 Pretty quickly here. Good morning. Welcome to work camp Europe. This is day two. I'm Raquel Landfeld and I am your emcee this today this morning. We have some announcements before the talk begins. First we want to just let everybody know that you got to visit the expo. There's swag and all of our sponsors. There's information. Also, please forgive my voice. I've lost it just so you guys know that. We also have a lost and found and if you need anything just if you lost anything just make sure to check that out. We have a community booth in the expo and a lot of stuff is in the expo so just make sure you guys check that out. This is day two so hopefully you have. You can also contribute at any time. That's in the Trianti balcony. You can take the elevator from track one to level two and it's a self-organized space. Who's discovered the game card? If you guys have seen that game of cards, if you got your swag bag inside were a few cards and it's just a way to mingle with other attendees and kind of gamification and if you guys are into that you can use those cards. You can gain more cards. If you guys are into Pokemon and all that you know how that goes. So there's lots of opportunity and ways for you to connect and network with each other. We also have the wellness track which actually started at 815. Maybe some of you guys have checked that out. Did anybody here do yoga or anything today or yesterday? I don't see any hands. It's hard to see but I did that one year and it was an absolute blast. At this point there is no more of that of yoga but there is Tai Chi in the afternoon at three and yeah that's it for our wellness track. So we really really love some feedback on our speakers and if you guys remember it's a pretty easy way to remember where to go and fill out the survey per speaker. So it's europe.workcamp.org forward slash 2023 forward slash slash slash I'm cracking up wow forward slash feedback easy. If you guys do need some help with volunteers anybody in a blue shirt is a volunteer go up and ask your questions and if they don't have the exact answer they know who to get that can answer. Lunch is served on level zero and level one and there are multiple food stations with multiple dietary needs like halal and kosher so make sure to check that out drinks are served all day all over the venue so if you need water or coffee there will be several stations you shouldn't have to look far. There will be 15 minute intervals in between each session so after this one there will be 15 minutes then the next starts and if you guys would like to attend a workshop and get your hands a little dirty it's happening all day long and you could just head to the registration desk to get more information unhelping. We have a special home page set up for quick access if you guys need anything and that's real simple europe.workcamp.org let's see here at the end we're going to set up a Q&A if you guys have questions just be sure we you don't need to queue up in a line anywhere we're just gonna ask you to have your questions ready and we've got volunteers with mics who will go up and take your guys's questions. We do have Matt's Q&A today and if you would like to submit any questions via social media you can via Twitter, Instagram or even Facebook. We do have an after-party tonight which I highly suggest you attend and that starts at 8 30 and is located at the Lohan Athens nightclub. Nightclub be sure to bring your badge you got to bring that even if you don't want to wear it just stick it in your pocket make sure you bring your badge. You get light snacks and two drink tokens and you could purchase more if you need. So we're gonna pretty much get started right now. Just want to remind everybody to have your questions ready be sure to ask effective questions and don't be afraid there are no bad questions so with that we're gonna bring our speaker up. Come on over. This is Vikas. Good morning everybody. Take it away. Thank you. Thanks for the lovely introduction. My name is Vikas. I hope everybody had their morning coffee. No but thanks for attending. I am going to talk about how to build or how to think about building a plug-in business in the block world. If you go on the plug-in repo right now, the WordPress plug-in repo, you will see there are over 60,000 plugins in the repo and you might feel the market is saturated and you may be right but in the block world maybe not so so during this presentation I would like to change your opinion if you have this opinion and what might feel that a little bit overwhelmed and go back and not do anything about it. So let's change that perception. One of my Twitter buddy Justin had a wonderful post about why this is a gold rush for WordPress. He said block today's are what plugins were 10 years ago right and he's really on point. I definitely encourage everybody in this room to go and check out this post, read it and then you will understand what I am trying to talk about. Before we move further let me introduce a little bit more. As I said this is not a 15-minute talk, this is a 30-minute talk and I have to talk a little bit more so I said I can talk myself about myself a lot more. Anyway so I am because I am coding since I was 14. I'm a programmer engineer by trade by heart. I acquired my first WordPress plug-in back in 2017 and never looked back. I have basically I rerun over 10 popular plugins and themes. I run two remote companies which is one is ExpressTech and another is InstaWP both based on the WordPress ecosystem. I'm also part of the WordPress Bangalore organizing team and we are going to have a word camp next month and you are all invited there. Okay, going back to the presentation, if you closely look at the repo you will see that there are less than 500 block plugins in the repo which gives you the huge opportunity of building a block plugin. Not only that, if you especially search for single-use block plugin which is less than 280 that gives you even more opportunity to do that. Let's talk about how traditionally forms were built as an example of how the traditional plugins were built and how traditionally we were using WordPress historically. So one of the popular plugins is ContactForm which I have presented in this presentation. To build this ContactForm the person needs to have at least an intermediate knowledge of some kind of coding or some kind of HTML or at least the person needs to be a little bit technical. So you build this ContactForm, you copy the short code and then you paste it in a page where it doesn't preview anything. So that is how we have been building ContactForm. We as WordPressers or WordPress professionals we know this but not the new users which the WordPress block world is now targeting. So this is how we have been building and this is not very intuitive. I don't know if you agree on that. However, in the block world it's completely different paradigm. In this changing paradigm the way you do block is you go to your block editor, you open the block inserter, search for form automatically shows all the single-use block plugins. Currently it is showing one of the plugins which we did on the top. Click on it, it automatically fetches the plugin, downloads it, activates it. Then you can drag and drop to the form on the block editor. It's that simple. No more coding required, a new user, a business owner can manage their own site. They don't necessarily need coding knowledge to do that. And not only that you can manage this form right inside the block editor by just clicking on it. It's that simple and then click publish. So that's the way we are doing blocks now and it's a great way, right? So how do you think about building a plugin business in this new era? So what are the different opportunities we have? There are two approaches which I think we should think about. One is a block first approach and another is a block enabled approach. If you are a traditional plugin business owner or you are building plugins traditionally for a long period of time, you might go with the block enabled approach but think about the block first approach. This approach gives you what you see is what you get which we just had a preview about. It doesn't load a bunch of libraries, basically not a bloatware. Most things happen inside the block editor which is really, really important when you are going for a block first approach. But when you do a block enabled approach which we just saw in one of the last slides, they just slapped a block inside the block editor but it doesn't change the experience at all, right? So the block enabled approach says there's a wrapper around existing functionality, doesn't follow true editing experience inside the block editor, may load too many libraries. So these are the two approaches you should definitely consider when you are creating a new plugin in this new block world. There is a hidden gem which I think is still too dead undiscovered which is the block inserter which we just talked about a little bit. Let's go a little bit deeper into this. If you search for a keyword inside the block inserter, automatically searches for single use block plugins. You might think what is a single use block plugin because it's speaking about so much. A single use block plugin is a special plugin with a schema marked up which says that I am a single block plugin and I can be qualified as a single block plugin. So how to build that single block plugin? You go to the WordPress handbook and then you will find the instructions on building that plugin. You just have to put a JS on file and then once your plugin is approved in the repo, you have to submit it as a single block plugin. The instructions are clear on the documentation. I'll be happy to share it after the call, after the talk. So once you search for a keyword, it automatically searches the repo. Once you click on an entry, it automatically installs and activates the plugin and it's perfect for the block editing world. You don't need to go out, search for the repo, click, find the plugin, find where it is. I think one of the biggest challenges with WordPress is once you install a plugin, you don't know where to go, how to configure it, right? This solves that problem and this I think, and this is how we have built our project which is Gutana. I'll talk about that in a moment. How to do paid upgrades in the block plugin world? And traditionally WordPress has been notorious in promoting with big banners that upgrade today and you will get this and then those are nagging notifications on the admin panel. I definitely don't suggest that. Go for a more subtle approach. Use something like this which gives users some kind of information what they are going to get and there should be a close button on top which lets them close that notice away, right? So that they don't see it anymore. It should be well placed, distraction free CTAs. If you don't know what CTA means is call to action, smooth checkout experience. So make sure, and this is kind of a generic advice when you are building a plugin business, if you are letting the user go through your checkout experience, make sure your checkout experience is smooth and they go step by step and they get the zip file at the end of the checkout experience. Use plugins like Easy Digital Downloads which is a free plugin on the repo or a service like Freemius to offer pro licenses. You can connect your Stripe account, Freemius provides that out of the box, so these options are available if you want to build a proper plugin business in the block world. Let's talk about some of the excellent examples in this new block world. One of my Twitter buddy Ajay did a poll as what plugin do you use for building a WordPress site in what block plugin specifically? And the results were kind of interesting and they were all over the map. If you ask the same as a page builder, you will get maybe top three page builder, right? And the results will be completely different. But if you see the most voted was other option, which means people are trying different libraries, which gives you an opportunity to build one because people are just trying every other library out there to see which one is good. And I will suggest before you start building a block plugin, go out and check out these amazing examples, generate blocks, spectra, essential blocks, co-blocks, there are many more in the market and they have a lot of active installations. That means there is an acceptance in the market about the block plugin. There are new libraries we should think about, key blocks. When I talk about these block competitors in a way, they give you inspiration on what to build. If they are doing something right, you can inspire from them. If there is something to improve upon, you can read the reviews, see if there is something which can improve upon, experience there, the experience which I talked about, how easy is to use that block plugin, and then you can improve on that. That gives you an enormous business opportunity on how you go about building a block plugin. Don't just go and start building one. First, learn what others are doing and then have your path charted out based on that. So one of the case studies, this is a pet project we are working on. This is completely free. We are releasing pro plugin I think next month, but so far it is completely free and we have a lot of features in the free version. That is one of the approach we have taken. Our approach is go for single block plugins. This is something I am giving away as a business secret, but I wanted the block plugin world to flourish. If you do the same, we will have a lot of cool options for people to try that help the WordPress ecosystem as a whole. If you see on the top right, you will see good and our forms. This is one of the popular form plugin and it has got 6,000 active installations in the span of three months, which is amazing if you think about it. Remember, there are 60,000 plugins in the repo and getting 6,000 installations on a new plugin is very, very difficult. So we went with the single block approach, which enabled us to be on the block inserter market where there is nobody. So you can dominate that market. That is the hidden gem. We are going with this and then redirecting everybody to the bundle plugin like KDens and other plugins. So that gives them an opportunity to install a bundle of libraries if they want. If they don't want, no problem. You can use a single block plugin. Our approach is go for no jQuery, which means going for vanilla, lightweight JavaScript. Focus on performance because, and this is a key secret in WordPress. In coming days, I think it has already happened is performance is something which plugin authors generally ignore and then you end up using a cache plugin. You end up using your speed optimization. I don't think you should need that. You don't need a cache plugin if you have properly built blocks. You don't need those plugins, at least for the UI loading. If the blocks are loading properly, if the CSS is lightweight, if the JavaScript is lightweight, you don't need all those things. Focus on UX as I have mentioned a couple of times already. Focus on user experience. Don't just focus on building functionality. Think about how users will use your plugin in the new block world. There are some plugins where you click on the block and then you have to do editing on the sidebar. I definitely don't recommend that approach because that is already being done by other page builders. What are we doing which helps the user edit that form, that tab, that block faster? Think about those when you are building this. Our approach towards building Gutena is four parts. One is we want to build audience first and this is extremely important when you are building a plugin business. Build a free plugin which people love to use and this is what we have been doing so far. Build an audience first, build a plugin which people love to use, get them a free installation, get them a taste of what you can do with your coding skills, with your designing skills, with your business skills. That gives you an idea of what Gutena is, what your project is. Extend core editor principles. There are some plugins who are completely different than the core editing experience. If you experience a core block, it is very swift. You edit it really quickly, drag and drop a button, you add a text, there you go. But as I said, there are some libraries, we don't do that. At Gutena, we are following that principles. The designing principles which we are following is extend the core block as much as possible, build on top of that and you can do that as well. Then we talked about block first approach in the beginning. A block first approach gives you an opportunity to be a block first plugin. So the end goal is to completely differentiate yourself from other traditional plugins. I am not saying that traditional plugins are bad or something. I am saying this is a new era. Think about in those lines rather than thinking about the legacy ways or the traditional ways. And then build feature parity. This is also extremely important. When you are telling that this contact form, go and use this contact form, people will expect a lot of things from that contact form, which they have been used to anyway traditionally. It will be difficult, but you will be able to achieve feature parity. Understand how they are using traditional plugins and what are some of the features you can import into your block plugin. So that is feature parity. So this unlocks some of the amazing possibilities. Once you know, so far we have learned what are traditional plugins, how are block plugins different, and how to think about in this new block first era. So this slide is one of the best slide in my presentation. This talks about democratizing design, which is what WordPress is all about now. So we have a block editor. We have block themes. We have block plugins. So what you can do? Previously, you had to build a custom theme to design. So the end goal is to design a website or design an experience, design a solution, which was difficult for a non-coder. Even for a coder, it took a lot of time to design. So design and then code and then there is an end result, which was like, it took a lot of time. But if you design something on Figma, you just design and deliver it. But that Figma is a design. It doesn't function. So going for functional design is what these three things enable you. You already have a block editor, an awesome block editor bundled inside WordPress. I know not a lot of folks are very much into block editor. They have their own opinion about it. I have my own. I think this is going to change how we use WordPress. And then we have block themes, which don't need no coding. So you can develop block themes as much as you want. You just need a good design sense. And then you can build block plugins, as I said, if you need one. Once you have all these three key components, you can build any kind of experience, any kind of solution, any website. That's where at InstaWP, which we are running right now, is we are creating a store and this store is going to change the way we look at themes in general. So we know about various theme marketplaces. They sell themes and that arise over already after the page builder have come to the market. And now in the block world, that arise completely gone, my humble opinion. If you are able to build a good template, a good design which a business can use, let's say a car shop, a pet shop, or any kind of business, if you can design those templates really quickly, really easily, you should be able to just export it and sell it somewhere. And that's what InstaWP store is all about. So the era of creating WordPress theme is over. Combination of theme, block, and with the editor can accomplish almost anything because it's being developed, right? The block editor is getting evolved day by day. A new market is emerging is my point. You can use InstaWP to offer demos of your product. So if you have a traditional plugin, if you have even in this case a block plugin, you can use a free account on Insta, offer a demo to your plugins. There is a key, there is a nice shortcut which we have built. If you replace WordPress.org, WordPress.org is not replaceable, but if you replace that in the URL with InstaWP.io, you will automatically get a WordPress site with your plugin installed in it so that people can experience a plugin. And there is no registration required. It is completely free. So this is actually a big point about building audience. When you're building audience, you want to show them a demo. They may say, okay, I have to install this plugin in my WordPress. It may take time. There is a friction around it. So this gives you an opportunity to show your demo. Easy to try. These are all sandbox environments. You don't need to worry about setting up a server. Everything is all set up. All right. So I prepared for a 15-minute talk. So this is my closing argument. Find early adopters. This is key, guys. If you don't know how to find early adopters, there are some things which is really easy to do. Go to various Facebook groups. Post, this is what I have built. Go to Reddit. Post, this is what I have built. Can you guys give it a shot? Post your zip file link. Post your WordPress repo link if it is already approved. Or the InstaWP link. Anything is fine. As long as you are able to find those early adopters who want to try the plugin. And believe me, there are many early adopters who want to try these things because they believe in the block editor. They believe in the Gutenberg project, which is for the next, I think seven to eight years, is still remaining in that project. Think block first. Don't think traditionally. Don't go on the popular plugins and then copy them. Instead, think go to the, I should not say this, but go to the modern editors like VIX or Webflow and copy them instead because they are providing an experience. And that's what we are all about. It's providing experience to the user, so it becomes an easier pathway for them to onboard to WordPress. Experience before functionality is the same thing. Design before code. So if you are not a designer, if you're a coder, you can copy design ideas from others. As I said, go to VIX, go to Webflow, go to Dribble, go to Behance, search for contact forms, see those designs and then copy them instead. And then think about your code. And then you will have a successful plugin business. I'm 100% sure. So I hope I was able to change an opinion if you had one about how do I go about building a plugin business in the world where there are 60,000 plugins on the market. All the big companies are dominating it. I am 100% sure there will be a company in the next one or two years who are, who will be dominating others based on the block, based on the block word. So I hope this presentation was useful. Thank you for attending. Thanks for being here. Thank you, Vikas. Do we have any questions? One. Mike's, anybody next? Thank you for the talk. Is it possible to just activate single plugins? For example, we're an agency and we do a lot of blocks for clients to just activate them for all the clients. So not the global repository, but just to activate specific blocks that they can search, but just the ones that we want. So every single block plugin is a plugin in itself. So it's not a part of a bundle. So you can activate it on client side without a problem. So if you want to activate on a multi-side, is that a question? Well, just different kinds of sites that we are running that we say, okay, we want to have a single post block that they can choose their post, post tab, for example, and one of the specific posts of that post that we can say, okay, we want to build this for, centrally for our clients. And when they go and search into the blocks, they can find it. Okay. So you want to enable some list of approved block plugins for a client, something like that. Something like that. So yeah. So if you do enable them, they will find that in the block inserted. And then they can drag and drop. Okay. So if you just add them as a plugin? Yes, that's it. Okay, cool. Yeah. They're just another regular plugin in the plugin sense. But then if you enable them, then you have to find them inside the block editor. Because where would somebody get started if they wanted to build a plugin? Where would like, would be the first step? I think WordPress.org has an excellent handbook on block editor. First, if you're not, if you're new to block editor world, first go and understand that. How, what, what are the various components involved there. And there is a great tutorial on how to build your first block. All the tools are listed. All the development tools are listed. You can go and get started. I think I forgot to put a link here, but I will be happy to share after the, yeah. Thank you. Any other questions? Oh, we got, yes. And then, so second one first. What's the process for submitting your single block to the block repository? Is it quite different to submitting a plugin? There are two steps involved. First is getting the plugin approved in the repository, which is like a, which is, which has been a process so far. So you go to the plugin repo, search for, or Google WordPress plugin add. And then you will find a link where you can upload a zip file. So when you upload a zip file, they get, they approve it. And once you get an approval, you can submit, you will get a link of your WordPress plugin. And then you can copy that link and go to the block submission link where you will have to just submit your WordPress repo link. And there is no approval for that. So the second step is has no approval, just click on okay, and it becomes a block. So it doesn't, it doesn't get approved like a normal plugin would through the, sorry, I can't hear you. So it wouldn't go through the, the traditional kind of plugin roof towards us. Like, you know, where it gets approved, where it gets some code reviews and stuff. While approving, they don't check if you are, if you're submitting a block plugin. