who have different needs to me so when I am designing and building a web-site I probably need to cater for them as well and this is how we do it. So, I do training and helping developers and whatever like that and so the future is there and there have been very false storms with accessibility but now it’s really starting to take hold now. There are a lot of organisations who are now doing it. It’s no longer just me getting up on my back legs at these meetings and talking about it. Other people are as well. And I think also people are conscious of like it’s not just about people with disabilities. My parents are in their eighties now. Remember the elderly lady right at the start? That’s my Mum. Because she’s not – she just can’t see as well as she used to, she’s not as clever as she used to be sadly, people lose their faculties as they get older and that’s going to be us in 20, 30, 40 years and people can get temporarily disabled. I hope no one does but you can get run over as you walk across to the tube station and stuff like that and means your arm is in a plaster and you can’t use your hands. So it’s about building the web for everybody and I think now is you really need to know it’s not hard but just different so understand and understand how many people – there are some statistics in there if you add everybody up we’re talking about 20 per cent of the population really has some kind of thing whether it’s getting old or whatever, dyslexia, colour blindness, blindness whatever, deafness, people who are deaf as well, haven’t spoken about deafness at all today, but if you add it all up it’s about 20 per cent of the population which is quite a lot of people. Okay? that’s where I hope it is going.
WENDIE: I think it was a great talk. Can we find your sheets anywhere so we can look up all the links you shared?
GRAHAM ARMFIELD: Yes, I will upload them to somewhere suitable. Haven’t done it yet but I will upload them.
WENDIE: If it takes a long weekend can we remind you that it’s okay for you? Cool. I think this was an awesome subject. I did a talk this morning and my final sentence was, I think it applies to this: it’s really easy to make someone feel special really easy, but it takes a big effort to make everyone feel normal, and I think you did a great job by explaining this to us, thank you Graham. {Applause}.
So it’s teatime. We are going to be back here at 10 past 4 with Alice and she is going to talk about – I just look at it and I forgot it but it’s teatime, there are schedules everywhere. Please see you in a few minutes.
Michael Murdoch
Help Your Readers: Format all the Things!
You press Enter and instead of a new line you get a new paragraph. You want to create a nested list and it just doesn’t look how you want it to. You pasted text from your word processor and its format is all wrong.
Formatting an article in WordPress can be boring and frustrating, but it’s a crucial step in writing for the web.
People read on screen differently than on paper and formatting the text will help them get to the end of it.
Nothing much has changed since 1997, when Jakob Nielsen published his “”How Users Read on the Web”” article: despite the principles being 20 years old, lots of pages look like a wall of text that might discourage well intentioned readers.
This talk will show you how to leverage the options available in WordPress and it will teach you how to fix some common problems with a few HTML tags.
This is a workshop: please bring your laptop and prepare a post in draft so you’ll be able to work on your formatting.
SAM: This session is going to be a workshop, so it will be best if people can be front and sentedder so everybody ising to the, then we can help people as we are going through if you want to move in?
FRANCESCA MARANO: It would be better if you want to work on your formatting.
SAM: That is if you are planning to do the workshop. Because if you are not, then, go sit at the back. Go get a coffee.
FRANCESCA MARANO: There is an intro and then there is work to do.
SAM: It is a two part session.
FRANCESCA MARANO: If you want to work on your formatting and you want feedback, you need your laptop.
If you have WordPress on your iPad, you can do it. So if you are one of the lucky that can work!
Convertively in the WordPress admin area, with an iPad. More power to you. Yes if you want to work on your formatting and you want feedback, we have here people to help. So instead of me running around the room there are 4 wonderful people that really volunteered to do this. That were wrote into this actually.
So they can come to you and we don’t have to wait a lot of time to have questions answered. So it is up to you, if you want to work with us, come in front.
SAM: Do we have somebody on the door, let people know if they come in. I think we are about ready to start, it is half past, so before Francesca starts we will do just a few announcements. My name is Sam. If you have got any questions, feel free to shout me. If you haven’t picked up your T. shirt yet, do that before the end of the day, you can do that at the graduate centre at the reception which is the building that you came in, in.
It looks like this. It is very nice.
Sponsors. Big thank you to all the sponsors without them with we couldn’t put on event like this, Jetpack, …, stall sponsors, … Go daddy …
Please if you haven’t yet make sure you go check out the stalls, giving away swag and check them out. Also thank you to the balcony and patron sponsors you can find all the people sponsored on the website.
