WooSesh 2023 Day 3 Recap

Brian (00:00:00):
Hello and welcome back once again everyone, I’m still your host, Brian Richards, but now I am flanked on either side by two wonderful co-hosts from do the Woo, Marcus Burnett and Kathy’s aunt. Say hello friends,

Marcus (00:00:12):
Everyone,

Brian (00:00:14):
And I forgot to show you off as I was doing that there. They’re, I assure you they’re here with me. They’re not just disembodied voices. I’m also going to boost their audio just a little bit just to make sure I don’t repeat what happened on Monday after such a flawless event so far today and yesterday. We wouldn’t want to do that. So to give you all a little bit of background about our speakers, in case you aren’t aware, Kathy Z is the director of marketing at Cadence wp. She’s a highly regarded speaker with expertise in security, marketing and data-driven website development. You may recognize her from such events as WSEs, where she presented only yesterday talking about how you can use things like AI through cadence to help build your landing pages more effectively or at least more quickly, which I think is more effectively when you know what you’re up to.

(00:01:09):
She has spoken all over the globe, though not just here, both in person and online. And her knowledge on knowledge and insights on WordPress and emerging technologies have made her a highly sought after guest, which is why I’m always thrilled when she agrees to speak at WSEs. And then Marcus is a senior marketing specialist at GoDaddy, or between you and me. He works in events and community throughout the WordPress space and is pretty good at it. He’s a seasoned web designer and developer with over a decade of experience with WordPress and WooCommerce and has served on small to medium-sized businesses and in the background in both agency work and freelancing. And after working for several years in that capacity, he joined SkyBridge, which was later acquired by GoDaddy, and now he’s at GoDaddy and now he’s here with us. Both Kathy and Marcus, as I said, are hosts of Do the Woo, a fantastic podcast that you should be subscribed to given the opportunity, which it’s free. So the opportunity always exists to you, and I’m thrilled to be hanging out here now at the end of day three of Woo 2023 with both of them. So Marcus and Kathy, welcome. It’s good to see you. How are you doing today?

Kathy (00:02:27):
It’s so good to see you, Brian. What an event. It’s so cool to see, not just everybody chatting in Slack, but just on all the socials, everybody talking about the great sessions. Mark, you saw some of the sessions today too, didn’t you? Were you watching today?

Marcus (00:02:42):
Yeah, I’ve been able to be present for most of these three days and it’s been absolutely fantastic. Kudos to Brian for putting all this together and all of the hard work, love the diversity of the speakers, diversity of the topics, and just an almost flawless event, which is very hard to do, especially with that layer of technology in between that tries to fight you the whole way. So excellent job, Brian.

Brian (00:03:12):
Well, thank you very much. I could not agree more with that technology layer trying to fight you the whole way along, but so far it’s worked mostly with me, which is really nice.

Kathy (00:03:26):
And you stand victorious today at the end of all of these three days and months of working with all of the speakers to make sure that all of our sessions were in the best light and also that our slides are lining up and just all of the editing that was done. You guys have been working for months on this, haven’t you?

Brian (00:03:48):
Yes, so I’ve been working on this year’s ESH technically since last year because as soon as the event wraps up, it’s time to start reaching out to sponsors because sponsors plan their budget for the year in the year ahead. So those conversations have to start right away. But I didn’t really have to do much in terms of actual organizing and producing until probably summer. I opened the call for speakers in May, closed in June, picked speakers in July, announced speakers late August or maybe not even until September this year. I was slow to announce speakers this year and then was slow to open registration because I built a whole new website for WSEs this year, which was a lot of fun, but also just a lot.

Kathy (00:04:46):
Can I ask you about the website? Because as soon as it launched, I mean a bunch of us were like view source

Brian (00:04:52):
Because,

Kathy (00:04:53):
Because first of all, it was so beautiful, but also a little snappy there, really fast, high performance. Can you give us some background on the site itself?

Brian (00:05:04):
I can. So I built it not with WordPress, it’s my first in production non WordPress site in a long time. And yeah, specifically I started actually knocking around with this last year too. I was exploring using Next jss and just I wanted to see what it was like and how easy is it to work with, how fast is it in reality? And I enjoyed it very much. I use Airtable behind the scenes for managing all of the speakers and sponsors because it’s a really nice spreadsheet slash database with a ui. And for years I was like, I don’t understand why everybody loves this thing. I don’t need a database with ui. I have the database in WordPress and I can give it whatever UI I want and I know how to navigate spreadsheets very effectively. This is a weird middle ground tool. And then I used it for about an hour.

(00:06:02):
I’m like, oh, this is why everybody likes it a lot. And in particular for things like speaker selection because you can view the data a bunch of different ways natively. I can go from looking at records as rows to looking at them in a Kanban board, Kanban board in columns. And so as we’re working through the speakers, basically my first layer is this talk baseline interesting or not that interesting. And then from the interesting pile, is this more interesting or less interesting than the one I just read? And I just keep sorting until we get to most interesting and then finally selected. And that process is super easy to do an Airtable. I can make forms to get the speakers to give us all the data, but then we have to get that data from there historically into WordPress. And I could have built an importer or set up Zapier or any other number of automations to do that, but I was just kicking around with Airtable.