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I can hear you without the mic. Hello. Okay, now. Yeah. Hey, thanks for the talk. You were talking about building like a suit of blocks, but then also distributing it, you know, single blocks. Is there a strategy for doing that from the development perspective? So I can talk about the strategy which we used. The reason which we went, why we went for single use block plugin individually for it, for a specific purpose, let's say contact form or tabs or testimonial or slider is the reason because they can find us inside the block editor. Once they find us, they are actually able to use our plugin in an easier way. And then we are sending them to our bundle plugin. But you don't have to use this approach. The reason, as I said, the reason why I use this approach is for discoverability inside the block insider. If you use like a regular, like a cadence kind of approach where you're building a block library, then you will be submitting yourself as a traditional plugin and it will not be a block plugin. It will not come inside, it will not show up inside the block insider when you search for it. It will come when you have activated it, installed it, activated it. The block will come, but actual suggestions from the repo will not come. Does that answer your question? Yeah, I was thinking more of like, how do you handle it? Like is it a mono repo that then branches out into, you know, the single block? Oh, you mean technically. Yeah, that's a good question. What we have done is we have used Git submodules to bundle all, because we don't want to do multiple development on this branch and that branch. So each individual plugins are separate Git repo and those are merged into a master repo with Git submodules. Okay, yeah, I think that's the answer said. And on the master plugin, we automatically detect what are these single use block plugins and then they load them inside the block editor. Okay, so the suit contains all of them, right? Exactly. It's the same code. Okay. It's just bundled together. Exactly. And it is actually online on GitHub. You search for Gutena kit. All right. You will find them. So you can actually see the code. Okay, thank you. Any others? Oh, very, very top, who's got it? Okay. I think you can just save without the mic. So thanks. Is the technology behind blocks still evolving? Are there any major changes to expect? So if we now start developing a block and two years later have to develop new or so? I think, okay, is the question about stability of development process? Okay. So I think that has been a complaint in the past. Every time there is a new release of Gutenberg or WordPress, there is some kind of major change on how you are developing and then you have to do a lot of development. But that I think is passed already. Budget is here. I think she can answer a little bit more on that. But as per my knowledge, there is not a lot of breaking changes seen nowadays. And it's pretty stable. So we don't expect a lot of changes which will hamper our development process. So it is pretty stable. You can rely on that. Yes. I was wondering, do you have statistics on how many websites that are using like Gutenberg editor and blocks versus like Elementor Beaver Builder? And then sorry, just to follow up with that would be on my side, clients, they find it difficult to use the editor to edit themselves. So when I look at Gutenberg editor and blocks and then looking at Beaver Builder, it's easier for them to understand Beaver Builder. Do you see a future with that on the client side? Because on the development side, a coder can understand it. But I think on the client side, that's the most important. Yeah. I think that's a very valid question. I don't have specific statistics on other page builders. You can see their active installations. I think they are in millions. But for the block editor, I think there are about two plus percentage of user who are using the... I may be wrong. So I don't have the specific percentage on that. But I do have an opinion on the follow-up question. When you train a client on a specific page builder, they become comfortable with that. It may be Elementor, it may be Beaver Builder. Have you seen specific problems by using block editor? Is it too complex? Or they're already trained on a specific editor, so it is a learning process for them? Yeah, definitely with the blocks. In their head, they're not designers or developers. So when they have to design something, if they can visually drag and drop it, that's kind of where Beaver Builder is, I think, way ahead, is that they can easily create something or save out rows, columns, all sorts of things like that. They also have a responsive editor, so they can see the tablet as well as mobile view. So if they go from that or try to learn on blocks or try to lay something on blocks, they're usually coming back to us to create that page, which is fine. But in our sense, we do a lot of management plans, so we include that. So we try to not have the client have to come back to us for everything that they can't figure out. All right, makes sense. I think Beaver Builder and other page builders have a lot of time in their hands to build those kind of experience in the past couple of years, and Gutenberg and Block Editor is comparatively new. And every release, you will find a new improvement which will help the end user use it. I think this is one of the biggest challenge right now, and I think the WordPress team as a whole, or the community as a whole, is focusing on that. So I don't have a specific answer to solve that right away, but I believe in the project that they are going to solve it as the time pass. And that's where I think some opportunity can come in, like having that responsive editor or something that can be built in blocks that can... Exactly. And some of the block, sorry to interrupt you, some of the block plugin authors are going in that route. So even they are using the Block Editor, you don't necessarily need to use block principles, the core principles. Like for example, some of the block editor have provided their own mobile, tablet, and responsive settings which the block editor believes in more fluid settings. So they have provided these kind of responsive breakpoints which we have been comfortable with over the years. So this is the approach you can take. As I said, it means learn about your audience. If they are more comfortable with breakpoints than fluidity, go for that. Any other questions? At least there are some questions. Without there will be no question and be prepared one. Yes, exactly. Well, that wraps us up. Thank you guys so much for coming out. First session, day two, that's a big deal. So congratulations for coming to session nine. And by nine, I mean nine a.m. But that wraps up our session. So you guys are free to go. There will be quite a break in between now and the next session. And thank you so much. Thank you, Vikas. Thank you for having me. Thank you for attending, guys. Good morning. Come on in. And pardon my voice. I have lost it and I lose it at every word camp ever because I don't be quiet and I love to talk. So excuse that. We're going to go ahead and get started. I'm Raquel and I'm the community manager for elegant themes. Welcome to Saturday, word camp Europe 2023. Did anybody go to any of the festivities last night? One? I know you guys were there. I saw you. I went to four, which is why I can't talk. So we've got a lot in store for you guys. Day one was wonderful. But day two is amazing. Tonight we have our official after party. You definitely want to make sure to catch that. It starts at 8.30 p.m. And it's at Lohan Athens night club. Be sure to check out our expo. All the sponsors would love to see your faces. They would love for you to come to their booths and engage in conversation with them. So be sure to do that. And we have lunch. Your dietary issues and needs will be taken care of. So don't forget to check that out. And that's pretty much it for announcements. We're going to go ahead and get started. Everybody, we've got Lindsay. Oh my gosh. I was totally thinking Lohan and I was going to say Lindsay Lohan. Wow. Wow. Louise. Louise Tauler. And we're going to talk about digital sustainability and the benefits for business and environment. Everyone give her a welcome. Thank you. So good morning. I'm Louise Tauler, founder of Indigo Tree. I've got three decades of experience in software and website development. And I'm really driven by a passion for the very best combination of technology, sustainability, and business excellence. And last year I was delighted to be named by Innovate UK as one of their Women in Innovation award winners. So did you know if the internet was a country, it would be the fourth largest polluter. This is from a study in 2021. And it's something we should all be helping to change. In this talk, I'm going to start with an introduction to the legal and commercial reasons why all organizations should be thinking about digital sustainability and the carbon footprint of their IT and their websites. And then I'm going to go through the various stages when creating a website. And as part of this, I've got 10 actions to share with you today. And finally, I'll summarize the commercial benefits of why you should all be starting now. So first, why? What's been going on? Well, in December 2015, 196 countries came together with the United Nations and signed the Paris Agreement. This was the first global and binding climate treaty to try and keep the global rise in temperature to two degrees compared to pre-industrial levels and ideally 1.5 degrees. Since then, they've held an annual conference of the parties, COP, in this year, later this year it's being held in Dubai. For everyone involved who's a signatory to that agreement, and at these meetings each member's progress is reviewed and assessed. But quite frankly, we're not doing enough. So later this year Europe is bringing in new border import taxes for certain goods, the really sort of what you call industrial dirty goods, very carbon intensive in their manufacturing, at great risk of carbon leakage, things like cement and iron and steel and aluminium and fertilizers. And they're bringing in these import taxes for those things, but there are plans in place to widen the scope of this, to more imports over the next few years. So although most people, if not all of you in the room, won't be infected by these specific taxes, it's likely that your organisation or some of your clients may well be in the future. In the UK, we were the first country to make it a legal duty to meet the requirements of the Paris Agreement. It's in law that our government has to do it. Our government's not just wanting to reduce emissions, they also have targets to reduce demand as well. At the moment, only very large organisations have mandatory reporting requirements in the UK. But this will trickle down to small and medium sized businesses before the end of this decade. I can quite envisage by the end of the decade, as well as doing my annual tax return, reporting my turnover and my profits, I might well be having to do a carbon return as well. When you hear people talking about reporting, they'll often mention scope one, two and three emissions. This comes from some standards called the greenhouse gas protocol. The diagram here shows all the greenhouse gases. It's not just carbon dioxide, there's methane and refrigerants that contribute to climate change as well. The emissions from our activity are split into three scopes for reporting reasons. Scope one is your direct consumption of fuel, oil and gas. It's things like company cars and your gas heating and the actual consumption of the things that are polluting the environment. We can normally measure this because if you have a company car, you'll know how much petrol you're buying or how much diesel you're buying. Scope two is your indirect emissions. For example, when you buy your electricity. Again, it's fairly straightforward to measure because if you're like me and you have a small office, you'll have an electricity bill. You'll know how many kilowatt hours of electricity that you've used. Scope three, this is the really tricky bit. For some organisations, it can be the vast majority of their emissions. I saw an article a couple of days ago, Etsy have started measuring their emissions. 99% of their emissions are scope three emissions. For an average business, it's way over 80% unless you're a manufacturing business. This is where your IT and your website fits. Upstream is all the things you have to purchase and do and pre-process, sort of cradle to gate to make the thing that you sell and then downstream is the distribution storage and it also includes the carbon footprint whilst your product and service is being used. So if you have a website, it's all your clients websites, if you're an agency like us, that that is included in our scope three and then it's the end of life. What does it take to decommission that thing? So this is all very theoretical and it's all very well talking about laws and standards, but what about commercial drivers? Businesses are actually not waiting for governments at this point. In the UK, the advertising standards authority and the committee for advertising practice have recently updated their guidance to try and clear up some of the confusion over sustainability claims, especially around the use of terms like carbon neutral and net zero because there's been a real backlash against consumers with a lack of trust and green washing. So if you're going to make those sorts of claims, you now have to supply evidence to support those green claims. You can't just say that you're carbon neutral, you have to actually show that you are by measuring it and then offsetting it. And environmental, social and governance strategy is going to become more and more crucial for finance, especially with access to finance if you're a larger organization. Why would I lend you money if your operations are not going to be sustainable in five, 10 or 15 years time? It's just not a good bet. Investors now are looking for answers when considering investing for the longer term and certainly some of the pension funds and people like that are starting to have that as part of their questions that they're asking before they will invest. And then there's where you fit in the supply chain. I attended a meetup a couple of weeks ago held at UBS Bank in central London. They're a global bank. They have a sustainability guild with some volunteers working on reducing their carbon footprint for IT across their operations. And ESG is a real priority for them and they're really genuinely trying. But more urgently than all the little things people are trying to do, the traders and their finance people and the people who are selling their services are starting to get real questions and pressure from clients on the specific results that they, all these great things they're doing actually are and see the measured reduction and reporting in place. Their ESG manager in the UK is literally getting questions about it from people who aren't willing to work with them unless they can answer those questions. And companies not waiting for the governments and regulation. Tesco, again I'm basically they're a UK company, but they're one of the world's largest retailers. They have more than 6,000 outlets across Europe and Asia. Millions of customers every week. In October 2021, they sent a letter to all of their suppliers. If you want to continue to be a supplier to Tesco, you must do these four things now. Our national health service in the UK is also not actually even waiting for our government. From April this year, all contracts above five million, the NHS expects suppliers to publish a carbon reduction plan for their scope one, two emissions and some of their scope threes. From April 2024, it will cover all procurement of any value. If you want to supply the NHS, you have to have a carbon reduction plan. From April 2027, it will cover all scope three emissions. And from April 2028, all individual products supplied to the NHS will be expected to have their carbon footprint calculated. And that includes websites and software and digital services. There's a massive amount of work to do to meet those mandatory requirements. So where on earth do you start with your IT and your website? Well, you can't manage what you can't measure. So everything starts with a plan. Talk to your clients. Talk to your internal stakeholders so they understand why you're making choices as you build or adapt the website that you're working on. My first piece of advice is to start with education. As what we've found when we're talking to our clients is that many people simply do not realise that their website even has a carbon footprint. They don't think about the fact that electricity is produced from fuel which can emit greenhouse gases. When a user requests a web page, the hosting server returns data to their browser. When you send an email, this takes electricity. The electricity is at the data centre. It's through the wires. It's on the device that you're looking at the page on. So actually, one of the things you can do is think about how you can reduce the amount of data sent, as this will reduce the amount of electricity required. A new website project normally starts with some design. An accessible site tends to use a bit less data as you tend to have smaller images and text isn't embedded in images. So one of the things we try and always do is make the site accessible, make sure it's as text-rich as possible. But think about why do you need all those images, videos and fonts? Do you really need all of them? Are they serving a good purpose? And design your emails really carefully? Do they need loads of images? So my action number two is to optimise your images. Now if you're here today as a designer or developer and you've heard of things like core web vitals, this won't be a new thing for you. There are some great WordPress plugins you can use to help with image optimisation. We often use things like Tiny PNG. We serve images on WebP. You can use the new WordPress Performance plugin to help. You can use a CDN, such as Cloudflare. You can make sure you're sizing and scaling your images in your theme from the media library. So even if you load up a really large image into your media library, it's saving out all the different sizes that are required for the different breakpoints so you're not on your mobile phone serving that really large image or serving one that's the right size for the device. You can also lazy load your images so that when you first come onto the page, images aren't loaded if they're not in the viewport. If a user doesn't scroll down the page, those images won't be loaded. And don't pull in things like third party icon libraries just because you need one social media icon in the footer of your website. Just use an SVG file. For action three, I recommend reviewing how you use video in your design. Really, really try to persuade your client or stakeholder not to have a video or to playing in the banner right at the top of the page. If they insist, can you turn it off for mobile and replace with an image, appropriately sized and optimized, of course. Most browsers don't ought to play videos embedded on a page now anyway. But if you're adding video directly, use the poster attribute to put an image in front of it. And at that point, the video will only be downloaded when the poster is actually clicked on. And the same if you're adding a video via YouTube or Vimeo, for example, make sure you have a facade image in place. And there are plugins that can help with that. Only when the image is clicked will the video download. So if nobody clicks the image, they won't be downloading that extra data. And if the video is not part of the initial viewport, as the page is loaded, you can lazy load those facade images as well. My next action is for fonts. Now, I appreciate the fact that if you're a designer in the room, it might be a bit controversial. But do you really need four fonts in five ways and different styles? Can you turn off the variations of the fonts and the subsetting if the site isn't multilingual? Can you just literally limit it to the characters that you need to deliver the site? We often design really lovely websites with maybe one or two fonts and a couple of weights and styles. You don't have to compromise. You just have to think about it. And then, self-host the font files as part of your theme, because then you can cache things. And again, there's WordPress plugins that can help with this. And check the formats, too. Being a bit geeky, uses broadly compression, which is about 30% better than the previous version. Google on their web.dev website has a really, really great article to help with this. It's really, really straightforward to actually make quite a significant difference if you work on the fonts that you're using on the pages of your website. And action number five is think about your email, especially if you're running a transactional website with things like WooCommerce, you're sending out a lot of transactional emails to your customers. It's quite tricky to calculate the carbon footprint of an email. According to the Carbon Literacy Trust, an average email has a carbon footprint of between 0.3 of a gram, if it's just a text spammy email. And then it can be up to 26 grams if you send out an email marketing blast to 100 people. But my advice is, do you think about really consider whether you need images in your email? And if you do, how large they need to be? Can you get away with the plain text email? Because actually, you might also get better deliverability as well. It'll get through the spam checkers a bit better. So what can you do when you're developing your website? Well, if you're going to start with an existing theme, choose wisely. On a simple brochure or lead generation site, you do need not need an all singing, all dancing theme compatible