The closing remarks at 20 past 4 then out of the building by 5:00 o’clock. The closing remarks are in the track A room where the opening remarks were.
If you tweet about the sessions, if you are tweeting about this session, the #WCLDN.
We have Francesca doing a talk and workshop. Thank you. (APPLAUSE).
FRANCESCA MARANO: Hi thank you for being here today, we will help our readers, that is the goal of the workshop.
Yes. I should turn this on apparently. My name is Francesca, I come from Italy, probably you guessed that from the R’s. The rr’s.
I build websites but, today I am here to talk to you about formatting your text. We will start with a bit of theory, we will go through the formatting bar if you already know it and familiar with it, you can start messing around and try stuff. Otherwise in the end we will have 10 solid minutes to work on the formatting and as I said, you have people here that can help you if you get stuck with something or you want to know more.
All right.
So for the past 25 years we have been telling graphic designers that they shouldn’t design for the web as they did for print. Right?
Who is a front end developer here?
Do you still get mock ups on photo shop? Yes, 25 years! We have been trying to do this but still people design on photoshop. Same things happens with text. I don’t know your age? We used to do this things calls press releases. Anyone hear heard of a press release? One page of full justified text with maybe some bold thrown in just you know, to highlight the name of the furniture you were trying to sell or stuff like that.
The people who started writing in that way too those keys and moved them into the web but that is not right. That is now how you write for the web. So content was deemed King by Bill Gates of all people. I think we try and dress him as one.
A bit of history, I love the history of the internet. The web is getting old. It is almost 30 years old. The first proposal for a distributed information system was posted by Sir Tim Berners-Lee on 12 March 1989 almost 30 years ago, deemed vague and it is exciting, it is the base of the worldwide web. You might have heard of … the W 3 C, but believe me when I tell you that the releases of html and css have more characters and power struggle that any season of game of thrones! Like, it is crazy, but somehow we got to html5. Html was published the first pack was first published in 1993. In 1995 we have the first version of html2.0 which is the standard on which future version are based. We now at HTML 5. Its release was like 15 years old I think it took to get it of the standard and it has more or less 100 tags.
They are all quite self-explanatory if you can speak English. The most important date for our workshop is October first, 1997. Twenty years ago. Jakob Neilsen I don’t know if you are familiar with his work on usability, all this wonderful things, published this post named “how users read on the web..”
It was based upon a study that was conducted over the summer of 1997 over a group of 80 people I guess.
The summary is, they don’t. People don’t read. 2017 it is still this, people don’t read. They scan. They scan the text. So, whether you are writing to share your recipes on-line or you have a heavy optimised blog to convert leads or whatever, you have all you need to write good copy and format it properly in this very concise, this is like half of the article okay. It says everything you need to know. It is concise, clear, 20 years old and we still see a lot of wall of text in the internet and it shouldn’t be like that.
Text should be scannable and you can achieve that by using headings, paragraphs, headings, all the elements were already in the first specs in 1992 of HTML, we don’t have an excuse not to use them.
So unless you are publishing the next releases on the web, week by week, I don’t know, you have no excuse not to format properly your text to help your reader get to the bottom of the page.
Before we go back to our WordPress install, let’s get acquainted with a few HTML tags that will help you better understand to structure corner content. HTML is a mark up language, used elements to define the structure of the content in a page. Semantically, it is a big word, what it means it is basically the element itself tells what is doing, what it is needed for. So, and it is says so in English or with some form of abbreviation. So if I am saying to the browser, this is a paragraph, this is a paragraph, it is not something else and if I want to make a list, I will use the HTML element for the list so the paragraph, sorry, the browser will know what it is reading. Also the humans will because it is English. So HTML, I don’t want to hear this, “oh I am not a developer so no this is still a language” English too is a language and I think you all have a pretty good understanding of how it works and maybe none of you is developers. HTML works the same. It is English and the words are enclosed in to angular brackets they have opening tag, they have closing tags, not all of them. Knowing how this will look, the opening tag, the closing tag, the angular brackets will help you if something gets wonky into your post, you will know how to fix it because you are now familiar with the structure.