(00:06:59):
I’m like, can I even do this? Can I feed directly from Airtable, put it out on the internet? Is that going to work? And I had a functional prototype together in about an hour. I’m like, oh, this is cool. And the page loads are sub 500 millisecond. This might be something. And so I hacked on it more this summer and then launched it as it is now. And it was ligety split fast and I got a little fancy with the animation and the heading, which looks awesome and is very fun, but is literally 250 individual divs whizzing past on the screen for anyone who might not be able to see the site either because it’s already gone down because you’re listening to this months and years later or for any other reason, it looks like a star field behind the logo in the header of the page. And the stars are moving past sort of at mock warp speed. So some of them are lines, some of them are dots, and they’re moving fast or slow with a parallax effect. It’s really fun. But animating 250 individual elements on the site tends to cause it to gain a bit of load time. So I went from sub-second load speeds to about a second or a second and a half depending on connection speed.

Marcus (00:08:15):
Second worth it though because I think I immediately thought this load’s very fast and then I’m going to post something on social media about how pretty it is. So it was still worth it because it was still very fast and there’s a lot of social media attention, engagement, availability around things that look pretty.

Brian (00:08:38):
That’s exactly right, and that’s largely why I got into it. And a second effect that I really liked of this, one of the features that I get almost for free, nope, literally for free at my current, is automatically generated social graph images, open graph social sharing images. And that has been the bane of running events for as long as I’ve been doing them because speakers will change their talk title or their role will change where they’re working or they’ll give me a better photo and now I have to go back and regenerate their image or as I’m generating the talk titles vary in such enormous lengths to very short, it’s a chore to make all of those. And now they just get generated for me automatically. And when someone says, Hey, can we change my title? I say, no problem. I can do it from my phone as I’m out for a walk. This literally happened and I swiped back from Airtable to Slack and said, all right, we’re all set. And there their talk was correct on the homepage, on their individual session page in the image that gets generated to go with it. That part was especially fantastic.

Marcus (00:09:53):
It’s very cool. And not to mention those badges when we registered, how cool those were and being able to share those out as well.

Speaker 4 (00:10:03):
So the registration is going into Airtable as well.

Brian (00:10:06):
The registration is not going into Airtable, so I hooked that up to Firebase because that’s lightning fast. And so I’ve got multiple tables that are running that. So there’s the attendees collection is what they’re called in Firebase. All of the registration data goes into there. And then if you check the box that says, I would like my profile to be public on the attendee page, which is only visible by other logged in attendees whose profile is also public, just the fields that get shown there are duplicated into a second collection. And the first collection, the attendee data is right, only we can write from the internet to the collection, but we cannot read back out. And then the other one is read only Firebase can write the data to it, but no one else can. And then it comes back out only. So one way data transfer, which is really neat and that gives me reasonable assurances that I’m not at risk of exposing anyone’s attendee data.

(00:11:11):
And then the other thing I got to hook up to this, so that gave us the dynamically generated attendee badges that you mentioned, Marcus. That was a fun freebie that I got to just design and put on the page. But now I have this infinitely scalable database. I have much better viewer tracking for the event this year than I’ve had maybe ever because I decided every minute I would write to the server I that you are watching. So I can see through the day a histogram of like, all right, we had a bunch of people here and then it trailed off and then it came back again and then it trailed off. Or how many people at this session or what’s the average length of viewership for a session? I think there are something like 60,000 events that have been logged in the database, and that will cost me all of about 10 or 12 pennies when the event is all over. So fairly good economic scale, just throwing things into these other databases.

Kathy (00:12:17):
That’s so fun. I know Marcus and I are geeking out on what you’ve done here because having been someone like Marcus who has built websites, when you can see a new technology that’s not only bringing data faster to an end user, but also making administration of that data on the backend and giving you all of that analytics, that is something to behold. Congratulations on pulling all of that together to make this event as smooth as it was. That’s really epic.

Brian (00:12:50):
Yeah, thanks. That level of viewer data is something that I’ve wanted to have all along because it’s indispensable information as I’m working on speaker selection for each additional year. And I’ve only been able to vaguely get it because Google Analytics would tell me one number, vimeo’s live analytics would tell me a different number, and then the stats that I was collecting myself, I just had a binary. Did you show up during the live broadcast at all during the live broadcast? Yes or no? Because I knew I could throw that into my server without crashing things. I wasn’t so confident that I could throw 60,000 records, right? If we’ve got a thousand people watching at every minute there’s a thousand records going into the database across an hour, there’s 60,000 of them like that. I feel like if I do that, I might run the risk of breaking the site and then nobody can watch it.

(00:13:45):
And then all of my stats are zero, which is what they would be if I did nothing at all. So let’s do nothing at all. And now I just have that. I don’t have the reporting interface yet. I’ve just been throwing the events in there. So when we’re all wrapped up starting, I’ll probably starting Monday is when I’ll do this. I’ll work back through the data and figure out what useful insights can I get. Do we have a huge dropoff at certain times of day or at a certain point in a session or things like that?

Kathy (00:14:13):
I want to know if there’s dropoffs during my bad jokes during my session. So you’ll have to back channel on that for me if my jokes fall in

Brian (00:14:23):
The good category or the bad. Yeah. Did you, I imagine that your jokes landed just fine. They

Kathy (00:14:26):
Were great.

Marcus (00:14:27):
Kathy’s going to compare timestamps later.

Kathy (00:14:31):
That’s all I’m concerned about. Do we want to talk about the sass? I know that this is new this year.

Brian (00:14:38):
Yes, brand new this year. I have been wanting to do this for a long time. I’ve been running WP Sessions for 10 years, solo running word sesh for eight, seven and Sesh for six. And for much of that I thought, how great would it be to have some kind of award ceremony to celebrate the amazing people who are in our community? I don’t know if I can do that. And so finally this year I said, no, I think I could do that because there are enough people who are on the mailing list for the events and enough reach from all of the speakers and companies that I’ve befriended throughout the years that I’m like, I think we could do this. And so this year, indeed, where did my slides go? There they are. The sesis are happening, and I decided to start small. We have six categories of awards that we’re going to hand out today, and for anyone who is listening to this episode in Isolation background in this, the ses are a community awards ceremony connected to Sesh where I get to handout on behalf of all of you awards to some of the best and brightest folks across the internet.