with every possible e-commerce event and form plug-in on the planet. All that extra code that's included by the theme author to make those plug-ins look really great adds data as you're using the theme. And you can in some themes turn that sort of stuff off, but it can be quite tricky and time consuming to do. If you have the skills and budget, I believe it's better to build the theme yourself. You have a lot more control to optimize your code, and you only include what you need. So my action number six is to look at the code loaded for each of your pages or templates. We all use WordPress plug-ins to add features. But if your Google map is only on your contact page, don't load the Google Maps API on every single page on your website. Or replace the map with an image linking out to the Google Maps. Because actually, for your visitors, that will be perfectly fine. The same goes for your inquiry forms. If you don't have a form on every page, why have the form plug-in loading all the code? There are WordPress plug-ins, such as perf matters, that we use with our clients to customize what scripts and files are loaded on each specific page. It's really easy to exclude scripts for all pages, but the ones that are really needed. It's a great way of improving the performance of your site. And don't forget to implement caching, so assets aren't downloaded more than once as visitors browse through your website. My seventh action is to help your developers and engineers write a sustainable code. The Green Software Foundation has a free course which you can incorporate into your education and training and your KPIs. And the Linux Foundation offers this course with an examiner certificate. It's a really interesting course. It doesn't take very long to do, and it gives you a great grounding on what all the basic concepts are around sustainable code and software and applications. So you've built your shiny new website, but have you considered where it's going to be hosted? The data center you choose makes a really big difference to the overall carbon footprint of your website. The Green Web Foundation, again, has a great tool for checking if your hosting is using green energy to run the data center. We host with WP Engine and use Cloudflare as a CDN, so I'm confident we're in a great place with our website. You can just go and check what's the score. My next action may not be relevant to everyone here, but sometimes websites and software applications are processing batch jobs, often overnight or at regular intervals. Think about the timing of these. They may not be affecting the end user of your website, but still require processing power on your server. As some background here, if you're connected to the power grid, you can't control what sources supply your electricity. It varies by location. Some countries have more renewables than others. It also changes over the time of year. A windy, sunny day is great for renewable energy sources in the UK. A cloudy day, not so good. And by the time of day, as energy demand fluctuates, especially in the early evening, it can really spike. So we use the National Grid Carbon Intensity Calculator and their API to look at when the energy is cleanest. What time is another useful resource with an API? Can you build something into your code to actually affect the timing of those batch jobs? Even 15 minutes or half an hour can make quite a big difference. So you've launched your website on green hosting and it's designed and built to use less data and have a lower carbon footprint. Then what? Well, often at this point, the website is handed over to content editors and marketing teams. They may decide to replace that static image you so carefully optimized with a large video. They may not realize they can choose the size of the image in the block editor. They've uploaded to the media library. They may not appreciate why it's taking a few seconds for that page to load. They could be planning an amazing marketing campaign and because you've built your shiny new site in the block editor, it's really simple for them to create a great landing page. But have they checked the size of their new page when they're planning their campaign, where hundreds or even thousands of people will be clicking on that viral social media link or advert? So my final piece of advice is to continuously monitor your site and identify of areas where you can make further improvements. Check where those improvements will have the greatest impact on the carbon footprint of the site. And you could even set a carbon budget with your team. So the result of all your hard work and benefits to your client and organization, well, if you start to act on some of these things and reduce the carbon footprint of your website, then it will be faster. And each page will have a lower carbon footprint per visit. And that's great news for your visitors and customers. In the UK, we have a lot of people on fixed and limited data plans. If your website uses less data, it will cost them less money to visit your site. We work with some schools in deprived areas. And they're always interested in the link between data and cost to parents to access the school website that their children go to on their mobile phone. And we actually had an instance during COVID where one of our clients wanted that big video on the banner on their homepage. We explained the impact that would have. And they made a very conscious decision to go with a static image because of the amount of data that the parents of children at their school would have to be downloading and using on their mobile phone when they visited the site. And if you have a global market, then reducing this data makes the site faster on 3G and low feature phones. Do not assume all of your website visitors have the latest phone and a 5G connection. Being a sustainable business helps you to connect with your customers, increasing profits. Making a clear commitment to reducing your carbon footprint often means a greater efficiency. As you find ways to improve your operations, internal processes across your organization, setting targets, looking at your suppliers, identifying improvements, creates a culture, it gets employees excited about innovation and then can actually improve employee engagement and satisfaction as well. And finally, clear commitments and measurement lowers the risk and gives investors confidence. But more important than the legislation and the commercial reasons are the moral ones. In total, the Global North is responsible for 92% of excess global carbon emissions from the overuse of fossil fuels. So we actually have a critical role to play. No single action will stop climate change, but we should all play a part. I'm Louise Tauhler, the founder of WordPress Agency Indigo Tree. Thank you for listening. There's a lot to do here and I'd love to connect with all of you in the audience if you've enjoyed this talk. Canopy is asked soon to be launched WordPress extension to help you continuously measure the carbon footprint of your website. So come and find me if you'd like to find out some more. Thank you. Thanks, Louise. That was amazing. Very educating. Do we have any questions for Louise? Stunned into silence. Wow. There's so many. Right here. We got Mikes. Here we come. Hi. I will have a question around the communication with your clients before you even start a project. So obviously while you're doing it, you can educate them. But I've often found that when talking to potential clients, some of them who don't understand the importance of the green website, they sort of want a website with all bells and whistles and they think it's going to compromise on design or quality and obviously you can assure them otherwise but they don't want to pay an extra budget or anything because they're saying it must cost more money because it takes more time. I just want to do it quick as possible. How would you have that conversation with them to obviously convince them that it is in their best interest to do that because most of the time they just sort of, we don't seem to have clients that are that interested and see the importance of it? I talk about core web vitals because whether or not they give us stuff about the planet, they're going to care about whether they're on in Google. So if you make the website fast, all other things being equal, hopefully that will help with your Google rankings and then at that point the commercial drivers are the fact that they'll get better conversions. They won't have people sitting on their mobile phone waiting, losing the will to live waiting for the website to load and I'd find some stats about performance and speed and talk about it from a conversion and profit perspective and not worry about the planet but feel good about the fact that you're helping the planet as well along the way and then when they do need to do their mandatory carbon reporting you can be there to say, hey actually we can help you with that too and by the way you've already got quite a low carbon website. Okay yeah because I think that obviously most people talk about the core web vitals and the performance and that's and they would usually respond with well shouldn't a website agency be concentrating on that anyway and so obviously if you're an agency who does practice sustainable web design and that's kind of one of your core values then obviously you're going to be doing that in all your messaging and I just want to try and work out how yes we could talk about it from a performance perspective but like you said every business likes performance but I would love to obviously like you've been educating everyone on the importance of what it does to environment that's the messaging I'm trying to try to get through to them and obviously we can convince them about performance but how do we convince them about you know the impact on the environment and I guess yeah it's just trying to bridge that gap and get them to understand it. I think it is about educating the content editors we did some we did 12 one hour interviews with content editors of our clients and most of them didn't have a scooby-doo about accessibility or sustainability and didn't actually consider it when they were editing a website if you're a busy marketing content editor you've got that blog post to publish and then you've got to get on with your busy day managing your campaigns doing your social media so actually I think it's an education piece and especially depending on what generation they are realistically especially the youngsters they do care they have some intrinsic motivation so it is about education because it doesn't actually cost any more money to build a fast website than a slow website if you start with a plan and you explain why in my opinion you just have to actually start right from the beginning and I wouldn't give them a choice quite frankly I don't we don't give our choice a choice to our clients about building a double accessible website they get it whether they like it or not unless they get a bit funny about their colors and color contrast any other questions we got one at the top right over there the very you what kind of tools or methodologies do you use for evaluating like the current carbon impact of of your website or your business the green software foundation has some really interesting calculators there's a website carbon calculator that you can just go on and it will literally you can put in the url and it will tell you a number of grams of co2 for this particular page being served and then obviously as I say we're launching canopy which will actually help do the continuous measurement but if you want to just get a view of it look at the pages that get the most traffic and go and measure it on an individual page level and work out which pages and then use things like core web vitals because actually you know if you and I think gt metrics is quite good because that will give you the actual amount of kilobytes that the page is loading wedge page test have started to do some stuff they've got a new reporting tool to measure the number of grams of co2 on a for a particular page for a visit but yeah there's lots of things out there that can help but you've got to do a little bit of work at the moment to actually measure it overall for a website but actually for a website is all about individual pages in the end and sort of looking at when you make changes what the impact is is next question what have you found louise like when you're addressing and doing auditing the sites what do you find is the most easily solvable but neglected videos and images and a little bit of fonts and then actually genuinely looking at what's loaded on each page making sure that what's rendered on the page for the first viewport you're just trying to keep it as low as possible because not everybody will scroll down and then you'll reduce it but it's tricky I mean it's it's geeky and it's a bit technical but I love that so that's why I took my straight any questions because quiet well okay then I guess that wraps up our second session of the morning everybody give louise a big round of applause again thank you reminder that lunch is soon and don't forget about the after party tonight you guys have a good break morning everybody it's still morning yes doesn't feel like it welcome to word camp europe 2023 today is day two it is saturday how's everybody doing yes I am impressed I'm impressed I think it took two sessions to get that sort of response so I think we're finally awake did anybody go have some fun at the host parties last night sponsor parties oh I heard that William I saw you I saw you I went to four of the parties and it was a lot of fun I was probably why I don't have a voice anymore but bear with me appreciate your grace for this voice we got a great session for you guys coming up want to make a little bit of announcements first we have lunch coming up pretty soon and we both accommodate all of our food needs and if you need any help at any time and you see a blue t-shirt there's several here they are volunteers and can help you out if they can help you out they will find somebody who will another resource is our code of conduct if anyone needs any help it's real easy you just go to uh it's europe.wordcamp.org slash code hyphen conduct of hyphen conduct so really easy to go to also volunteers can help you with that if there are any needs and with that we're going to go ahead and get started with our next session we've got Javier Salinas so Javier joins us from Spain España he is a designer with more than 20 years of experience he has worked in almost all areas related to visual creation graphic design web design photography cinema series oh my goodness advertising events video art etc for the last decade he has been working mainly in the educational sector he is currently coordinator of innovation and audio visual production at an important university in this talk we will see how we can use wordpress for the design and creation of immersive experiences making use of custom blocks and open source libraries oriented to virtual reality development thank you thank you welcome thank you good morning everyone blend who we i'm glad to be here with you to talk about how to build immersive experiences for the metaverse with wordpress this is not a click bite title this is true as as she said i'm Javier Salinas i was born in the canary islands in Tenerife Spain i've been working as photographer videographer web designer and graphic designer and for the last years in virtual reality applied to educational sector in 2008 as a web designer i used to work with flash i think many of you know what flash was it was a many amazing tool for designing websites but it has a problem it was very difficult to update the site you have to unpack all the site make the changes and upload it again so then i discovered wordpress and i have been working with wordpress since then so the metaverse i have a question how many of you have played with virtual reality glasses well a few only a few well the metaverse i have a bad news the metaverse today is nothing nothing but marketing sorry marketing campaign well i say that what you see here is the service volume for the keyword metaverse in 2021 before 2021 nobody was talking about that then in 2021 social media company changed its name so the interest crisis and then in 2022 um the nfts came to to life and then in 2023 the ia came to life so the interest of the metaverse is going down maybe last week is going up again but today the problem is that many companies have spent a lot of money creating worlds or metaverses their own metaverses um but worlds for brands um for companies and not for people and but i have also good news the metaverse is a fictitious virtual world or a collective and shared virtual space this definition was written by neil stevensson science fiction writer in his novel snow crash from 1992 so the metaverse today uh it doesn't exist but it's a long term project we are starting now to to write this path uh the futures of the metaverse uh metaverse is single many people talks about several metaverses but this is not right the metaverse is only one it's like the internet we know today uh the metaverse is universal we can access from everywhere every time like the internet we know today but the third one is the game changing it's immersive uh if you have played with virtually glasses the sensation of immersive uh in immersive website um it's unique so we have to change our mind we have to start to think um 3d spatial websites spatial computing it's a term we uh just recently heard and we have to change from 2d through to 3d the space we have to break the two axes of our screens we have the x axis and the y axis and we have to think in a third one is the z axis we have to change from shapes to form it's a very different way of thinking how to design and build websites so how can how can we make uh WordPress immersive this is the um the main question and as I have been working with virtual reality I have the idea to mix some technologies some languages um and to uh start to to to to design 3d uh websites and many of you may know AFrame is an open source library uh 3.js basic framework for building immersive web experiences it has a capital fear um but it's very interesting because with a very few lines of code we can do um 3d websites but it has a problem the same problem that flash had in those days it's very difficult to update the site because it's pure code you have to edit the code and uh upload it again so um it's very simple as you see here we have a library main library a script and then we open attack a scene and inside this a scene we put our content okay this is a basic thing um you can see in in 3d space but this um is immersive this this thing okay so I started to think that it has some similarities with WordPress for example in WordPress we have the themes and plugins and in AFrame we have the libraries this adds our extra functionalities in WordPress we have the posts and the pages and in AFrame we have the scenes this is the publication type and in WordPress in Gutenberg we have the blocks and in AFrame we have entities that is our content okay so so we can combine the power of AFrame with the flexibility of the WordPress CMS to design and build immersive websites so let's make an experiment this is only idea is a moonshot is um hope an inspiration for the future but it's also an opportunity for designers and for developers and for WordPress uh to build this future so the first thing we have to do is to add this functionality this AFrame functionalities we have to insert the less distribution of our AFrame library in the header of our site how can we do that with a simple function uh here you have the first line of a plugin I'm writing from weeks ago and my first attempt was a theme but I think that plugin is a better approach for that so we load the library in our header with this simple function the second thing we have to do is to create a custom post type I have to I have tried to um to do this uh this this we have to to name the the custom post type scene you have to be compatible with Gutenberg um we have to add the this tag at the beginning of the our content again we use a function to do that simple function to add our uh tag uh in the content so we have the opening tag then the content and the closing tag pretty simple and the third the third thing we have to do is to add the content elements uh we can use our custom plugins I have tried and I failed because it's very tricky you may know to have custom plugins but there are a lot of plugins in the in the plugins repository to do that we have to create our own elements our own entities for inserting uh as content okay we have all these entities in AFrame we have of course uh shapes like boxes cycles spheres um cylinders we also have uh 3d models uh we have cameras we have lights and all these elements we can use them to build our scenes how can we insert uh content in our scene for example here we have a a box an entity called box you have all these attributes for this element okay and this will be the code to to insert it with our custom uh blocks I'm adding here in this example only 3 attributes position rotation and color uh position and rotation y axis and seat axis and the color is a simple color picker the resulting code is like many short codes in WordPress so we have our first uh entity our first content type after creating custom blocks we can add more we can have cylinders as we saw before we can add spheres we can add planes so we have this basic setting again but with our new system we can also add acryltangular images for making skies we can do we can add video uh video sources and we can add lights to lighting our scene every each of these elements have its own properties okay lights for examples as a rotation as the color WordPress to allow us to upload these models to the models we can add shadows reflections and rotations with simple coordinates simple tags we can edit our our models and customize it and of course we can add motion controls you may know that um virtual reality headsets has motion controls for for hand tracking and of course for interact with the environment because it's not a dead environment we have it to be uh interactively okay and our custom our wooden bar editor will look like this we have the left the list of elements and at the right we have our custom elements with its own properties it's pretty simple to edit it safe again and we have our site updated we have solved the problem that we had before with a frame we are using the WordPress database to store all this information to update it and then to paint on the front page but combining all those elements is possible to will match more complex scene uh you may know that in adding 3d models or editing light beams cameras we can build these these words in 2021 from work with Spain work with Spain we did that work um late night show it was a live streaming program and I could work there making a 3d tv scenario and I had the idea to replicate this with this that that scenario with this this method and what you see here this is a workplace page this is made everything with that method as you see we have uh floor we have lights we have 3d models the sofa we have a video source and this scene is interactive the media gallery will look like this we have all these 3d elements uploaded we can edit them we can swap them we can change upload the new new and the wooden bar editor will look like this we have the list of elements and at the right we have all our elements that we can uh combine as we like I should have the opportunity to have a to do a live demo it has not been possible but it works also for book commerce um last month I did a test for a 3d e-commerce shop where you have the 3d products you can touch them you can add them to the card you can of course buy them and with the glasses is really impressive because of the immersion and I think on maybe in 10 years it's very difficult to say but 3d