All this tags, these are like the most used common basic HTML tags you can use when you write a post. All of the tags are actually the buttons you have in the formatting bar in your WordPress installation and as you can see, they are all abbreviation of English words. What indicates as blockquote is the full word, so you can not get confused if it is a blockquote, it is a blockquote and not a list. You are not confused the browser is not confused, the readers won’t be confused.
Is this clear?
As someone never seen this in the life? Never saw an HTML tag in their life?
Raise your hand? I mean I, I basically just know HTML I don’t know anything. I know of some css so raise your hand if you haven’t seen HTML it is okay. All right good.
So English, angular brackets, self-explanatory abbreviation and functionality.
I would like to spend a few moments on the headings element and introduce you the the general idea of accessibility. In HTML you have 6 headings, it is the titles all right? From 1 to 6 and they are hierarchical. This is a word I can really say, it is hear-archy in break, bear with me, if I say hear-archical rather than hierarchical.
Don’t use heading one, if you have additional question about this, Rhian is here to help you with this.
FROM THE FLOOR: Thank you!
FRANCESCA MARANO: Don’t use heading one. It is reserved for other things, important accessibility things.
One of the common mistakes I see, is people using one of the lower headlines because it looks pretty. I love things that look pretty. I am all about the pretty but, if there is a 5, there should be a 4, a 3 and a 2 before that. It is hierarchical. I said it!
So, don’t skip that all right and another common mistake that I see is using actually styling to make titles but then it defies the purpose of having a semantic element because that is just pretty and again, all about the pretty, but it doesn’t say anything to the browser.
All right?
I am telling you this because using this structure will help all the readers. We want to help all the readers and when I mean all, I mean everyone. Doesn’t matter how they look or hear or do other things with websites.
If you are not familiar with the concept of accessibility start learning about it today. It is not difficult. Well, it is but, you can get an intro and get the idea of what this is about today as soon as the videos from WordCamp London will be on-line, don’t miss the 3 talks given on the topic that were really really great. I added some references at the end of the slide to get you started. I am no accessibility expert I just started learning about that. One thing is clear, don’t assume everyone uses the web like you do and not everyone uses a computer like you do. So these are things you should keep in mind when you design or format your text.
So for one extent to many by focusing on what is universal important to all humans. We love all humans not just the one we see like that or that can type on the keyboard right. I really like how Microsoft summarised this. Designing, benefiting, … they did this with a PDF that is not accessible. You have to go down to page 35 or something to see that. It was a document published a few months ago, but it is eye opening about how people use the web and devices.
So I really suggest you go and read it.
So again we are not here, we are really here to help our readers all the readers go through our text all right?
So we will do something about accessibility, we will do the bear minimum but we will do it. Now the first thing we will choose a theme, I will, I suggest you choose a theme that it is accessibility ready. So all the technical stuff. The difficult stuff about accessibility will be taken care for you, the theme will be coded in a way that it is going to be accessible.
Second rule, don’t mess with the theme. I mean, even if you can write CSS doesn’t mean you have to. Because if you go and mess with the CSS, or the accessibility ready theme you defie the purpose of having accessibility ready thing, maybe you go and change the contrast or the size of the font so all the wonderful benefits that we had from choosing an accessibility ready theme might be gone and the third one is formatting. Formatting for maximum readability and the rules were on that 20 years old post, list, paragraphs, headings, don’t use italic if it is not necessary. Be concise don’t be verbose just because you want to hit your target words for the day.
All right. Now we are going to our beloved WordPress. How many of you have no idea how a formatting bar looked like in WordPress? Like you have never used WordPress to? Yeah, thank you!
I am so happy you are here with us today. Otherwise I would have had to skip the next 20 slides! That we are made for you. I am happy you are here, thank you.
So you already know the formatting bar we will go through it because you might be surprised by some stuff. But, feel free to get out your laptops and start working on stuff. There, you have a draft ready that was part of the assignment for the workshop. Nobody did it?
Oh, you are worst than Italians! So if you don’t have a post ready start working on one now. So you will have time to format it and ask people far more experienced than me to help you with that.
All right. Let’s go through it.
When you open a post or — oh no don’t go like that!
Do you have WordPress? Do you have a WordPress website?
No! Oh. Mm bummer!
Okay. We will go, oh, I will see what we can do about that later.