(00:15:56):
So this year, our categories are Advocate of the Year, developer of the year, extension of the year, agency of the Year, store of the Year, and Innovation award. And we had about a month where I was accepting open nominations where anyone could come along and just nominate whomever they thought was deserving of the award and why. And then for the past week, I closed down the nomination form and pulled the top three nominees from each category, our finalists, and then let people vote on who they thought among the finalists deserve the award most. And the hardest part about that actually because there were so many incredible submissions, was coming up with the Honorable mentions. So it was easy to get the top three because, and let me pull both of you back up here since I’m not just talking to myself. It was easy to get to the top three because the nominations gave me that, but after that, from literally from the fourth highest onward, it was one or two nominations across the board, across 10 dozens of nominations for each category. And I wanted to highlight some because there were so many good projects, so many great contributors. And so I pulled in two honorable mentions for each category as well, so we could just celebrate them even if I can’t give them an award. And so

(00:17:30):
I’m excited now to finally be able to reveal them. Should we get into it?

Kathy (00:17:35):
Let’s do it. Can I keep my fingers crossed from my favorites? I’ve got some favorites.

Brian (00:17:40):
So our first one here, let me just make sure this is all working right? Good. Yes. Advocate of the Year. So Advocate of the Year is awarded in recognition of an individual organization that has invested in fostering, sorry, an individual or organization that is invested in fostering the WooCommerce community, which could be through educational content hosting meetups and contributing to the public discussions and all of this in service of others. And our finalists for this year are Do the Woo, Michelle Frache and Kathy Darling do the Woo. I hope all of you listening are familiar with, because it’s this podcast that you are listening to right now, or in the case of people who are listening live to Sesh, the folks I just introduced to you. But Michelle Frache is the director of community engagement at Stellar wp, and community relations for post status loves to help people get hired and find their own calling within the community. And she does so many different things that it’s hard to be able to list any one specific thing without diminishing the multitude of others. And then Kathy Darling is a developer like myself, and she is frequently helping people in the WooCommerce Slack, just helping them figure out their own things in addition to contributing her own extensions and generally making the internet a better place to live. And with that, hang on, I’ve got some sound effects here to queue up as well.

(00:19:17):
Our winner for this is Due the Woo. Good job team.

Kathy (00:19:29):
Marcus, do you have an acceptance speech prepared for this highly esteemed award?

Brian (00:19:35):
That’s right.

Marcus (00:19:37):
I do not surprised. Yes, I do not have an acceptance speech prepared, but yeah, that’s fantastic. I have had the pleasure of being part of Do The Woo for I think maybe like a year and a half now. So not one of the original members, but super thankful to Bob and the rest of everyone else for inviting me in and letting me co-host a show with Ronald for a little while. And now with Katie. Keith, we have our Woo Biz Chats once a month. And yeah, I’m just, thanks everyone. I know that Bob is kind of the spearhead and he’ll be modest and he’ll deflect to the rest of the team and thank everyone on the team for showing out every episode. And so I will do that in his stead. I will just thank the whole team at doula woo for just putting out great WooCommerce related episodes and more and broader things to come, I think.

Brian (00:20:40):
Heck yeah. Well, congratulations team. I enjoy that I get to present the award to the people winning the award here. I should think about trying to make that happen next year for everybody, perhaps.

Speaker 5 (00:20:55):
Ooh, that would be fun.

Brian (00:20:57):
Hard to do. So next up is Developer of the Year, and this one is awarded to an individual or develop an individual developer or developer within an organization who has contributed significantly either to a specific WooCommerce project or broadly to the community. And our finalists for this year are Mike Jolly, one of the original core contributors to WooCommerce ro Taek. And apologies if I totally butchered that name. I forgot to ask for pronunciation ahead of time. And he’s an experienced WooCommerce developer with Maximer, and he received so many nominations that was impossible to ignore. He apparently is a huge contributor within the agency and helps everybody left, right, and center in addition to being responsible for his own work. And then James Kemp, who is the founder of Iconic and a colleague of Kathy’s and the happy brand of Stellar WP products, in addition to building lots of neat stuff, is also prolific in helping other people manage their own success. So three incredible candidates. This one I can tell you without revealing too much was a very tight voting circle. And so without further ado, our winner for this one is James Camp.

(00:22:35):
So congratulations, James. Very excited for you. Clearly you deserve it because the community thought. So next we have our extension of the year. So this award goes to the plugin that has added the most value to WooCommerce stores, either by introducing new features, improving efficiency or enhancing user experience, and crucially should be reliable, stable, well coded, and easy to use. And our nominees, or rather our finalists for this year, TikTok for WooCommerce, which is brand new this year. In fact, all three of these are, I believe, brand new for this year, or at least these first two are brand new. So TikTok added the ability to bring in your WooCommerce catalog to TikTok shop so you can do live selling and all kinds of product and promos over there. And so this is a first party extension made with TikTok and WooCommerce together. And then second is WooCommerce Product options, which we also released this year from the fine folks at Barn two.

(00:23:38):
This adds a new approach to product configuration, letting you add as many different kinds of fields as you want for configuring your product. And then Pixel Manager for WooCommerce, which brings about a unique feature in terms of the tracking plugins that exist, which is to help reconcile malformed data. A lot of the pixel tracking solutions that exist for anyone who does marketing leave a lot to be desired when the data isn’t wired up correctly at the initial setup for ad flows and things like that. And this helps correct that gives much better reporting and things like that. And our winner here, WooCommerce Product Options by Barn. Two, congratulations to the Barn two team. Next up, we have Agency of the Year. And as you may imagine this one, it goes to the agency or who delivers an excellent digital experience with an emphasis on client satisfaction and overall innovation.