webs will be more common than today so we have to keep an eye on this and I hope you uh you can try and be a success thank you very much if you have any questions that was really only caught me off guard thank you thank you all right we have any questions to start off right here William got a mic where's the microphone the mic is coming I just want to say good presentation my question is related to what are your views on how the metaverse is actually going to affect the changes of web development for word camp conferences and wordpress itself because I'm in a similar field like you are creating um metaverse sites for word camp conferences itself and I find that there isn't I think like a seriousness to it or it really taken off now because of that it's very difficult to say um in their positive there are some uh plugins for 3d there are first attempts to do things with wordpress I do not really work is going to be in in some years but I think it's a good opportunity because wordpress is spread all over the world over the internet and I think the metaverse really is an evolution of the internet how we know today so um we have to be there we have to um we have to read we have to test things we have to talk to each other um we have to see what other people is making for example if you know Mozilla hub they have a couple of impressive 3d web demos you have to look that is amazing what these people is doing and of course we have today a problem it's a bandwidth it's very short with the stretch but maybe in the future this will be not a problem so it's really difficult but we have to be there I'm sure it's going to be serious not for all things but I'm sure that for working for studying have a lot of potential thank you I connected with you on Twitter so I sent your message on Twitter oh yeah thank you next question hello hello thank you very much will you be able to manipulate with three gs functions everything of this or is it a different you didn't load the three gs you have to load it is it's codependent is there a dependency I know there are some plugins for editing three models but yeah the model you have to upload it as it is maybe we can do a trick for changing textures for example or changing shadings I have to try that but now you have to upload the model as it is but you can upload the model as it is and then with the lightning for example everything changes so you can move it you can scale it you can do a lot of things but yeah the models you have to upload so three gs doesn't have to be loaded is it on the same library but because you showed only one javascript is everything inside yeah you upload you upload the 3d models as images no no I mean the library showed for the oh yeah the library is only one line just that not three gs just that wow that's good yeah the first thing was like this is gonna be work this is not going to be work to work but yes it works it's only one line if you get into the a-frame code it's a huge library but from WordPress only with this line on the header you have all the functionalities of a-frame and it's curious because even you have one thing or another it paints the 3d web in front of what you have in WordPress it's very curious yeah this is impressive and only with the attacks yeah because 3ds is actually really huge you know there's so much to do to do with it I have a lot of information yeah there's a lot of to do yes yes thank you thank you any other questions anybody is going to ask for the echo Luizio hi thanks for awesome talk I have a question very interested in your point of view from from your experience maybe you know some current tools that connect AI uh with metaverse development 3d development and if there are any like current opportunities to connect it and what future do you see from that perspective from that angle thank you for your question the IA is an amazing tool for making 3d systems it's amazing that it knows what a frame is you tell chat gpt write me as an a-frame machine and it does it's really amazing you can use IA for example for uh writing this plugin writing a scene for example but you have to know what to tell it to do for example the university um we recommend to use chat gpt only for things you know for uh to if you don't know the answer it can give you wrong information but if you do the answer you can use it to have more ideas to develop more content but you have to guide it what you want and I hope it has a lot a lot of potential it's another thing that is is here for staying it's only one year but it's amazing what we can do with IA so maybe in 10 years what could be it's it's awesome so we have to be there to and to combine it you have a thing it's a time to start to make to make experiments and to mix things because you can do very interesting things thank you thank you very much question oh my gosh wow okay Siri um did you illustrate all your slides aviet there was one slide that was like it was just beautiful did you design that uh the experiment yes the one experiment no this is uh okay um image oh no no worries IA and part of this code is made with IA it's a guide it's a help and for the images for example you know I don't have copyright so absolutely beautiful there were a lot of try before yeah no no absolutely I was just curious thank you yes hello hello from a fellow tenor if a neighbor I'm glad that we have people doing this kind of stuff there a question about the design of what you're presenting it took us about the decade to create a responsive web design for the 2d websites but what you're showing like it looks great on a big screen but how do we accommodate you know smartphones tablets anything else that they are existing and we have to know about them um if we are about to make it you know more popular so how do you think about designing these 3d environments that will be you know responsible responsive but also you know fun to play with okay thank you uh well uh obviously immersive design is not responsive but if you use a mobile phone or a tablet for for a 3d website you can use your gyroscope so you turn and you see how the environment is changing okay it's like a window through another place so you turn and you see the back of the of the scenario you know so in that way it is responsive it works on mobile phones it was very good but the main objective here is to be immersive so um this is really for virtual reality glasses we are designing uh 360 environments that are the the the platform is virtual reality headsets now not too many people have the virtual reality glasses at home but maybe in 10 years uh it will be very common you know so and we have the last week a new uh presentation of another uh VR headset um and it's uh people waiting now the the idea of having this device at home so this is really a platform but it works on mobile phone but not responsive as to the as to the webs are you know any other questions well i think that wraps it up then um oh wait i need to let you guys know that we have our first question for the card game is anybody playing the card game well um the first question is here and that's uh when and where was the first word camp are they supposed to answer me that's the next question though so if you're playing the game that's the next question and otherwise lunch is soon but we got one more sesh and everybody give a big round of applause for javier thank you thank you thank you good morning everybody wait we are officially now good afternoon and in greek it's yasu is that correct anybody in here yasas something like that well good afternoon welcome to word camp europe 2023 today saturday how's everybody doing yes i love thank you i love that more people are coming in everybody is welcome so happy to be here i get the privilege to come to word camp europe this is my fourth time from the u.s my name's rakel and i'm the community manager for elgin themes divi so thank you guys for coming to james's talk before we get started we have a just a couple of announcements uh tonight is the after party starts at 8 30 and we hope everyone can make it it's at the athens lohan nightclub uh make sure you bring your badge don't have to wear it but you got to bring it you got to put in your back pocket and show it um we've got lots of volunteers here to help you if you guys need anything if you see a blue shirt feel free to ask at any time they will do everything they can to get answers that you need and after this is lunch so make sure you take advantage of that now that i've given you guys some announcements we're going to bring james on james james jeru uh i have to think about saying his last name correctly uh so james is one of the most amazing humans i've met i know james personally and he's been long in wordpress he's been in the community in wordpress around 15 years and he is has one of the kindest hearts of persons i've ever met kindred souls and james really deeply cares about humans and has passion projects and one of them he'll talk to you a little bit about today and with that take it away james thank you hi everyone uh i was on the flight over and uh i don't know if you've ever uh had a talker who sits beside you on a plane but i had one and this was a 10 hour flight so you can imagine how excited i was as an introvert to be stuck in the middle seat besides somebody who was a talker but um you know as you as you do on these flights he started out by asking me questions like what do you do where do you work that kind of stuff and i said oh you know like i'm in this this ecosystem called wordpress and what do i do i'm starting this new thing it's all about like people and culture and how we kind of are are looking at that and i'm going to a conference to do a presentation because oh that's very cool turns out he's um the i guess like senior guy in a university in florida and um he's got 50 people under him and they're based all around uh the u.s. now he says that going remote was one of the hardest things that they've done as a company and um he had a lot to say about going remote and honestly listening to him was like seeing all of those horror stories that you hear about um senior executives who said who promised to their their teams that they would be able to go remote and then wants to bring them all back he was telling me about how he's got like five employees that he doesn't even know what they do all day you know like are they even working i don't even know i mean i can tell when this person's working so i need to bring them all back so that that they can you know be working and that kind of stuff and you know i'm sitting there obviously stuck um listening to him talk about this and reminding myself through that experience of why i want to do this kind of stuff and talk about this kind of stuff um i've got a couple of goals for today and and these are the things that i hope uh to accomplish in my talk things i hope you take away but i really want you to leave curious about your own team's experience i want you to leave with permission to be more invested in your team's experience and i my real hope is that at this time next year our teams are happier healthier and performing better than ever because you're more curious about your team's experience and you're more invested in your team's experience you might be wondering why why why should i even care about this you know wordpress is a really interesting ecosystem because a lot of the time you can start at any point right anyone can do anything in wordpress if you have an idea of something to create or something to fix on wordpress um you can start something and all of a sudden you you can make money from it not only can you make money you can build a team around it right and maybe that's a story of a lot of you you started out you you built a project or you did it for free and and gave it away and then all of a sudden you realize oh no people really like this so you created a premium version and then with the premium version you realized oh no now i got a higher support staff and then once you had support staff you realized now you've got a higher marketing staff and then from your marketing staff you realized now you needed more developers and engineers and all of a sudden you as this developer who just had this idea to fix something or to make something cool are now responsible for this whole big team right it's crazy and as i look at wordpress and where we are we're 20 years old now you know many of us have been doing this for a little while um some of us have been lucky enough to sell sell off to to greener pastures but this whole idea of of building a team is maybe not something that you got into wordpress for but you find yourself in the position of needing to think about it so we're going to talk through something and that's kind of why i i did this because the reality is that financial success doesn't really equal team success right and we've got a really great use case to to look at that's outside of our ecosystem has anybody here been following what's been going on with the the little blue bird and it's a recent takeover by someone and what the experience has been like there are stories all over the internet of what it's like to work in that space now after a new leader came in and now you might argue you know their their ad revenue is down but in terms of of just revenue and financial success and team size they've done it they've made it all right but just because they're generating revenue doesn't necessarily mean their team is happy healthy or that their culture is even sustainable what got us here is not going to get us there i think that's that's basically what i'm i'm thinking about today you know as as you are a leader in your team as you're you're looking at all these things you know like what got you to where you are now is not going to help you get to where you need to go if we want the next 20 years of wordpress to be amazing we need companies that are willing to stick it out for the next 20 years and be around that long i was reading some stuff on Shopify recently and Shopify has this really interesting slogan if you will that they want to build a 100 year company can you imagine building a 100 year company there aren't many of those around but imagine wordpress full of 100 year companies right like what would you need to do as a team as a culture and your structure in order to make that possible the future of wordpress isn't just about our ability to create great products right it's actually a lot more than that it's about our ability to create great teams that's kind of my my thinking on it and so how can we ensure that as our companies grow and succeed our teams do too that's the question that was really going around in my head when i decided to kick off this whole thing called team WP and and the the real issue was as i started to look at this i did what you know most i'm a marketer by by trade so i did what most marketers do i tried to find some data and see if there was anything out there that could help me understand what teams are are going through in wordpress and it turns out we just don't know enough there's there's like no data about wordpress and and what our employees and our companies are experiencing or feeling or going through so i said all right well let's have a go let's see if we can figure that out so i launched something in february or april i guess called the team experience index the team experience index was something that i wanted to give to wordpress the idea was that if i could give team leaders team managers some data based insights on what their employees are experiencing you would have some inspiration and some clear understanding of what comes next for you as you invest in your team so uh oh this slide uh yeah so here's some some information on on um what we did so we put it out there we had around 293 responses come in um 50 plus companies participated in it and um the survey completion rate was about 20.5 percent so i don't know if you've ever taken a survey but this one was like 70 questions long um you're welcome and uh it took people some time to fill out um not much time but when you tell somebody that it's like an actual five minutes they think one minute but no this was like a real five minutes like you had to actually think about things but it was good so thank you to everyone who participated and filled it out here's a little bit of information about it um we had uh some demographic questions that we asked these were completely optional so you did not have to fill it out one of the really big things about collecting information like this is when you're asking people for feedback especially about their employee experience anonymity and confidentiality is really really important you're never going to get an honest answer from someone if they're worried that it's going to come back to them or if they're going to get found out um so we worked really hard to make sure that everything was anonymized everything was randomized and we will never disclose any individual response but um we will show you sort of the aggregate of what's going on but we did ask some demographic questions to invite some people to share a little bit about where they're based or or or how they um how they represent uh and this is the results one of the things that's really cool here I don't know if you can see is the um the male to female in um self-disclosure we had 65 percent female and 33 percent male so an overabundance of women were willing to tell us that that they were filling this out which I thought was really cool and really brave um because and because I don't know if you know this but it's really risky for people especially women and and people from historically underrepresented groups to share feedback and do this kind of thing um because they're the ones most at risk of having something happen and not be able to recover as quickly so I was really excited about that so thank you to everyone um who was brave enough to disclose that um and here's a breakdown as well of where people were from so about 55 percent were from North America uh Europe was 16 percent Asia was 22 percent and then the rest of the world was around 7 percent uh a little bit of information about um who filled this in as well so we had around 20 percent were from product companies uh so that's plugins themes things like that 34 percent uh are what I call logistics or hosting companies um and 47 percent were from agencies and service providers uh as far as company size goes um it was pretty good split but you can see the two big ones were the 11 to 29 category and the 300 plus category um not everyone who filled it in in the 300 plus category by the way was from a hosting company there were a lot of agency people in there as well um yeah so there's that and then the breakdown as well of of who they were by company role so senior leader team manager and team member I thought this was really cool actually to see like senior leaders and team managers were as willing to fill in the survey as team members uh when when you're asking for feedback sometimes it's the the team members like I am ready to you know tell you how it is um and this is the result so uh I developed this framework it's called the open team framework and it has eight different areas that we measure in so transparent leadership authentic purpose candid communication empowered ownership collaborative decision making continuous learning and inclusive culture and so the global open team score and so this is the average across all eight areas is 89 that's pretty high and worthy I think of a round of applause for the WordPress community and to give you a little sense of how this data I hope is used um I ran uh I worked with a team called barn two plugins and um what we are able to do is plot their scores against um the open team benchmark and show them where they're doing well compared to the community or compared to like the the the global sort of like ecosystem and also where they have opportunities and so this was their score which was also amazing so big huge round of applause to barn two because like that's a great culture score so now I want to talk through each of the eight areas um that we took a look at and I've given quick little definitions here of what we mean by each of these just to give you a sense so transparent leadership is trustworthy ethical and communicative leadership it emphasizes the importance of open honest communication accountability and active engagement from company leaders um and when you do that you foster sense of trust and collaboration across the entire organization so these are the questions that were on the survey that were um geared toward this um so the the transparent leadership score overall was 86 positive uh 6 neutral 8 negative and this is what we do for each question um for those if you didn't take the survey that's fine I'll tell you how it works we basically ask people questions um or or give them statements what we call likeert statements and we ask them to rate their agreement with a statement from strongly disagree disagree neutral agree and strongly agree um and we weighted it based on the um the response so that's how we got these scores here um so there's things in here like our company leaders have communicated a vision that motivates me um really high scores for our company leaders are honest and ethical in their business practices um so here's some strengths of uh transparent leadership and some opportunities I think in for uh WordPress companies 92% agree that leaders are honest and ethical good that's probably something you want in your leaders um I can ask uh company leaders any reasonable question and get a straight answer I don't know if you've ever worked in an environment where you're afraid to talk to your boss or you're afraid to talk to your boss's boss but one of the things that's really exciting to see in WordPress is that we are approachable right senior leaders managers are approachable and um our teams feel that way um I will say that senior leaders didn't fill out a bunch of these questions intentionally because we didn't want to you know skew the results in their favor um and 91% agreed that the leaders here demonstrate that people are important to the company's success so that's really cool opportunities 80% agreed that our company effectively directs resources funding people in effort to our company goals uh might not be surprising maybe it is uh to me what that says is just that there are people who think that you know maybe they're they're overworked or that they they have these company goals that they're working toward but they don't have they're just stretched too thin to be able to accomplish them uh our company leaders have communicated a vision that motivates me was at 81% um and I think I have some ideas on this one um but I think this one really is is uh our distributed nature uh and and um the way that a lot of us are in remote teams means we don't get as much face time uh with our leadership team and the leadership teams of our companies are probably talking vision and talking strategy and have clarity on purpose and mission uh but they they haven't maybe communicated that or or haven't communicated it enough to their teams and then um finally here uh 83% agreed that company leadership here keeps people informed about what is happening so yeah there you go so I think that there's an opportunity here for team leaders and and um executives or senior leaders to actually be more engaged with their team as far as like telling them what's going on uh when I was at Envato this was something they did really well so we would have in all hands for the entire company every two weeks which was really cool and then like every quarter or so they would actually get up and they would share like how the the company was going what was going on um financially and how they were progressing toward goals um they're using tools to help with that but you can imagine a team of like 600 people all getting together and being able to see that and then ask questions at the end it was it was