Okay. So this is the formatting bar, when you open a post or a page and probably other custom post types I don’t know exist you will see this. Okay.
You will see one line, if you only see one line, go click on that last button that is called toolbar toggle and “tadda” another line will appear! Have you, do you all have 2 lines? Great.
It took some very experienced WordPress Developer some time to find the second line, so if you don’t have a second line, don’t feel bad about it. Now you have it because you pushed the toolbar toggle button.
If you are running a version of WordPress prior to 4.7.3 are you running a version of WordPress prior to? Is anyone running … there is no shame! All right. Go on and raise your hand.
Rhian, we are trying to be inclusive here!
I do think it is a shame too so in my notes it was written, why? So first of all why you run version prior to version 4.7.3. If you do, you might see more buttons in your bar and they shouldn’t be there and if they are there don’t use them. Doesn’t matter how pretty you think they will make things look, don’t use them. Please. All right?
I am looking at you lovers of justified and underlined text. Stop doing that! Really, believe me!
You have 2 available views, visual and text. Visual, visual. Bar, buttons, flashy nice things; the text view will add the HTML tags to the things that you wrote so, this up here is the version of that sentence in the visual view and that one is on the test and sends now here you have your HTML baptism I think is the word in English? Although I am not sure you do that?
You have your opening tag, you have the attribute – we didn’t talk about that. You have the string, you open it and close it then you close the link. Really it’s not rocket science.
The first thing you see on top is the paragraph heading selector. You have the full paragraph, you have all your headings. Don’t use heading 1. Are we clear on this one? Are you swearing today that you won’t be using again the heading 1?
FROM THE FLOOR: Yes.
FRANCESCA MARANO: Thank you. I will go and look at the work you did because I’m asking you at the end to post stuff and I’m going to look at that. Yes?
FROM THE FLOOR: Why not?
FRANCESCA MARANO: For so many reasons that I don’t have time to say right now! But I did add the references at the end because I knew this question would come up. But yes you need to have only headed 1 per page and since that element is used for the page title or the post title, if you have another one it will confuse things and people and devices.
FROM THE FLOOR: {Inaudible}.
FRANCESCA MARANO: Yes, yes, fight, I love fights, can I watch this? Later. Let’s go at this later. I don’t have a super clear vision but if Rhian says don’t use heading 1, for me that’s don’t use heading 1.
FROM THE FLOOR: There was an accessibility talk yesterday where it came up and you know common wisdom says that you can use H 1 within a separate article or separate section. No, you can’t. That’s not valid.
FRANCESCA MARANO: Yes, yes, yes.
FROM THE FLOOR: The reason for this is people who use screen reader can call list of headings and if there are several H 1 headings they don’t know what the pages about because heading page 1 is this is what the pages about it’s post title page title. If they are more than H 1 they don’t know what the pages about so it’s to make clear for screen reader users what the pages about so only use 1. It saves them a lot of time.
FRANCESCA MARANO: If Rhian says use it once just use it once. Don’t second guess Rhian. No, I am joking, but yeah there is a lot of discussion about that 1. But I chose you know accessibility over SEO, SEO over pretty. That is my principles list.
And also you have the pre-war matted text that can be use to add block of code into your page.
You can also use the short cuts if you are one of these people who can remember them. I’m not. But you can also use the hash symbol. So, if you start a paragraph, if you start a sentence with 2 hashes and then hit enter, it will transform it into a heading too, and if you use 3 hashes it will be a heading 3 and so on.
Bold of course is used to draw attention. Italic is used to emphasise a portion of the text. Beware that there are grammar and syntax rules about that and they’re different in the different languages. So ask your third grade teacher before going crazy with the italic.
Also another thing that I discovered thanks to some articles about accessibility, italic is very hard to read for people with dyslexia. So don’t use it unless it’s vital for the context of your post, don’t over use it. I was a huge over user of italic. I love italic but I stopped doing that.
List. List should be formatted as list. I run a blog with 60 contributors and prior to WordPress 4.3 one of the things I had to do manually for every post was to turn stuff that started with dashes or with numbers into lists. It’s very easy to make one. Just press the relevant button and start adding items. Like I’m super lazy so if I have to also add the dash symbol, why? That safes me one character in every sentence. That’s great. Use that.
But yes that used to be the case so you could do sentences that started with dash and call that a list. That’s not a list. A list is defined by an