(00:24:49):
And our nominees here are SoCal, Maximer and Inside. And all three of these brands have been around, or rather agencies have been around for quite a while and are rather prolific. Interestingly enough, all three of them, well two and a half of them are firmly based outside of the United States. And that just tickles me as the guy who’s running the event from the United States, who’s mostly familiar with folks in the United States. Proud to see the reach that these awards have. And I don’t need to tell you too much about each of them except that they’re each independently amazing and have been around for quite a while and have large teams who have delivered many projects that their clients really love. And our winner is Maximer. Congratulations to all of ’em and kudos to them. They reached out to for clarification in the nomination and voting rules, are we allowed to vote for ourselves and nominate ourselves?

(00:26:01):
Absolutely. You sure are like more than one person from the company. Yes, show up, celebrate yourselves. Tell us about the cool stuff. And they did and they won, and I think it’s well deserved. Congratulations team. Next up, we have store of the year. This one was especially fun for me to look at to see all of the different nominations for cool stores that are out there in the internet. Our finalists were Universal Alum, universal Yums, which is a subscription service that will deliver delicious treats to your door from all around the world. And they have a lot of really unique things that are happening their store to make all of that work. Because as you can imagine, for anyone who’s done anything with subscriptions or box delivery, there are many, many, many different nuanced things. And then next we have chia makers of the Chia Pet, and also I rediscovered, I think manufacturers of the Clapper. So they got a brand new WooCommerce site this year, and it’s beautiful. And in particular, if you check out chia.com and hover over any of the buttons, like the add to cart buttons or things, they sprout chia plants and it’s delightful. And if you leave the page alone for a while, chia grows and overtakes the entire viewport, and then a chia cat comes bounding across. It’s delightful. I could

Marcus (00:27:31):
Tell. That’s how you up your time on Page. Yeah, that’s

Brian (00:27:34):
Right. Yeah,

Marcus (00:27:36):
Yeah,

Brian (00:27:37):
Good stats hacking there. And then finally, barn two manufacturers of the fantastic plugin that just won an award and dozens of other incredible WooCommerce plugins. They have wired up their store to spin up or rather show off individual WooCommerce demo sites for each of their plugins rather effectively. And their entire site is just pleasing to look at. So without further ado, our winner for this barn. Two congratulations team. That’s two different awards they’re taking home today. Way to go. And then finally, our last award, the Innovation Award. This is for showing off basically just strutting your stuff and flexing all over the rest of us. It’s an award for using WooCommerce in a truly unique or groundbreaking way, whether that’s through integrations, customizations, or novel business models and in a way that empowers customers and drives innovation. And our finalists for this are Simple Dose, which is an Australian pharmacy that will ship you.

(00:28:47):
They will take all of your prescriptions, they will sort them for you and ship them to you in individualized packages. So you need to take this one Monday morning and this one Monday evening. And so you just pull out the next one. It has printed on there, what time of day it’s for, which day it’s for, and then you take them and whether or not you took or forgot to take your medications and it comes straight to your door every month, hassle-free. Remarkable. I want this to exist just universally. So I hope this idea takes off no matter what. Our second finalist is Wild Cloud, which you may have first been introduced to as WPCS, and they provide a scalable, rather, a robust, scalable platform that anyone can use to deploy their own platform as a service basically. So if you want to your own micro hosted WooCommerce experience for restaurants in your area, for example, you could spin that up and each of them could be responsible for managing their own site.

(00:29:51):
You maintain the infrastructure, or at least what’s available to them without having to know how to do all of the infrastructure, set your own pricing, get the exact experience that you want to deliver to your customers without having to be a huge network engineer. It’s rather remarkable how much they’ve simplified that whole thing. And then the third finalist is CALM is simple. We had a presentation on them just yesterday from who is their IT director, showing off the incredible things that they had to build in order to deliver mattresses in Latin America and delight customers, mattress buying experiences universally terrible. And they said, what if we could make it even just a little less terrible? And that’s what they’ve been working on for a while and put a lot of really cool tech into it. And so our final winner here, simple Dose, nice job, everybody.

(00:30:56):
So to recap here, all of our winners, we’ve got do the WOO for Advocate of the Year, James Kemp for Developer of the Year, Maximer for Agency of the Year, WooCommerce, product Options for Extension of the Year, barn, two for Store of the Year, and Simple Dose for the Innovation Award once this live broadcast has wrapped up, those will all be published to wses.com/sesis where you can follow through and check out all of them as well as the nominees that I didn’t have time to go through here today. And please help me in congratulating and celebrating all of them because they are each amazing in their own right. And I really appreciate them and all of you for participating in the sessions. Thank all of you. Thanks to all of you for nominating and voting and turning up to make these awards actually matter. I appreciate that.

Kathy (00:31:47):
Amazing. The Slack channels are for all of those who aren’t participating and maybe listening to the replay next year show up because the Slack channel, I can’t keep up. There’s so many people who are hanging out and watching us live and celebrating. Some of our winners are actually in Slack. And so it’s definitely, we’re seeing the effect of a community event and so many people who are participating in making these connections, even though we are so distributed. So it’s kind of a cool experience.

Brian (00:32:22):
Yeah,

Marcus (00:32:23):
The Slack has lit up with one additional Eshi award. It looks like you managed to find on your desk

Brian (00:32:32):
For

Marcus (00:32:32):
Best Woosh organizer of the year.