pretty powerful and and pretty good at helping people stay connected to um the core of what the the company was all about authentic purpose is uh really about aligning the company's mission vision and values with its day-to-day operations so maybe you've heard the story about the janitor at NASA who when he gets asked what does he do um says I'm putting a man on the moon right he had real clarity about the purpose of what he was doing and why he was there and even though his job was to maybe sweep and and empty the rubbish bins he uh was helping to put a person on the moon and I think that's great and so that's what authentic purpose is all about and so we look at a number of things uh here in this space and again um pretty pretty decent scores for the WordPress ecosystem I rarely think about looking for a job elsewhere right um I see myself working here in two years time my work has special meaning this is not just a job I have a feeling in WordPress this probably ranks a little bit higher than maybe in the rest of the world and and in the rest of tech because we are a community we're we're very passionate people we've got this this project that we all contribute to that we love and are passionate about um and I think that that bleeds into that sense of purpose that we all have I'm proud to tell others I work here I would recommend our company is a great place to work here's a few of the the strengths I know how my work contributes to our company goals 96 that's fantastic now the products and services our company provides are as good as or better than our main competitors teams you have faith in your projects you have faith in your your your work and that's awesome I'm proud to tell others I work here that's pretty cool if you're developing an employer brand or you're about to recruit or hire get your people to do it get your people to tell their stories about what's going on how exciting is that they're probably pretty excited to tell people what's going on opportunities 86 percent said I rarely think about looking for a job elsewhere when I look at what we accomplish I feel a sense of pride I see myself working here in two years time so these are kind of there's a bit of a flag here maybe for us to take a look at it's not that bad when you consider that the spread is 87 percent to 94 percent between strengths and opportunities but just something to consider and think through is that you know we all have our our eyes open and doors open to new opportunities and things when I look at what we accomplish I feel a sense of pride I wouldn't consider that low but I would consider that people's inner critique maybe going oh I pushed that out there's three bugs I wish I would have got rid of those before it went live but here we are all right candid communication this one's fun uh does anybody here ever had or wanted to give feedback to somebody or wanted to have a conversation that maybe wasn't all you know like rainbows and lollipops it's really important to do that no matter who you are in the company bottom to the top having candid conversations in a space that's safe can be really really great for your culture and help you get past some challenges as well 90 percent here there's open and honest two-way communication in our team this is a psychologically safe space safe place to work when it is clear that someone is not delivering in their role we do something about it that one's interesting I don't know if you can see that on the score there I'll bring it up here but 78 percent agreed with that so when you look at some of the other scores we've had even in the opportunity space there's an opportunity here for us to have to have a think about this 97 percent agreed there is open and honest two-way communication in our team that's great I mean if you're remote you're gonna have to get on a call at some point and talk to folks I can voice a contrary opinion without fear of negative consequences yeah so you can disagree that's great the perspectives like mine are included in decision-making one of the things you may not notice as we're going through this is diversity equity inclusion and belonging questions are not segregated to one specific principle of the open team framework we spread them all throughout each one particularly because DEI and B is not a program it's it's just how we all should be working and so we've tried to spread those out and and provide some insights here and this is one of those questions where perspectives like mine are included and I think that's really cool to see such a high score especially when you consider those who self-identified as women are 55 65 percent of the people that filled out the survey so that's really great 89 percent agreed I am happy with my current role relative to what was described to me and 91 percent said this is a psychologically safe space a safe place to work now it's in the opportunity category only because it was in the bottom three but this category in particular did quite well so yeah moving on if you got questions and we're going to curate space at the end for questions but if you have an insight or something that you see I don't mind if you yell it out either it's pretty cool let's have a fun fun chat here empowered ownership focuses on creating an environment that supports autonomy encourages innovation and promotes accountability at all levels now depending on whether your team is distributed or you have a hybrid model or you're all based in one location empowered ownership looks a little bit different I find that with teams that are are fully distributed this sense of empowered ownership is probably a lot higher and the amount of trust that you have for your teams is significantly higher as well as it has to be and we see that in some of the scores here as well so we have enough autonomy to perform our jobs effectively things like that so 90 percent was the total here and here's some of the strengths we have enough autonomy I have access to the things I need to do my job well and I know what I need to do to be successful in my role 83 percent agreed the information I need to do my job effectively is readily available we act on promising new or innovative ideas we hold ourselves accountable and our team members accountable for results so again those are toward the bottom but this whole category as a whole you all did very well collaborative decision-making emphasizes the value of diverse perspectives and encourages employees to contribute their ideas insights and expertise to drive better outcomes so 88 percent here 7 percent neutral and 5 percent negative questions like other teams collaborate with us to get the job done you can count on people to to cooperate some of the strengths were that you can count on people to cooperate that's cool have you ever been part of a team where that wasn't the case where you maybe had had some negative experiences I've been there so to see that overwhelmingly at least with the the survey group that they thought that things were that they could count on their team that was really cool and they could they felt part of a team I think that's a belonging question right I feel included I feel part of it especially in remote and distributed environments that sense of belonging you have to work really hard on because you might not ever meet people I worked for a company a little while ago for about a year and a half and I never met anyone in person until after I finished there which is kind of crazy right but that's that's how it can go sometimes it was also COVID so nobody was meeting anyone opportunities here are 79% agree that administrative tasks that don't have a specific owner are fairly divided this is a this is an interesting one this is one of the lower scores in the entire survey and what it tells me is that the people that do good work get the work and sometimes that means that people that don't do get work have less work and it puts a lot of burden on those people that are good at doing things and so maybe something to consider is partnering people up together and assigning things that way and taking some of the load off of your best workers 82% agree to other teams collaborate with us to get the job done I don't know if this is a conflict between support and marketing or support and engineering or engineering and marketing but I can see all of those things happening maybe you've you've had a situation where engineering's just done the pull request and and merged everything into into you know the the public stream and it's about to go live and so they just do it and they don't tell marketing until the day it's going live and marketing's like wait you just launched a whole new dot release of this project and you expect me to have a whole marketing campaign set up and ready to go for that excuse me and then you have support coming in and going documentation did anybody document anything what am I supposed to do is anyone tested this yet right so there's opportunity here for us to maybe have a think about the way our teams do things and the way we roll things out my team leader does a good job of assigning and coordinating people that's an interesting one 84% agreed so I think this one probably can be taken alongside the administrative tasks are fairly divided that maybe there's some opportunity here for us to to think through that as as team leaders continuous learning this is one of my favorite ones because the whole idea of continuous learning is is it's two things it's offering resources and opportunities for skill development or career progression but it's also a way of just approaching work right I I really prefer saying what did we learn out of something that maybe didn't hit our goals rather than hey that was a failure or that didn't work the whole idea of failure is not a word I ever like to use in anything I prefer the whole concept of learning right and I'm a big fan and proponent of hypothesis driven design and development because when you start with a hypothesis no matter what the result you learn something right and all you're doing in hypothesis is trying to think of what you might what you might get out of it yeah so continuous learning good job folks you're doing some really cool stuff here I have access to the things I need to do my job management recognizes honest mistakes as part of doing business and my team leader or someone in management has shown a genuine interest in my career goals so some strengths management recognizes honest mistakes as part of doing business great no one wants to be you know made redundant or let go because of something that happened that was a genuine mistake I love seeing maybe you've seen those things where it's like I don't know somebody at KFC gets access to something and uploads some code and it's wrong right and then the whole world sees it and then you see the developer thread of everyone you know celebrating and encouraging them and saying all the things I love that right that's a continuous learning opportunity I have access to the things I need to do my job well and day-to-day decisions demonstrate that quality and improvement are top priorities 85% said my team leader or someone in management has shown a genuine interest in my career goals there's a lot of pressure on team managers in particular to be responsible for a lot more this is one that I hope every team manager takes seriously that you have a responsibility to your team to do everything you can to help them grow not just in their efficiency or productivity but in the things that they're interested in right maybe you've got somebody in support who's interested in marketing finding opportunities for them to jump over and maybe do a couple of weeks there or do a project or work on something can be a really great way to expand their skillset expose them to a new role and build some of that cross team cross functional I don't know growth or or skillset so that somebody goes down sick for example you have somebody who can fill in the gap 88% agreed I am given opportunities to develop skills relevant to my interests and 89% this is a great company for me to make a contribution to my development so again opportunities here for us inclusive culture so this is yeah a safe and supportive space where all employees feel welcome heard and respected regardless of their background perspectives or experience I always find it hard to talk about inclusive culture because I am a 40 year old married white male and I am literally the least inclusive I'm the poster boy for you know what tech is I guess and so for me though when I think of inclusive culture and how it relates to me the thing that I come down to is can I bring my authentic self to work can I talk about how much I love K-pop and K-dramas with my team can I share my love of knitting right and all the projects I'm working on in my team and you know let them be as equally sassy and bring their themselves to it and all in all this is something that everyone here is doing pretty darn good on 93% one of the higher scores that we had throughout the entire survey 96% agreed we are genuinely supported if we choose to make use of flexible working arrangements I am able to arrange time out from work when I need to and generally I believe my workload is reasonable for my role 90% said I feel like I belong here I see myself working here in two years time my team leader cares about my well-being so even though those are red listed as opportunities they're higher than some of the strengths in other categories so all in all I think we're doing okay or or we didn't want to answer this one honestly and so we were more positive maybe than than the than the reality and last but not least intentional recognition which centers on creating a culture that values employee achievements provides fair compensation and celebrates success so 86% probably one of our our greatest opportunities here as well so 91% agreed we acknowledge people who deliver outstanding service people celebrate special events and care about each other I receive appropriate recognition for good work promotions go to those who best deserve them is 82 I believe my total compensation is fair in the context of the industry I had to I had to add that last part in the context of our industry because I don't know if you know this but on average word for salaries are like 20 to 30% less than the wider tech community so if you just left it as my total compensation is fair people might not agree generally the right people are rewarded and recognized here one more thing though so that's like the whole thing we also ask a couple questions about the WordPress community and how people felt about WordPress in the survey and in particular we asked how supportive team leaders and senior leaders are or how empowered people feel to participate in the community and if you see that around our open team framework we had 80s and 90s here with the WordPress community we're sitting at 74% and the questions we asked were I feel good about the ways we contribute to the WordPress community which had a 76 our company leaders are actively engaged in the WordPress community set at 70% my team leader encourages me to participate in the WordPress community 71% and we are encouraged to make a positive difference in the WordPress community set at 80% we all have business goals I wonder if there's an opportunity here for us to add some community goals to our teams not just at the senior level not just at the sort of company brand level but within our individual teams around like how can the marketing team in a plug-in company of 20 to 30 people contribute to the WordPress ecosystem how can that team leader actively support people who are interested in it and ask questions about it and say hey what are we doing this quarter to support WordPress is there anything we can do maybe it's translating a doc or doing something like that so now what a lot when I did this presentation and I gave these results similar results to barn 2 at this point I was like oh that's a lot Katie had a lot of patience to sit through it so you've all had a lot of patience sitting through all the data thank you for that and by the way you'll have access to it after the talk as well but action is the foundational key to all success that's what Picasso says he's a European and because we trust Europeans we will trust Picasso and agree with him here as well we need to we can't just have the data we got to do something with it so I've got three things three takeaways that I think for our companies that we can have a look at so the first one is recognition and career progression so one of the things that can happen in WordPress companies or or any small company is that there doesn't feel a sense of forward momentum in a career and if we're trying to recruit new people into WordPress those ambitious young Gen Zers like Tycho DeVoc who did his talk yesterday and did a really great job I like how are we going to get people like that to join WordPress as a career well we've got to actually show them what the path is like for them how they can grow if they think they're going to be a developer stuck as a developer for the next 40 years of their life for some that might work but for others that might not be what they want and then how do we recognize people how do we celebrate wins how do we empower people and and bring them together in a way that allows them to you know take pride more pride in the work that they do and celebrate it so that's one and I'm at zero minutes so I'm trying to speed through this last little bit here support and training for team leaders all throughout you can see some of these results our company effectively directs resources my team leader makes their expectations clear my team leader does a good job of assigning and coordinating people so we need to equip leaders with the tools to succeed and inspire so maybe investing in some comprehensive training programs encouraging regular team check-ins and promoting external inspiration so foster leadership style that's collaborative empathetic and innovative and finally communication from senior leaders as I told you a little earlier at Envato we do all we did all hands every two weeks when I was there and we did these quarterly check-ins that were fantastic I've worked at some companies where they might have won all hands a year I've worked at others where they have none and when when you don't know whether the work that you're doing is actually having the the success or is meeting the goals that senior leaders have it can be really unsettling right as as an individual and you're like are we even doing what we're supposed to be doing so senior leaders communicating regularly not just on how the company is doing but like the mission because mission and vision leak right it's a leaky bucket you got to keep pouring water into it so you got to keep reminding people of the why so I think that this is a great opportunity for our teams so that's that's pretty much it that was my goals for today I hope you leave curious about your own teams experience you leave with permission to be more invested in your teams experience and that if you can take on some of these things that you can be happier that your teams can be happier healthier and perform better than ever next year future of work is open right and all of these results are open you can at the end of this talk I'll give them to you and you can take all the questions all of the data you can run your own employee engagement surveys and your teams and see how you stack up against the the broader community as well thanks that's me thank you now that my my came off so with that we're going to start with some questions does anyone have any questions for James I see one right there thanks for coming everyone you can download the slides and everything at that link hey James it's Cliff hey Cliff long-time listener first-time caller how do you think it it might skew one way or the other from a larger versus smaller organization maybe under 10 and you know 100 in what sense like like just all the data how is it skewed or or might it be skewed yeah so the demographic breakdown of of company size the two largest blocks were teams that were like 15 to 30 and over 300 so that makes up about 50 percent of the total amount and then teams in between that were less than five 50 to 30 to 50 50 to 100 100 to 300 so I would say the data is pretty pretty good and that we can be confident that the results are not necessarily skewed toward larger teams or smaller teams my most recent experience in work was in a team of about 600 300 600 so when I talk I often talk more corporate speak probably then then for smaller teams but if you are a single leader with a team these things still apply right ask yourself the question when was the last time we actually got the whole team together and talked about our company goals and how we're tracking toward them when was the last time I celebrated a win with the team when was the last time I promoted someone right those are all good questions that anyone can ask next question okay I guess that's it then is that really it thanks folks so a quick announcement lunch is postponed to 115 because they want to take all of our photo as a family photo they do that every year at work camp Europe so if you guys can head on up and would like to be in the photo we would love it other than that you guys have a good day hi guys good afternoon how's it going my name is Christos Palukas I'm gonna be your emcee tonight we're gonna introduce some amazing people so we want plenty of engagement we want to give them the time of their lives here on stage so help us out here all right we do have some general announcements to say I do have to inform you about the swag table the info desk in the lost and found you can find that at the center of the expo you've probably heard all of this again but it doesn't matter it's okay then there's the community birth in the expo area that you could discover ways to contribute and get involved with wordpress that's also very important because wordpress is made with all of our contributions every one of our little contributions counts we also have a contributing area in the Triante or Triante balcony you could take the elevator from track one to level two it's a self-organized space where contributors can contribute to wordpress in a quiet setting there's a couple little fun little toys inside the swag bag you got there's a word camp europe game card that you can collect and swap eight cards in two ways you've received four cards in your swag bag and you don't have to go pick it up now but and there's four different designs and you can mingle network and meet new people and exchange postcards sounds fun now right you can also gain more cards to get more to get other designs you only to answer questions that will be between the sessions and to collect the cards from the community booth right it's really important to visit all the sponsor areas too all the sponsors have made this an impossible and it's just go past them you know get some swag say things maybe fill out a form a little communication form so they can maybe keep that you keep in touch with you in the future it'll mean the world to them i do have to remind you my obligator to remind you rather about the code of conduct that you'll find at the word camp website at europe.wordcamp.org slash code dash of dash of conduct and all right there's some wellness stuff but that's over with i hope you guys had fun at the wellness stuff if anyone here go to the yogurt the tai chi no one literally no one went i don't believe any of you one person saw them that's great at least one person saw them all right so if you guys need any help you could always like find anyone in the blue shirts the little volunteer shirts just ask them any question if they can't answer your question they'll find someone to answer that question for you there's quite a few of us there's about 200 of us too so don't be shy uh drinks are going to be served all day at the around the venue just look for the little stands on the left and on the right it's also important that we get some feedback back from from all of you if you can actually so if you could just head over to europe.wordcamp.org slash 2023 slash feedback you can find all this information on the website in general and you can just fill out a little form and just you know give us a give us some feedback tell us we did a good job we didn't do a good job you guys can improve there you guys were really great there positive feedback is good too all right uh workshops are going to be happening all day long and registration happens at the work workshop registration desk looking down floor one near the track two track three i'm sorry right here right next to us like if you head out and turn right uh well contributor days over i hope everyone that went to contributor they had a great time uh we do have a special page setup for a quick access to the info or that happened and the contributor day it's really important that uh sorry i got stuck there i just wanted to talk about the lights and acts and the two drinks that you can find around the shop so there's a party we got going on later we have the after party uh it's going to be for the happy 20th birthday of wordpress it's exciting it's going to start at 8 30 at low hand athens night club so just bring your badge and you can get in for free uh lights and acts will be provided and you get two drinks with the tokens that are going to be provided a drinks additional drinks can be purchased though uh with card or cash actually so it wasn't that hard there's actually quite a lot of you and this is the first time i'm doing this so thanks thanks thanks that really does help maybe next time i'll do it without the papers anyway i think it's time that we introduce our first speaker of the day uh her name is tess tess uh tess is joining us from the uk today she's the head of growth at atomic smash a website performance agency based in bristol that specializes in the wordpress and wool commerce she's passionate about communicating uh ideas and creative ways tess loves finding new ways to build narratives around technology and collaborating with clients tess cares about business ethics the environment team well-being and is part of an internal sustainability working group at atomic smash that's in the progress of becoming a b corp in her spare time you'll find her hiking in mountains jumping in the sea lifting heavy things at the gym so she's one of those strong girls and writing songs or stories even she's quite creative uh today she's talking about e-commerce c s quality and convenience or sorry she's talking about e-commerce cx quality convenience value incentives trust sound sound ethics minimal environmental impact and uh they're all tied together with a seamless customer experience meaningful purchases are more are what more and more modern customers expect so how can agencies products platforms and merchants respond by working together to create an e-commerce experience working together to create e-commerce experiences that leave good taste and keeping customers coming back for more and more there's quite a lot of you out there having said that that there is quite a lot of you out there let's have a great round of round of applause for just tess tess thank you thank you for taking away thank you for a lovely introduction i appreciate that and i think christos said you're going to be a really engaging audience and did you say they were going to give me the time of my life on this stage well excellent thank you thanks in advance i look forward to that um so yeah i'm i'm tess um as mentioned i am uh head of growth at tomah smash website performance agency i work with some very brilliant and inspiring colleagues um who are experts at working with wordpress and blue commerce and i'm going to be using a lot of examples of of their great work today um i live halfway up a mountain in wales i'm actually on top of that mountain in this picture um and on a clear day you can see over to bristol where atomic smash is based um i've also been heavily involved in the wordpress community for the last um few years um i was one of the um organizers of europe's first due action day which is a one day hackathon where volunteers create websites for small local um charities and nonprofits in a single day and i was also um one of the global leads for word camp europe back in 2020 there's plenty more i could tell you about myself but i'm sure you'll all agree the most important thing is that i'm a dog parent to hugo who you can see here um hugo is an honorary member of the team at the agency i work for and a regular on top of the mountain with me i would love to talk about hugo for half an hour and i'm sure a couple of you actually would quite like that as well but i've promised to everyone that i'm going to talk about customer experience in e-commerce so firstly where are we now um the state of e-commerce well it's actually quite a challenging time for merchants marketplaces and other businesses working in the e-commerce ecosystem it's because it there was such a boom during the pandemic um online shopping jumped 77 percent just months into the pandemic um which was really exciting but obviously that that growth has leveled out um so now we need to approach this with an attitude of flexibility interconnectivity we need to work together and this will be hugely important for success um and we should always be thinking about the customer experience and making it as good as possible so that customers don't have to work so hard to shop with the merchants that we serve okay so many of us here today create or sell products or services that actually affects people all over the world in some cases for example when it comes to creating accessible um or inclusive online experiences the work we do has a very real impact on whether someone can purchase a product or service or engage with a web um a website or a digital experience so um it has a real um genuinely really important function the work we do and also the businesses that use our platforms or our services um rely on us to create um good experiences as well so that because their livelihoods um depend on it if they are merchants um WordPress obviously is an open source technology uh and the um the platform and the community rather drives forward the platform um global contributors make WordPress better obviously and we come together at events like this so that we can share learnings we can connect um and we can also um come up with new ideas and new approaches to solve shared challenges and problems that we identify so the same can be um um focused exclusively on e-commerce so I want to talk about how product businesses service businesses and merchants can be more open transparent um and work together to make customer experience as good as it possibly can be and and so all of our organizations can thrive so in the spirit of sharing learning and collaboration I'm going to talk a little bit about a program that Atomic Smash is involved with um the WooExpert program uh we're a certified platinum WooExpert and uh that means we're sort of verified and endorsed by WooCommerce as an agency partner I think we're just one of three um to have that level of of partnership in the UK and the WooExpert program means that we can share learnings we can represent the needs of our clients directly to WooCommerce we can get extra support um we can um represent their interests um we can also access additional resources training resources for our team um and we can celebrate the success of our team um as experts as well which is really nice in February um WooCommerce invited myself and Atomic Smash's managing director Piers Tinknell to attend their division meetup in Vienna which kind of like a company conference and we joined their the agency program manager Mary on stage for a fireside chat where we were able to talk about emerging trends that we are seeing in uh the ecosystem we were able to represent the interests like I said and the pain points and the needs of our clients on stage and explain to the the the WooCommerce team how merchants that we're representing are using the platform which was great during the chat the chat um so sorry after the chat we also had the opportunity to listen to a merchant who they'd invited as well so this was a really nice example of agencies merchants and platform or a product business coming together um because we're talking about sharing and learning I thought I'd share a couple of things that the merchant um told us during their fireside chat um so they said that one thing that was extremely important to them was the opportunity to experiment with kind of like buying incentives so for example free gifts and um to measure how that had an impact on average order value um and then to look at things like unit sales um and as their main conversion um point to track and then how that evolves or changes month on month year on year based on the experiments that they're running in practical terms it's now easier than ever to share learnings with our peers and our partner organizations and our clients because we're instantly and globally connected um through the internet so um it's a really great um opportunity I think at an event like this to see how what what works when we collaborate and then mirror that when we go home and hopefully you'll have some ideas for for how to do that after this talk okay so we can learn from one another in the WordPress space obviously we're all WordPress enthusiasts if we're here um we're a small percentage actually of a really global community and even wider um set of um people all over the world who use the platform um so let's also think about how we can engage with communities that we are involved with they're outside of the WordPress space so as mentioned um atomic smashers in the process of becoming a b corp we actually share uh and learn through that process as well um if you aren't familiar with uh the process it's a series of sort of checks and balances that you uh that ensure a business not only cares about profit but also cares about people and the planet so it's a long and and detailed and and uh in depth process that ensures that a business is doing its part to take care of the world and the people in it and they also encourage that same openness and transparency so you can share best practices and you can also um acknowledge that the impact you have on the world relates to your clients your suppliers and your organization as well another example in the context of shopping experience um is when we think about returns um PayPal saw the extent of the returns challenge um so 84 percent of shoppers will avoid a retailer in future if they have a bad returns experience um and so they in 2021 acquired happy returns which is a software and reverse logistics company um to help solve these problems for their online merchants they can handle returns and I think that's a really interesting uh approach where they've looked at okay what further down the line what problems are end users having and how can we help to solve that problem now obviously we can't all acquire lots of other businesses to solve our problems but we can look at what's going on in the industry more widely and take inspiration from what works obviously a word of warning I wouldn't just copy everything the big guys are doing you know they don't get everything right either and you know I think if you're a leaner team you actually have the opportunity to innovate more so uh take inspiration from the positives but but don't follow blindly okay I've been talking at you for a little bit obviously this is a conference talk I know you expect that but I'll give you a chance to move slightly now um and and engage a little bit more um so I'm going to run through um these points and ask you as customers because we're all customers um to raise your hand when I get to the one that's most important to you uh as a consumer so um only raise your hand for one please so which is the most significant for you is it the checkout process okay a few thank you um is it the returns process one do you know oh two do you know my that would be my mom's vote definitely she absolutely loves a return um okay what about value for money oh okay yes I appreciate that yeah we have a lot of people who who care deeply about the value for money absolutely what about ethical values okay and environmental impact yes okay lovely and put your hands up if actually you would have loved to have voted for more than one as being extremely significant to you of course yeah that makes perfect sense that's no surprise to me many of you put your hands up there and the extent honestly to which all of these matter to us as as consumers depends on a lot of external factors and internal values that we hold um but these can change over time and actually they vary with different context too um but they're all important in one way or another they all contribute to customer experience and the lasting emotion that um an end user feels when they engage with a brand online and a merchant when they're shopping online so customer experience is everything I think um and e-commerce um brands I believe could think a little bit more like um traditional brick and mortar stores sometimes if you imagine how they used to build local communities um in a location where they were going to open a store I think more can be done to create that lasting positive experience um a memorable experience um to win loyal customers online too this is especially important at the moment because the rising uh cost per acquisition rates mean that brands have to place even more focus on um retention techniques to win loyal customers who will come back again and again so they can maintain profitability okay so together our products our services and our processes can be designed to help merchants create that ultimate customer experience so that they can enjoy a smooth and convenient buying process and spend their way in a money that feels right and meaningful to them whether that's to do with value for money the checkout experience um environmental impact or a combination so why does it matter um well the uh it matters a lot because so many shoppers go deep into a buying journey um and then leave before completing a purchase and actually research into the checkout experience by the the behm the behmard institute found that on average 26 percent of users um have abandoned purchases during the checkout flow solely because the checkout flow is too long or too complex at the same time research into the world's largest the world's 60 largest e-commerce sites revealed the average e-commerce site has 12.8 form fields in their checkout flow and i'm going to argue that's a lot of extra fields uh and unnecessary complexity and possible friction to put customers off so how can we reduce friction at checkout well we can optimize the checkout experience um the checkout is the final hurdle on this page you want to have probably as as few clicks as possible not to overwhelm the user um fewer steps probably means higher conversion rates but i'd argue you should um test that with your target audience um and we also can improve the experience by reducing clutter and reducing inputs when they're not necessary and this is something we did for a client elizabeth shore elizabeth shore has been producing chocolate-based confectionery for more than 140 years which is very long history but they're also looking to the future in a really nice way and they want to improve the online experience for modern consumers um so they also wanted to improve conversions so that their business is profitable and growing um and initially they came to us to merge uh their wu commerce shop their existing wu commerce shop with their existing wordpress site and then to um work through ongoing um iterative improvements to optimize things like the checkout so this was the checkout before this is utilizing a plugin and following um a ux and ui audit we decided straight away to remove the login step because it's presenting a huge blocker for new customers to make a purchase um the emphasis here is really on existing customers logging in and not even on their making a purchase um so we also thought the styling and the wording of how to to skip this um to the to go to the next option was confusing and again we felt it was a detraction from um getting them through the the checkout process so the default um wu commerce functionality actually pushes users directly to the second step which is billing and shipping with a small prompt for returning users to log in um so it's much much less intrusive and um uh on new customers or our guest checkout so we kept the plugin but we uh mirrored the um the wu commerce default um uh way of doing things and we also combined industry research customer research and ux principles to try and decide the objectives of the consumer and to determine exactly how the checkout process should look and feel for them so one thing we did was we combined um the first name and last name fields into a single text field for name this is also more inclusive um having a first name and last name is a naming convention that's traditionally in the western culture not everyone in the world uses a first name and last name so it's more welcoming or appropriate more inclusive to do this anyway we also um made some previously um we made some fields optional including the address line two and the company name and you can see they have a minority input now with with a plus icon we further reduced um friction by collapsing other uh fields such as the gift message into another minority input and finally as the login was such a massive obstruction we switched to prioritizing guest checkout as you can see with an option for returning users to login at the top so for customer experience convenience is obviously a really important piece of the puzzle and value for money is very important too as we discovered earlier when you kindly raised your hands um but purchase decisions often take elements other elements into account too um so for example more and more modern consumers want to spend their money in a way that matches both their needs and their values I like this quote to summarize today's consumer not only wants savings and convenience but also wants to feel good when a company that aligns with their values gets their money so a great example of this um is positive news the first media organization in the world to focus on uh quality independent reporting about what's going right um this is an independent media brand and it's structured as a community benefit society so that's a form of social enterprise and it's a cooperative ownership structure so the organization is actually owned by um readers across 33 countries around the world and its profits are reinvested into creating inspiring journalism for the public benefit they came to us uh with an existing wordpress site and it was very slow and unstable and a separate platform for subscriptions that they needed to bring together and improve over time their primary goal was to strengthen their funding streams and by driving more sales subscriptions and monthly supporters through their site so that they could invest back into um um creating more and more inspiring journalism so we responded with a fully customized wordpress platform and we call this shop um and an ongoing rollout of additional features and improvements over time we utilized really powerful reporting um to develop strategies to improve the the customer experience and provide more value to the client um so that we could deliver reliable growth for them so it was a bespoke WooCommerce shop that enabled customers to sign up to magazine subscriptions make single purchases and make donations and we rolled out some digital improvements such as an intuitive online basket experience and actually we saw a really nice increase in magazine subscriptions after we did this um because we it was designed to encourage more uh conversions and in terms of donations we introduced an interactive support slider uh where um people could use the slider to say how much they wanted to donate um and this was um to give a more engaging experience and to generate more recurring donations um for positive news most importantly I think we helped positive news to personalize customer communications um by segmenting their audience with automated tagging determined by customer behavior on their site um so again making that that customer experience more personal um and more appropriate and there were some really nice um results some really special results so uh page views doubled within the first year of working together with this client um there was a 234 increase in turnover from subscriptions uh within within the first two years of working together and 290 percent um increase in web visitors over four years of working together so I'm really proud of the team for what they did and and their collaboration with with positive news on this one okay here's a statistic that shows just how much values matter to most people uh research commissioned by google cloud found that 82 percent of shoppers want a brand's values to align with their own now obviously values are personal I can't tell you what any of your values are but what I can say is that there's a growing number of of consumers who have ethical or environmental values that they expect uh their favorite brands to align with and they may very well leave if they if they don't so we're at a pivotal point actually for sustainability in e-commerce um there's an increasing appetite for you know uh sustainable product materials packaging and delivery uh plus interest in a circular economy is growing many shoppers who want eco-friendly options are actually willing to pay more for them and according to global web index 41.8 percent of shoppers want brands to be socially responsible google searches for sustainability increased 63 percent um from 2018 to 2021 I'd be really interested to see a more up-to-date stat on that as well and see if it's continuing to rise and in google and in a google survey 82 percent of shoppers said that sustainability is more top of mind now than it was before the pandemic and that again that's no surprise to me so the consumer demand for ethical and sustainable choices is there and it's really up to brands to deliver and it's up to all of us to help them to do that okay another example to to go into this point picked um an organic fruit and veg box supplier um we took on their existing WordPress and WooCommerce site to get it working harder for them part of that was to show their usp's and values um in a in a way that's more clear to their target audience and and that demonstrates benefits to those consumers so we identified areas of the site to do this on the home page for example and we also identified ways that the home page could continue to be effective without overloading people in terms of their limited time or attention um one thing we did was added a visual how it works process um so this communicates information more transparently and more easily um which matches the way that um picked want to get their messages across being very transparent and honest about the way they do business um we rolled out consistent layouts for like product cards um to reduce visual clutter to try and eliminate and eliminate unnecessary cognitive load and to improve cohesion um lots of other things like improving um the use of ctas um and also using the navigation bar for a flexible place to um share really important information so this could be um order um countdowns and order window countdown um important delivery updates uh seasonal announcements um and then also things such as promotions usp's values if they are the most important things to um to cover at the time here's an example of a section of the home page that shows their usp's to their target audience it demonstrates some of the core values that are not just important to pick but also crucial um for those for