Brian (00:32:35):
Yes, comes complete with trophy.

Marcus (00:32:39):
With trophy. Well deserved. Well deserved.

Brian (00:32:42):
Thank you everyone. I will display this proudly just off camera because it’d be very weird to explain to everybody who has no idea what I’m up to and what I’m doing. What’s that piece of paper tape to that infinite void behind you?

Kathy (00:32:56):
It’s not your giant fridge where you put your,

Marcus (00:33:00):
That’s a big Yeah. Chalkboard on the fridge behind you.

Kathy (00:33:03):
Hang

Marcus (00:33:03):
It up proudly.

Brian (00:33:04):
Yes. I’m actually only three feet tall. This is a regular sized refrigerator. Amazing. Well, thanks everyone. Should we talk about some of the sessions that happened today? We’re basically, we’re practically out of time already, is that right?

Kathy (00:33:19):
Are we,

Brian (00:33:20):
What time is it?

Kathy (00:33:21):
25 past the hour?

Brian (00:33:23):
I dunno. We still got time. We got time.

Kathy (00:33:24):
Okay.

Brian (00:33:26):
But I did use up a lot of it talking about all these amazing SESS winners. You want to talk about some of the sessions, recap how today went, what else is going on in the world? Maybe not that part.

Kathy (00:33:36):
Yeah,

Marcus (00:33:36):
Yeah, absolutely. I’m going to start with AME this morning. Who killed it? That was great. I’m going to admit that I understood maybe 30% of what he was talking about, not because of the accent or anything, but just to sheer volume of knowledge that he put it out towards us in our direction. And I was trying to soak it all in and it was a lot. And it was very cool. Brian, share a little bit about what that one was about.

Brian (00:34:10):
Yeah, so AME was presenting financial inclusion in Africa and specifically gave us a case study on the inera, which is a nationally recognized and organized digital currency that runs through their central bank. And I think it’s going to be amazing. I hope it takes off. You mentioned some of the challenges with this, of course, is getting the public to trust and believe in a brand new currency that hasn’t existed for very long relative to everything else. But the way he framed how they’re thinking about this currency is phenomenal. Not just like, Hey, let’s put some more money out there and hope that it’s fine. But like, Hey, how can we make sure specifically that this is helping unbanked individuals who otherwise don’t have access to financial services and financial resources, and how do we improve the distribution and delivery of government services now because we have this digital currency that we can control and how do we bring all of Nigeria and make the country as a whole more available to international global commerce? And so well, this needs to be something that our local merchants can deal with and individuals can deal with and international mega corps like McDonald’s can deal with. So they’re thinking through the whole gamut. And so it was really cool to listen to and hear how that’s going. And I agree, Marcus, it was very easy to miss out on probably 60% of the subtext and the detail that he brought, but wow, was that one cool?

Kathy (00:35:58):
It was very

Marcus (00:35:58):
Cool. If nothing else, I’ll use it as a plug to make sure you rewatch the session. That’s what I’m going to need to go do. I’m going to need to go rewatch and try to soak in a bit more of what he was talking about. That was super great. And I think that the major barrier there is just adoption and getting the word out to everyone and the trust. It’s awareness and trust and spreading the word to the rest of the folks there.

Kathy (00:36:26):
Amay was really active also in the Slack during other people’s sessions yesterday during one of the personalization sessions, he actually talked about the perspective of receiving a very highly personalized email in Nigeria because there is so much scam emails that people are receiving. If it’s overly personalized that in that culture, it’s actually even more suspicious. So you have to be really careful. So I really appreciate the fact that he’s bringing knowledge of different cultural norms on the internet to ses so that we can understand just the needs of developing countries, cultural things that we might not understand. They’re not our default. So just that perspective. And I really appreciate those diverse perspectives that have happened over the course of the past few days.

Brian (00:37:21):
Marcus, back to you. Well, Kathy.

Kathy (00:37:25):
Yeah. Well, the next session we had was BET Hannon’s session on accessibility. And Bette is one of my favorite people, I believe she’s in our chat right now as well, but accessibility essentials for e-commerce. A lot of times people are developing, again, it’s another cultural norm. If you’re not exposed to someone that has a disability or that has accessibility needs, you might not think about tabbing through navigation and what that experience might be like. And so that really brought this additional perspective of what it’s like to shop online and some decisions that store makers, store creators can make in order to make their stores more accessible to everyone. And just even how that helps with SEO, just another anytime. I see. But talking about accessibility, I’m tuning in because it’s such an important topic. Marcus, were you able to watch that one?

Marcus (00:38:26):
Yeah, I was able to see it. And that was actually one of the things that stood out to me is this is not the first time that Bette has given this talk. And every single time I can feel the passion that BET brings to every single time that she talks about these things, whether that’s just the differences in different laws and different places in the US and around the world. And then on top of that, just giving us a list of here’s some real practical ways that you can now today improve accessibility for your WooCommerce site, for your websites. You don’t have to wait. There’s not like a course that I have to go take two weeks from now to just finally get started. And just every single time that I see Bette speak, I can feel the passion that she brings to the session in sharing that knowledge with everybody.

Brian (00:39:22):
I agree completely. I liked a line that she uses frequently that I have forever appreciated, which is progress beats perfection, progress over perfect. Making incremental improvements is always better than just waiting and waiting and waiting until you can get it just right at the end.