those consumers you can see the likes of like fast free and fast delivery um there's fair pricing there's optional subscriptions and all of this caters to that that convenience and the value for money side of things but on the other hand we also include the things like certified organic uh plastic free and b corp these things like things like great relationships with their supply chain are very important for their target audience and align with their consumers core values so all of these together contribute to the experience and emotion when a customer is interacting with a brand okay and it's not just uh when transactions through a web store are linked to uh profits that this is important um we also used wu commerce to put on a charity auction um for uh bristol children's hospital charity the grand appeal and this is a website that's a critical part of the charity's income stream um it helps them to support um a hospital that that works with or cares for rather hundred thousand patients per year um so this is uh an example of using wu commerce um to raise money for a good cause um customer experience however should still be the highest priority people are still giving you their money um and giving the charity or the client them their money and helping to make that helping them to make informed purchasing decisions is still really really important in fact you could argue that actually it's it's more important for an organization that's using the money like this um so for example the grand odd auction enables supporters to bid on artworks donated by local communities and artists um each auction page contains um additional information that's really key to the purchases uh the bidder's purchase decision um so for example there's a there's tabs in each product page to inform the user of things like uk shipping costs this is a uk based organization as well as like the option for some personalized international uh shipping options for for people who are bidding from abroad there's also important dates during the auction obviously that's really important for an auction time frames were clear across you know the homepage the product pages and the auction page itself so when funding streams like i say are this important and in this case helping to save lives it's even more crucial to create an experience whereby bidders donors or supporters feel good about the way they're using their money and they want to come back and spend their money with this uh brand or this charity again um during the next campaign so when it comes to improving customer experience we shouldn't be guessing uh i know probably all of us like we really believe are intuition but in this case you know we need to put ourselves um in the the consumer's shoes and that's impossible to do without without data so when we can use website data um which plays a pivotal role in enhancing that um customer experience we can analyze how user behavior we can analyze user behavior rather um to um help businesses gain valuable insights um to make uh in uh decisions based on customers preferences their needs their pain points um and they can leverage this data to help them um understand their customers uh optimized e-commerce experiences um in a targeted uh customized way um and make them more intuitive and effective it also means if there's bottlenecks if there's obstacles or friction points these can be identified and road maps can be developed um to roll out improvements to to solve these hopefully um implement implementing improvements obviously can create things like a smoother navigation better user flow better user experience higher conversion rates and ultimately create that better customer experience that ensures that consumers come back time and time again um to improve overall business performance okay an example of this um in terms of data using data in a better way um we work with oxygen free jumping um who has um indoor activity parks and they've expanded to I think they have five in the UK um and their strategic objective um at the moment is all around um they have ambitious growth targets so they want to increase revenue in line with that but they had at the time a black hole of data in their sales funnel so this prevented them from implementing effective CRO strategies um to build you know incremental improvements to make their site better because they had no data to to rely on they had data but it got lost as soon as someone clicked to book so throughout the sales funnel they couldn't see anything so we worked through a series of initiatives to improve visibility uh of key data and improve um the UX and conversion funnel and this included designing and building a more intuitive uh easy to use online booking system and allow users to book um with as minimal clicks as possible okay so oxygen now has um flexibility uh visibility throughout the sales funnel and they can use that data to inform future business decisions for example how to price products um accurately how to um identify your fixed drop-off points during that process that booking process and we're helping them to use ongoing data analysis to support business growth in term uh interpret um that sales funnel analytics and improve things like average order value which is a really important one for them and so far the results include an 11.6 improvement in conversion rate so I'm really happy with that so far okay I've used a handful of case studies obviously to prove my points today um thank you for listening whilst I did all of that um and I've been able to do that because Tomic Smash has some really good processes in place uh that ensure that we can make iterative iterative improvements and results driven approaches to improve WordPress and WooCom and sites and building out strategies that you know rely on data that we can test um and we can rely on um and that results driven approach um is something that I really want to see more of in in terms of customer experience um it helps our clients to grow and it ensures that the end user gets what they what they want as well all right so hands up if you learn absolutely nothing today okay no oh you're all very kind thank you hands up if you did learn something okay and hands up if um you now have maybe an idea you want to go talk to someone or when you get back to your desk after word camp you're up there's something that you it's provoked an idea that you want to explore further okay that's my favorite one I think you can't argue with that that's that's the best one um so that's all from me thank you so much for listening I really appreciate it way to go test that was impressive thank you let's get a great round of applause for test that's hard it's hard to get up here and actually do all this stuff come on come on come on everyone I don't even know if you guys can hear me I think it's better now right all right well test that was amazing oh thank you I think I forgot to mention that you were involved with WordPress Europe in the past as well as a global lead yes yeah word camp europe yeah you're a global lead as well in the past but there's some very very talented global leads now who are very thankful for putting on this event and it'll be really interesting actually to see um if uh how word camp Europe evolves and if any of you are interested in in organizing that in the future um there's going to be a call for organizers at the end of the closing remarks so I definitely encourage you to get involved if that's something that's interesting to you yeah wonderful great so I do have a quick question or like I have maybe two questions my first question is considering you do so much work for your clients in that sense how would you prioritize them I mean probably a lot just going off your examples there are a lot yeah so I think the work is very varied um and the way that we prioritize is we'd work with we'd delve really deep into the needs of the client right and we'd try and identify the work that's going to provide the the most value for them with the least effort required so it'll be the most value in terms of how it will affect their business but it also will be you know the most cost effective approach um so we're always trying to do it in in the cleverest way um so we can make the biggest change for the in the least time or effort possible all right wow and the second question let's say I'm your client okay because uh I might have an e-commerce website you don't know um I come to you I have all these problems we sit down we consult I understand that every situation is completely different but if I had like a mom and pop shop kind of thing going on what how much time do you think it would take for us to start I know it's a crazy question but like let's say I'm at zero oh I have absolutely no idea it's like how long is the piece of string I think that's a good question because it's a question that a lot of merchants will ask they'll always ask like how long is this gonna take um and actually it really depends on the the requirements that they have you know what are their ambitions how complex is their e-commerce site um are their integrations is it you know multi-site like is it international if it's a mom and pop shop um I know that we commerce have some really um nice ways to get started that's more that's simpler and quicker uh but actually you might not need an agency for if it's like not as complex um but the more complex sites you know you're going to be working on them either iteratively and ongoing or for a really you know intense period of months and months and months because it's a it's a big job to get it right all right so your agency is way too big for me um I don't know does the audience have any questions does anyone want to ask any questions oh please you ma'am you were first oh there's a mic coming away the microphone they're just gonna wait for the mic for a sec if you want you can talk and I'll repeat it so that everyone can hear oh here comes the mic there we go thank you so I'm really interested in the example you gave I think it was the magazine perhaps of that obviously they're selling subscriptions but I believe they were making donations as well yes and you mentioned like the slider that folks could use so first question is is that native WooCommerce functionality or did atomic smash have to custom code that and second question I'm really interested in the efficacy of that donation strategy so did you see an improvement in donations did people donate more because of the fun interactivity of it yeah so the idea actually for that one was to try and generate more recurring donations so it was I think a shift in the way that they were thinking about how to to get supporters they really wanted people to support them over time of course like so many nonprofits do I believe it was custom code but I'll double check that and get back to you and I know that the the I can't give you the exact results off the top of my head but it made a significant improvement and everyone was really happy with that and it's been great to work with with an organization like that and to watch them grow over the years and yeah we're really really happy to work with with organizations that do good and that we can help do more thank you thanks for your question wonderful is there a question down here the sir had a question right here hi I want to ask you do you agree with the sentence that customers hate filling the forms sorry please could you repeat could you agree or not customers hate filling the forms do I agree that customers hate filling informs I think most people don't really like filling in forms and now I've got as a customer if I put myself I'm talking about myself when I answer a form on my phone if it doesn't like already know like my name my email address my surname I get really frustrated exactly to that yeah in one example you mentioned that you combine first name and last name and how to deal with the out of feel yes that's a really good point so actually in this case it wouldn't ought to fill for me however I think sometimes you need to look at the you know the inclusion and make decisions balanced with you know customer experience and inclusion and actually how important is that inclusivity going to be over time you know is it going to outweigh the the speed and convenience of of auto fill and in this case we decided for this client definitely it would I think it's probably a good idea to do it case by case but I think you know if you if you have a decision to make and you're going to be able to make something more accessible or inclusive that's probably the best way to go okay thanks thank you for your question we have a question right over here oh I'm sorry I didn't see you terribly sorry oh no no please yes yes of course hello thank you for such a presentation could you please tell what maybe measurement or analytics instruments are you using to grab the statistics and improve the funnels yeah so obviously we use google analytics and move everyone to like GA4 so definitely if you have clients who aren't yet on GA4 it's definitely it's time like time's running out actually to move that over so I'd recommend that but we also really encourage the use of metoric to our clients we think it's like a really really excellent tool for e-commerce and yeah if any of you have e-commerce clients that aren't utilizing metoric I definitely say give it a go it gives really really like detailed insights that that our clients find really valuable and we're really happy to be able to use that together with them to to come up with those with those insights and also if the client is you know more complex they might have integrations with something like Salesforce and so there'll be other ways to gather analytics as well and using those tools thank you thanks so much Tess I really enjoyed that and big fan of atomic smash and it's been amazing to hear about those examples of wins for customers I wonder if you could share off the top of your head a story of maybe where you worked with the clients and you had a big learning from something that didn't go wrong that agencies or all of us could learn from oh absolutely I'd say one thing that's that's really difficult is if you have a really big and complex e-commerce pro project no matter how experienced the team is it's always going to be so hard to get it right first time so actually you might I would suggest a better approach is to try and do a kind of MVP if you can if your client will be happy with that and then have iterative additional rollouts of different features because there's been yeah absolutely it's really hard to get everything right first time off the top of my head is there's something that I can share that's been really really challenging working with a client yes obviously if you're working with money right this is really high stakes and most of these clients that I'm talking about they take all their revenue through there not all of them that I've given examples for but most of the clients we work for taking their revenue through their site exclusively so if something goes wrong with payments actually if there's something insecure that could be you know really really really terrible so you have to that's a big thing that you have to take a lot of care around and so finding like a payment platform or gateway that you can rely on and secure and that's really important so I would definitely highlight that in terms of e-commerce as being a really big challenge that we face all the time thanks for your question go ahead please I have a question about the auto address feeling some users using from google for example what is your opinion about it it is like to get more faster checkout than before what's your opinion about it yeah I think it's a good idea and usually we recommend to clients to use the system where it can it can autofill or like help you generate your your address using like the postcode again I would use some of those those tools rather than you don't necessarily need to to do it all yourself you can if there's a tool that already works or you can do you know google that's you know making things simpler quicker hopefully and I usually yeah I would recommend that and I know my my team members usually would as well however I would say one other thing it's always important to review the decisions you're making and what you're saying to your clients over time because things change things shift really fast in technology and in terms of say accessibility best practices so it's a really good idea to take time to review what you're doing what recommendations you're making and ensure that you're still happy with those recommendations as time goes on wonderful um wow you're impressive I don't know I can't really say anything else thank you that's so kind um yeah so that's time and uh can we get a final old like it's a big round of applause here for Tess come on everyone here we go thank you all right we're gonna move forward with a little break now but wait don't get up yet we're gonna have a quick update now we're gonna the word camp card game is gonna start now um again you have four cards inside of your swag bags there's a total of eight different designs you can go get uh the other four from upstairs and then uh you can swap them between each other you're collecting them you're mingling you're you can use them as postcards actually all right and then we have tai chi at the wellness center at three o'clock for anyone that's interested in tai chi hi again everyone all right so this time there aren't any announcements and we'll get straight to introducing our next speaker his name is Lorvo Merchic he's from Croatia and it's just amazing that he's just now finishing high school he actually took a break from his final exam so he can come here with us today and share some information of simplifying the lives of individuals so they're drawing on his innovation innovative thinking and passion for creating user-friendly solutions he developed a unique uh plugin called collab cart it's designed to foster customer collaboration so at the young age of 17 he founded a thriving company despite his young age he had the privilege of being a featured speaker at various conferences events where he shared uh his insights on cutting-edge business practices additionally is a columnist uh in the respected publications to the social network blogs where he continues to share his ideas and inspire others to pursue their passions he's done quite a lot for a 17 year old as i'm sitting here reading his bio to you the collaboration between shoppers in general generation z and alpha so that's born between 1997 and 2025 respectively is poised to revolutionize the social proof in several ways these digital natives are the first generations to grow up with digital technologies uh and as such uh they're per they're purchasing oh sorry about that they're purchasing decisions are heavily influenced by social media online reviews and recommendations from friends and peers unlike previous generations gen z and alpha place more value on recommendations from friends and family other than advertisements and even influencers uh or influencer endorsements they prioritize authenticity and transparency and social proof ignoring or rejecting the content that appears inauthentic or biased so more over this is uh this new focus on collaboration has led to the creation of small online communities where members can exchange information reviews and recommendations this type of collaboration emphasizes the power of social proof and improves the customer experience overall their focus on authenticity transparency and community driven recommendations will continue to shape the digital commerce landscape and provide new opportunities for businesses to engage with customers so uh whenever you're ready let's everyone see you let's do this thank you thank you for a beautiful introduction i did my bad yeah hello everybody uh before i start uh it's a great honor standing here in Athens on this beautiful event uh thank you for considering me to be a speaker and i would like to say special thanks to all of you organizing this beautiful event today i will say a few words about how collaboration amongst shoppers in gen z and gen alpha will change social proof but before we start i have one question for all of you so feel free to join me and my question is when you go to some some new city and you face with a problem of hunger you probably go to some restaurant yeah so how do you choose that restaurant based on what like what what does encourage you to go to some restaurant anybody okay reviews so like google reviews or okay because google is a sponsor yeah okay okay so google reviews trip advisor what large queues okay that's also good yeah okay great because you believe them yeah yeah okay okay uh keep keep that in mind because we will come to this a little bit later on okay so let me introduce myself even though uh he did a pretty good job i will do it one more time my name is laura mersic i'm 18 years old and i come from small but beautiful country of Croatia i founded one interesting and innovative e-commerce plug-in which is called collab card and ever since i was a little boy i was always curious about how things work and why they work in a certain way so i started like reading and watching different videos overall i was gaining some knowledge later on i was trying to use that knowledge to solve some basic problems and at one point i asked myself what is my mission because at the end of the day i think that we all should work on some mission and we should focus on our mission and i realized that my mission mission is to provide solutions that can reduce the complexity of everyday's life for people on this planet and i said this just to get a little bit more into my head and to get my perspective here have qr codes for both my linkedin account and twitter account i prefer linkedin so feel free to add me like i said i will i will talk today about how gen z and gen alpha are going to change social proof so let me introduce you to those two generations gen z are all born between 1995 and 2009 so i am personally a member of gen z raise a hand if you are a member of gen z maybe oh nice great great great great i didn't expect that great great i will not ask about gen alpha because okay so gen z interesting generation we are at the moment facing one big live transitions we are finishing our formal education starting a job starting to live alone earning first incomes but we had really specific childhood because we grew up during the recession but on the other hand we grew up with development of smartphones so we are smartphone natives we are the ones who are basically fueling the whole digital transition the e-commerce we are the biggest customers of e-commerce and even though we feel young they are even younger and those those younger guys are gen alpha so gen alpha gen alpha are all those born after the 2010 so the oldest member of gen alpha is 13 and even though they don't physically have credit cards or press the purchase button they have some key roles in decision making when it comes to purchasing an e-commerce well because their parents listen to them and taking account that their parents are mainly those age between 20 and 50 so their parents are leading in terms of technology and economical stability but what's what interests us are two things and that is the spending power so here you have spending power just for united states not whole world and the estimated spending spending power of gen z is around 360 billion while on the other hand the estimated spending power of gen alpha is around 40 billion combined that is more than 400 billion which is a lot and while I was preparing for this presentation I was searching for some data to give you unique perspective of what we do and what we feel and I came across really a lot of different statistics but one especially caught my attention and and was living rent free in my head for several days and that is this one so some marketing experts did our research and they said that