Kathy (00:39:46):
And with accessibility too, there are a lot of, you’re hearing more and more e-commerce stores that are being hit with lawsuits or threats of legal action because they aren’t accessible. And so just showing that you’re paying attention, I’m stealing from, but I got to spend some time with bet. Last week I was taking some of her talking points, but she talked about how just showing that you’re making incremental improvements, showing that you’re trying to be accessible, that you’re doing some of the basics and that you’re making some improvements can go a long way if you are faced with a lawsuit. So that is definitely the person that you want to talk to if you have the opportunity to learn more about accessibility.

Marcus (00:40:37):
Yeah, a hundred percent. And that progress over perfection is so big because it’s oftentimes easier if you’re kind of a freelancer or something working on your own to just start doing things. But when you’re working within the confines of an agency or something, being able to put some things in place without having to get too much buy-in too many check boxes and stuff, like, I can make this progress. I can do these little things now. I don’t need to put together a brief and pitch this whole thing, which you should do that too in an attempt to do more. But as you’re going along, you can go ahead and start making little changes, little progress, and every little bit makes it that much better. Every little bit counts.

Kathy (00:41:24):
Definitely. Our next talk was inviting customers in inclusive and accessible practices with Anthony Papini. Marcus, did you see that one?

Marcus (00:41:35):
I did. I loved how, and Brian addressed it afterwards, how he was nervous having back to back, very similar talks about accessibility and inclusiveness, but they were almost like this one kind of mega talk in the middle of the day because they were so complimentary to each other. And I think I even mentioned it in the chat while I was watching them. It’s so important when you hear this is important for accessibility. And then the next person comes on that they’re saying similar things, that they’re not, oh no, this is important for access or this is important for whatever the other topic is, right? And you’re like, well, now I’ve heard two different talks about the same thing that took me in two different directions. I don’t know where to start. I am just going to wait and I’ll deal with it later. But the fact that they were back to back and basically just building on top of each other, reiterating the same things, the same important pieces, the same practical advice, just made it that much easier to go ahead and say, I can do this today. I should start working on this now.

Brian (00:42:41):
Yeah, the part that I enjoyed about that was how they were, they’re talking about different facets of the same problem that went in not surface level, but she gave us a really good spread of, these are all of the different ways in which accessibility plays out in the things that you’re building. And it’s not just making sure your images are described though that’s important. And it’s not just making sure that your site is keyboard navigable, but that’s also important. It’s a multitude of things. And so she couldn’t get in deep on any of them. I only gave her 20 minutes to just like a whirlwind sprint through, Hey, here are some of the most important things that you should know about for accessibility, so you can start fixing those things. And then Anthony came in right behind her to talk about these are the people that we are welcoming to our stores by making them more accessible, by making them more inclusive, not just with how they function, both also the language that we’re using, the imagery that we’re selecting, the overall experience that we’re delivering.

(00:43:49):
And I appreciated that because something that I think about a lot, recognizing that WP Sessions and sesh and word sesh has a global reach. I didn’t want to make this site fast just because it’s cool to have a fast site, though it is. I wanted to make it fast because making it fast also means it’s lightweight. Making it lightweight means that it’s more available to the broader world. And that seems like a silly thing to try to do when ultimately we’re delivering a 10 80 p live stream and gigabytes of data across the wire as the main means of learning. But delivering a site that is accessible and lightweight and easy to manage makes the rest of the experience more available. And I don’t want them to have, have the same amount of infrastructure that they would need to watch a live stream just to visit the homepage and register. That would be absurd. And so I’m trying to make the rest of the site as small and trim. And one of the amazing things about the livestream that we deliver, which is Vimeo, behind the scenes, is all of the work they do to make sure that the stream can be delivered across a variety of network connections. So I’m providing 10 80 p to Vimeo, and then Vimeo’s transcoding it on the fly to support people wherever they are.

Kathy (00:45:14):
And transcripts too. Wasn’t the transcript live as well.

Brian (00:45:18):
Yes. We’ve got a real human, Amanda Lundberg. Thank you, Amanda, for your hard work and writing everything that we are saying today and the last two days as well. She is an amazing professional, and if you also want to hire a professional transcriber for things you are doing, I cannot recommend enough the team at White Coat captioning, so you should hire them. And the captions are a fantastic example of where accessibility benefits everybody. Two days ago, I had an audio issue, but Amanda was still able to catch just enough of what the other speakers were saying, even though they weren’t micd up correctly, that all of us could still read. For the most part what was being said while I went back and fixed the audio issue. It is just so handy. There’s situational times where I can’t have the audio on, but I can read the captions is a big, big obvious win for accessibility, improves the world. Curb Cuts in Cities is another example where curbs didn’t use to have a cut at the end so that you could easily just step into the sidewalk. Those were only added way later. And now they’re amazing for everybody, not just people who need to use a wheelchair, but anyone who’s walking with any kind of assisted device, anyone who’s pulling a wagon or pushing a stroller or walking with small children at all. Accessibility and inclusion helps everybody. Everybody

Kathy (00:46:53):
Definitely. I love the attention that you’ve placed on that for this event. Someone told me that we are all just one terrible event away from having accessibility be the most important thing in our lives. My family has experienced that. So for everybody who thinks about accessibility and thinks about people who need a little bit of help, yay, thank you.

Marcus (00:47:15):
And not just one event, but as we age naturally, we get closer to needing assistive devices of all kinds as well. So I mean, we’re all headed in the direction of needing devices in one form or another.

Kathy (00:47:31):
I’m not aging, I’m refusing.

Marcus (00:47:35):
Well, I’m aging double for you,

Brian (00:47:39):
Unsubscribe,

Kathy (00:47:40):
Finding it every step of the way. Our next session that we had is My Well from Aging and Death, we’re going straight into taxes. Taxes, things we can’t avoid is my T-shirt taxable? I remember the internet when it didn’t have a taxation showing how old I am. And now taxation is definitely a big topic. If you are selling anything online in multiple jurisdictions with multiple tax rules, understanding how taxation affects everything from a T-shirt to big ticket items is a huge deal. How was this session?

Brian (00:48:20):
It was intense. It was incredible.

(00:48:23):
It is surprisingly difficult to answer the question, is my T-shirt taxable? Boy? I don’t know, is it, and so India laid out a bunch of scenarios like, well, is it sports apparel? Is it part of a work uniform? Is it part of protective equipment? Is it for this particular demographic of people? Are you a business selling to other businesses? Are you a business selling directly to consumers? There are so many different rules that exist across all of those jurisdictions, and it’s a hot mess is what I took away from that talk, and it wasn’t meant to be, but effectively was the perfect pitch for here’s why everyone should just use Avalara, because it would be a nightmare to get some of that wrong because the government is not very forgiving when they discover that you got it wrong and you can’t just say, oops, can we just start doing it correctly from now on? They’ll be like, no, we’re going to need all of that money that you owe us immediately. So I prefer not to mess around with that myself.

Kathy (00:49:37):
That’s a little bit of a fine for not getting it right the first time. Yeah, things like that. Never fun working with those governmental agencies. Did you enjoy this session, Marcus?

Marcus (00:49:50):
I did. I’ve had the opportunity of having India on our GoDaddy Pro meetup and we had a chat about taxes as well, not this particular one. So I was very interested to see what the answer to is my T-shirt taxable was and blown away that the answer is, it depends, but not on a couple of things, on a couple dozen things. And so between that and the conversations I’ve had with her before, I don’t know how anyone handles taxes online or otherwise without having a company that’s dedicated to doing that to do it for you. I remember when she was on talking about how it depends whether something is taxable or how much it’s taxable based on location and how if it’s a warehouse, sometimes the front door is in a different tax code than the back loading dock of the same building in the same parking lot. And I was like, Nope, that’s enough for me. The fact that it’s in two different tax zones on the same property, I’m out. Somebody else has to deal with that. I’m not going to try and figure that out on my own.

Kathy (00:51:02):
Yeah, those edge cases sure get kind of complicated and confusing. Yeah, what a great title though too. It definitely gets you thinking about the complexities of something as simple as a T-shirt, so that just kudos on that title. Good job. Definitely pulls you right in. What about our next session on automating e-Commerce Bookkeeping? I like that Automation.

Brian (00:51:31):
Yes. I thought you might. I too enjoy automation, which interestingly is also another of the reasons why I wired up Airtable for managing all this stuff because it makes it a breeze to deliver all the different speaker emails that I need to send out and tracking sponsor deliverables and things like that. And so Peter was talking specifically about automating bookkeeping for WooCommerce and showing off a fantastic product that he helped develop through my works to help businesses automate their bookkeeping from WooCommerce to QuickBooks and elsewhere. And he also showed up with a bunch of, Hey, here’s some things that you are probably doing as a business that are very unpleasant and could potentially ruin you if you got it wrong ever, and how fickle it is to try to manually reconcile things with selling digital goods and things like that. And so he presented a number of different examples of here’s a store doing things this way and how we can automate that and fix it. And just showing off genuinely how quick and easy it is to go from having to do it by hand to like, Hey, the computer’s doing it now, and it’s doing it perfectly according to the rules that it’s supposed to follow, so it can never be done wrong again. Or if there is a mistake, we can unilaterally fix it across all of the things that were wrong instead of manually going back and finding and correcting those things by hand. So kudos to him.

Marcus (00:53:12):
Yeah. I’m afraid that I unfortunately missed that one. I had to step out for a few minutes, but I’m all about automating things that can be automated. I sort of live by a general principle that if there’s something that I need to do more than two or three times that it’s worth the effort to figure out if there’s a way to automate it and let it continue to do the work. For me, especially in the realm of computers and things like your website, that’s what they’re built for. They’re built for doing tasks for you. And so if you can find ways to leverage that processing power, take it out of your brain and let the computer handle something for you, then kudos to you. That’s something that you can spend your time doing something else with instead of doing the same task over and over again.

Kathy (00:54:04):
Definitely good thinking. Our second to the last session was what to expect from a hosting partner from one of my coworkers, Tiffany Bridge. I bet she said Nexus is pretty awesome, but yeah, so

Marcus (00:54:21):
You didn’t mention Nexus once. No, I’m just kidding. Really. Oh wow.

Kathy (00:54:25):
Wow. Agnostic Nexus is pretty awesome. And yeah, I mean, what do people want from a host? They want to make sure that it’s fast, that there’s not going to be problems, that security is going to be taken care of, and that support’s going to help you solve problems. What other things? Oh, you who works at a hosting provider, Marcus?

Marcus (00:54:50):
Yeah. I mean, there’s a checklist of things that you want from any hosting company, but I think the big picture is that you really want, if you have managed hosting, you want to know that the hosting company has your back, whether that’s you’re struggling with the performance of your site or it gets hacked, or you have a spike in traffic, which is one of the things that Tiffany talked about. Being able to handle things like sometimes it’s a holiday sale, like a Black Friday thing and that it’s coming, but sometimes you don’t know. Sometimes you don’t know that there’s going to be a bunch of extra traffic to your site for any given reason, and you just want to know that you’re hosting company will handle that for you and you’re not swimming and trying to figure out how to get your site back up.