average american team receives between four to ten thousand marketing messages per day what does that mean that means that in some perfect week in terms of getting these messages american team will receive 70 000 messages like 70 000 imagine 70 000 of anything that's enormous and then you as a brand or you as a webshop you need to stand out among 70 000 messages it's impossible I mean it's possible but and because we are here we are getting so much messages we just developed a blockade and we don't even feel when you when we get some advertisement on instagram or some mail or something else so question here is how to stand out and it's not easy it's not easy it's complicated but overall it just requires a bit different approach and yeah we get those 70 000 messages but then the end of the day we still buy and question is what we buy we buy brands and yesterday here it was a really nice presentation where it was said that brand is not only a logo or slogan or something else that brand is what people say about you when you are not in the room and I agree with that but I will go one step further I think that brand is community yeah so the best way to if community is good the brand is good for example today we took a family picture and that family picture is more powerful than any wordpress logo and if you ask me what is wordpress all of us here are wordpress this conference is wordpress and we are the ones who will support and who will bring new clients to wordpress same goes for everything else and now when I'm talking about community I will try to say a word too about social commerce so social commerce is something that has been brought up a few years ago I mean it it has been here for several years but lately it became more popular and when you ask someone or when you go to google and type social commerce the first 15 to 20 links will basically be all social commerce is when you buy something through social media so for example through facebook or instagram to to to some other social media network and even though all of that is true social commerce is much more and if you ask me social commerce is actually a community and then how oh just a moment how we see social commerce is that at the front end what we all see is that like social media shopping but what we don't see and what is even bigger what is behind every big front end is even bigger from back end and in this case back end is role of community and social proof so without quality community you don't have quality social media you don't have the followers for your brand on that social media and to spread your community you need quality social proof and now I'll go to the beginning of presentation so I ask you how do you choose your restaurant and let me rephrase what you said so you basically said I'm searching for some proof but not any kind of proof you are searching for social proof and believe me you are not alone because according to some surveys Gen Z and millennials are 99 more likely to rely on online reviews and social media when choosing a restaurant so 99% that's almost 100% that's almost all of us let me just bring water my throat is but believe me when I said that restaurants are not only thing when social proof is deal breaker so for almost everything like I don't I don't have an example but social proof is go or no go for me so I use social proof in everything and not only me but my whole generation is using using social proof now I'll do a step away from the everything I said before and tell you a little story of my own so one day I was browsing through internet searching for for one t-shirt I really want one t-shirt and I found it yeah but I didn't buy it and the after the day like I did everything I added to cart I went to check out and everything but I didn't buy it okay anybody maybe have an idea why I didn't buy it what was the deal breaker for me that time it's not connected with anything I said before okay no okay okay almost but shipping yeah exactly shipping so shipping was almost twice as high as product itself like and even though if somebody offered me 100 million dollars I would still not buy it because I'm not willing to pay for something twice as much than than for product itself and at that moment I just like they thought well okay this is a problem but this is not a problem that I face like my whole generation is facing that problem and like I said before I think that I should reduce that complexity and that I should offer some solutions for those problems so I started thinking what can I do and what can be done like and it didn't take me long to get an idea what do you do when you want to reduce the shipping you ask a friend to join you and then you will share the shipping costs but what happens then from the perspective of the guy who is in charge of that shipping of that card he needs to receive all kinds of info from other sides so one one guy will say I want the size M blue hoodie another we say we'll say I want the size L t-shirt with something written on it and so on so I just went from one problem to another which is not good and I connected them so I created a big mess but what's good is that I realized that those two problems are heavily connected and that I could maybe offer some solutions with which could solve both of them so I again start stopped and started thinking what can be done and not so long after I with the help of friends and some experts I created the collab card plugin which enables customers to shop together on really easy way but that's not that's not the point here point here is that I saw that as a need as a need of a whole generation and then I realized well collaboration itself and shopping with with with someone together is not just something that will happen in future is something that is happening happening now and on the large scale and like uh and like maybe you are scared as a webshop of collaboration but you should not be collaboration is a beautiful thing not only for shoppers because basically for shoppers collaboration is cost cutting initiative but from your perspective as a webshop it might be for example that you are encouraging creation of small shopping groups that will transform to communities which is core of any modern e-commerce or maybe that the individual purchase will be higher because in a single purchase you will have more more shoppers or maybe the thing that consolidating some smaller packages will reduce cost operational expenses like there is a ton of those benefits and you should not be scared and you should search for solutions how to give us the most and the best and the most simple way of collaboration but it also I was also curious like what can I what is also something that happens while we collaborate like something that is not benefit or anything like I mean not benefit but something that happens in the background and I started thinking okay collaboration good I am getting something from some links from my friends but and I also connected that with those 70 000 messages and I soon realized that today some traditional advertisement and influencer endorsements are not as important as they were before moreover today the thing we value the most are recommendation from friends and family and intensity so remember this word intensity and then I realized that we have a shift in trust and emphasis on intensity what are some other newest products of collaboration well first of all review culture so today is completely normal to live a review after you eat something good or you buy something good or you have a good experience in something and one proof of that is that almost half of Gen Z is living their review on social media like posting and personally I don't do that but I often talk with my friends about my experiences so I think almost whole generation is one way or another giving some kind of review or some kind of social proof is it that good or bad it depends on you but then the end of the day your view culture is definitely on its rise on the other hand user genesis content which is strongly connected to reviews is here and when you ask someone what is your genesis content you would get different answers but user genesis content is actually authentic perspective on your business so remember what they said the one slide ago authenticity and when someone gives you authentic perspective it gives you the best ad the better ad than some influence and endorsement and like user generated content is great but what's even greater is when you support it so try to support it like for example you could if you see some review you could easily just screenshot it and put it in your social media that way you're doing two good things first of all you are showing that you see a little people normal customers but at the same time you are encouraging others to do that because some other guy will say look they put some random guy on their social media they are promoting them try to support user generated content now we'll try to circle everything that I said before and finally get give you an answer of on how will we change the social proof itself and then I also was thinking about that before of course so I started thinking you know what's crowdfunding so crowdfunding for example if you heard about Kickstarter is when Kickstarter is a platform that where people crowd community is founding some brand business idea basically the crowd is founding with money something then on the other hand you have maybe Wikipedia where you are founding the base with information then I thought well wouldn't be nice if we could just connect social proof with crowdfunding but I would not use the crowdfunding the founding I would use crowd sourcing that's how I got to crowd source social proof so crowd source social proof is definitely something that should be considered as future of social proof it's not that the social proof itself would be changed but our perspective on it will be and community members will actively contribute with their opinions experiences and feedbacks on products or brands which is excellent for you and on the other hand you are the ones who need to develop some kinds of rating and reviews to allow that community to provide feedback but what I like the most are all of the strengths of crowd source social proof so first of all you see this pointer right here okay so you see one picture and I see our picture we both think that our picture is most accurate but it's not but if we combine our pictures we get more accurate and more complete picture now think like this you have some product and you're getting one review of from one side and then you're getting another so crowd source social proof offers a diverse representation from different people for different backgrounds different preferences different behaviors and so on overall crowdsourced social proof is only thing to give you a complete picture of your product and most accurate picture of your product on the other hand to do anything today you need to be I mean you need to follow the trends to be trendy and I I agree that that this is really not simple that's extremely difficult but you can help yourself and not you but others can help you so crowdsourced social proof is continuously going to get new members and those new members will join contribute the social proof we evolve all over time and it will be up to date which is great for you and now if you use those two strengths you have pretty good chances of standing out among 70 000 messages but last but not least multiple community members endorsing a product or service through positive rent ratings and reviews builds trust and credibility but not any kind of credibility authentic credibility and what we said before is that the authenticity is key in getting to us like okay so last but not least accessible information and community engagement crowdsourced social proof really is accessible and it's up to you also to offer the most simple way of us getting to that proofs and like I said you need to encourage that it's up to you but also community members actively participating in discussions I'll give one example also for WordPress so I know that there are several Facebook groups and Reddit groups where people sometimes have a problem and then the community is the one who solves that problem and that's great and that's something that gives additional value to WordPress and bars are of course empowered with the insights they need to make confident choices based on collective wisdom of the crowd yeah and like I would go to the beginning how to stand out among 70 000 messages and how to get to us because I know that's a big problem not only for small brands but also for example for WordPress because WordPress is having a tough times in getting Gen Z as there so it's like if you ask any of my peers it's more likely that they will know for example Shopify or some other brands than WordPress and I know that you are having a tough time but what you can do you just need to listen to us and offer us solutions or if there are some solutions try to get the solutions and to support those solutions I think that I was a little bit faster and I was a little bit not good with time management so please feel free to ask me any questions yeah all right that was impressive I'm not gonna lie sorry I was a little bit thank you wow wow so this is from everyone thank you it's from the WordPress team and then we just wanted to keep doing what you've been doing big rounder applause everyone big rounder applause keep going keep going come on you've all eaten just do it all right so I think I'll start with my questions again because I don't know I'm curious um you're over 17 you're still in school you've done this research you've created this application when do you sleep well you know they said that there's no such a thing as a lack of time there's just a better organization so you know if you organize your time well you can do a lot of things do you do seminars for time organization can you teach me how to do this I'm 32 when I still have issues for enough money I'm very serious about this question too all right so a second question that's a little bit more serious well the previous one was actually quite serious to be honest but you mentioned that the generation the earlier generations out is the alpha and so forth they don't uh okay so they don't care about the tv commercials or things that are like really commercial and expensive and I don't know trying to sell you something maybe magazine that they don't care about those either but why don't they care about social media influencers they're like the same age they're young they're still in school why why aren't they well let me ask you a question so you see an influencer and you know that he's getting paid he won't promote a product without getting paid and on the other hand you have a really good friend who buys some products and then recommends it to you who you believe yeah I picked a friend but what I picked a friend no no no you're right so same words for us we just we know that the influencers are getting paid and no matter how good the influencers are they need to live from something and that somethings are sponsorships so I will believe a friend before uh influencer yeah that makes sense does anyone here disagree with that no hands I guess you're right Ravel all right so let's take some questions from the audience now right oh that was quick uh one moment the microphone is coming your way so you can ask your question we can all hear you nice and clear it's likely they deliver you right there when it's arriving you're not understanding which side of they are arriving okay so hello nice to meet you uh first I want to congratulations to your to you uh because you're so so young I'm 21 actually and when I see people that are younger uh that are young I also I am also a generator in Z and I started in warpers when I when I was like 16 or 15 so I'm the younger person the as far as I know in the Italian community so I'm so happy when I see people like me so congratulations keep going thank you and now uh what I wanted to say was that actually you said before that uh you seemed like WordPress was too hard to use I actually my experience never heard uh from any people also like 18 17 16 never heard about that what they have always heard is that people think that they are too hard because they they see the html code they said oh no I don't want to go to do that so why you say that this uh is uh is too complicated thank you sorry for this uh maybe uh off topic question no no no uh so uh what was that a few days ago I was the biggest uh the university in Croatia which is called the electric which does that uh so they they they produce developers at the end of the day and I asked them so what do you why do you don't I'm personally not the expert for for the things I just get what people told me but they said that they it's not just it's too complicated and and things like that but they prefer other things and that is exactly why for example Gutenberg is developing to to to acquire our generation and to to to to to to get to our generation I I think that it's easier today and when if you go now to youtube and say and type how to start a webshop there will be more tutorials about how to start it on Shopify than on WooCommerce and it's maybe easier to learn than to learn WordPress if that satisfies your answer I don't want to take your thunder here but um I'd like to add to that that there with WooCommerce and with WordPress you have so so many options so so many plugins whereas with spot the spot nothing against WooCommerce my plugin is on WooCommerce only at this moment so I support WooCommerce let's go with course but I'm just saying like what I hear from my people from people my generation yeah yeah so we all want to make it better yeah yeah right because we all love it yeah every day all right any other question from the audience come on oh I'm sorry oh you're right in front of me terribly sorry for that one microphone here please thank you first of all I really find your idea very very good and very pioneer but I'm not sure about how you imagine the collaborative crowd crowd source collaborative proof hey is it like um in independent networks or in a certain platform it's an idea or are you planning to create a platform no it's it's not an idea it's just the perspective it's just how we are going to look at social proof we'll not look at single one review or something we will try to collaborate all of the all of those to found one big social proof you know so there's not like a platform something to do that just our perspective and our position from where we look on that okay thanks thanks next question oh right up there uh yeah sorry I'm circling back wait wait wait wait wait I don't see you I'm up here okay more corner sorry yeah so circling back two questions to your comments on influencers and I think what you said made a lot of sense you know obviously you're gonna trust your friend more and your your your more personal recommendations but do you feel that your generation has perhaps strengthened that view because I mean as an adult I have that view too um and I'm sort of boomer generation almost uh genics yeah thanks that's generous um uh does that have something to do with the fact that you as a generation are receiving 70 thousand marketing impressions per week and you do you feel that as a generation you've developed a resistance to marketing in general okay I'll get it yeah yeah that's the question not to general but okay like I said those 70 thousand messages are basically some traditional and an old-fashioned marketing messages and or influencer endorsements and yes we raise some resistance so that that's why you need to find new approaches to get to us yeah and and in order to to to to acquire more customers the best way to do us is through community so you need to um uh encourage your community to do that so uh follow on question if I may so the your resistance seems to me like it is a lack of trust or it's found in a lack of trust and then if we as uh not just the WordPress community if the marketing world as a whole starts infiltrating our communities does that not mean that you will eventually get to the point where you lose trust in your own communities as well I mean that super philosophical question there but we're in Greece you know a land of philosophers so um to put a little more context on it though um you your generation has raised those barriers that those resistance levels I think probably faster than any generation in history um and I wonder if that isn't going to be the exactly the same for whatever marketing trick comes next uh so uh I suppose my concern here is that we're starting an arms race it's always been an arms race but we're really accelerating it now less a question more of a comment yeah okay so if you asked someone 10 years ago how will marketing look today they will they would probably not give you an accurate answer and that's why I cannot give you an accurate answer right now so we can only predict or try to predict and go with the flow all right next question from the audience please oh this sir right up here quite a few questions thank you hello hello first congratulations for achieving many things in at your at the very young gates I think sky's the limit thank you from there so uh people form communities uh big or small do you think that ethical consumption that I believe is getting bigger will get in the way of forming view community bigger communities and I don't know in the near future maybe make reviews seem obsolete like people will start buying products based based on their ethical based on their on their beliefs okay or on what is ethical rather than oh that person or my friend was happy with that product could you repeat one more time please excuse me I could you repeat one more time I didn't yeah do you think that people in the future okay we'll start buying uh stop or start buying products based on their beliefs and uh what what what does their belief means on their ethical or thinking that oh this product is more environmental friendly or okay okay okay okay yeah is better than me rather than based on critics and reviews from friends or family but uh those two things go really really well along with each other because you will get recommendation look this product is environmentally friendly and you you support that so those two things will probably go with one with another you know because what I don't know if you understand what I want to say to you and and maybe yeah there will be some uh situations when one will go against other but as I said that the beliefs you are surrounded with people who have same beliefs as you pretty much so those recommendations will go with your beliefs okay thank you all right any other question from the audience I don't see it's pretty bright and there we go that's much better um no nothing all right I need a really big because we're not that many people and we really should be a really big final round of response here for Lorvo bravo man bravo all right that's it for this track uh before everyone gets up and starts leaving I uh I'd like to suggest that everyone goes over to track one for the final talk of the day it's going to be on variations on the theme 20 years of wordpress um we're going to have automatics product architect there and we're going to have the product leader met mullenweg so please attend that final uh chat also a quick update just in case you guys missed it before we're all going to the party we're all going to party at night and you all have to come to the lohan like nightclub any details can be provided by anyone in the blue shirts if you for some reason don't know where it's going to be or what you're going to do or hell you can ask us uh what to wear but feel free feel free we'll give you some advice uh you can ask the locals what it's like there too just come to the party all right um that's all that's all for this track we're going to close it off slowly so thanks everyone thanks again thanks thank you thank you