(00:55:41):
And if it’s a commerce store, like what I’m talking about here, then you’re losing out on sales for every second, every minute that your site is down and you just want to, A lot of what Tiffany talked about was just making sure that your hosting company’s got your back in any number of situations, and there’s a lot of discussion about making sure that you have backups and where to back things up so that you’re adding an extra layer of that security to your site. But ultimately, I think that the main message was making sure that the host and company will be there when you need them to be there.

Brian (00:56:24):
Bingo. Yeah. Not just hosting is a service that I pay for. So my website is online, but my host is a partner that I’m working with not only to keep my site online, but also to recover anything that may have gone wrong, whether that’s through backups or scaling or whatever it takes for resiliency. Yeah, missing out on fresh orders is bad. Losing completed orders that have already come in but have not been fulfilled, way worse, way worse. So making sure not only are we scaling on the front end so the site doesn’t fall over, but also capturing things in the backend so that there’s no data loss or as close to no data loss as is reasonable and possible.

Marcus (00:57:15):
Surprisingly, people don’t paying for things and then not getting them, I don’t understand.

Kathy (00:57:20):
Weird Right. Expectations of kids these days.

Marcus (00:57:23):
Yeah.

Kathy (00:57:25):
Yeah. Good points. All right. Our last session was about integrating Amazon Pay with WooCommerce. Ooh, that sounds interesting. How was this session?

Brian (00:57:35):
You’ll never guess what Debbie showed us how to do

(00:57:41):
That. Yeah, exactly what it said on the tin. Yeah, so Debbie Martindale is a senior solution architect at Amazon Pay, and so she showed off the fast and easy install Amazon Pay, log into your dashboard, connect things together, you’re good to go. Amazon Pay ta-da, done. But it’s not just that because WooCommerce is a store platform that can sell anything. So you might have many different unique and complex needs. And so she showed off the multitude of hooks that are available so that you can control where the button appears, how the button is working, or rather the whole integration stack specifically for, I’m talking about when she was showing off the button things, but it has plenty of excellent features for customizing it to work however you need things to work in your store. And it was refreshing to me who is a developer who mainly talks to developers to actually get to show off a talk that here’s some actual code that you can use to make this thing. Sean Conklin had a talk with code on day one, and I think those are the only two that actually showed off real functions doing real things, which is funny.

Marcus (00:58:55):
Yeah, I was in and out of that one a little bit. It looked like it was quite technical. It looked like there was a lot of code being shown on screen, which is fantastic. I was able to check in yesterday a little bit. I think there were some other discussions than even a case study with Amazon Pay. So at GoDaddy have our own payment solutions. So I’m not telling you to go check out a different, but those talks yesterday on Amazon Pay were pretty cool and talked a lot about the non-developer side of enabling Amazon Pay and how simple it is and all the benefits that they’ve seen. They had a case study and everything, and then it sounded like today’s was a bit more on the technical side, like a deep dive into the code and writing some of that stuff yourself. And so really nice to see the balance of both seeing the simple side of just let’s get a plugin in and connect it to Amazon. And then the dev side of things where it’s like, well, you can do that, but also you have a lot of power if you go in and do some of the stuff yourself, and here’s how. So it was kind of cool to see both sides,

Brian (01:00:03):
Whoever was in charge of curating that experience to make sure that all sides of the experience here with WooCommerce were catered to. They did a good job, I think, making sure that Right, everybody got some representation in the schedule.

Marcus (01:00:23):
I agree. Well done.

Brian (01:00:26):
It’s my favorite part of this is being able to curate those talks and bring together an amazing group of presenters talking about a variety of things. Sometimes similar things, sometimes the same things, but from different ends of the topic. It’s an absolute joy to get to do this and to see it all come together like this warms my heart

Marcus (01:00:53):
As someone who’s usually stuck in a sponsor booth at Word Camps and other in-person events. I very much appreciated being able to really set aside a chunk of these three days and engage with all the speakers and in the Slack and be able to ask questions and provide some commentary and stuff, and just the wide range of folks that we had. I know we’re recapping today, but really this is kind of the final recap of the event. So I really enjoyed day one, day two, day three, all of the sessions. I maybe missed one or two throughout the whole thing. There was just so much really great info in all of those and from such varied perspectives. I know we talk a lot in our community about hearing everyone having a voice, and I feel like the lineup really exemplified everyone having a voice in this one. So super appreciate all the work that you’ve done to put this together. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Kathy (01:01:56):
It was such a good event and brought in. I loved the diversity of all of the different voices that you brought together over these three days. How long I wasn’t, it’s been kind of a crazy week. I wasn’t able to see all the sessions. How long do I have to catch up with all the recordings?

Brian (01:02:16):
So the recordings for one Days One and two are already published. Today’s talks are going to get published very soon, and they’ll be up for a full week starting tomorrow. You can come and watch them indefinitely on WP sessions.com and watch all of this year’s talks, all previous five years worth of talks and hundreds of other interesting talk topics that I’ve been able to host over the last decade, which is pretty fun.

Kathy (01:02:47):
What a deal. Thanks for having us.

Brian (01:02:52):
Yeah, it’s my pleasure. Thanks for agreeing to come and join us. I, I just realized I need to add one more thing here to my closing out deck. So you two talk amongst yourselves for a second. Can you tell us a little bit more about Do the Woo and sort of where people can listen to what you’re up to and the shows that you’re running on? Do the Woo.

Kathy (01:03:22):
Yeah, so do the.io, the community of WooCommerce Builders. There are so many different shows. I am mostly involved with Emerging Tech. I’m the latest one that I was involved with Dave Lockey from Automatic, and I interviewed Carl Alexander and talked about just the cool stuff that he’s doing with EER and amazing scalability. That’s just go to do the w.io and that’s on the homepage because that one, I think it was just launched a couple of days ago. But Marcus, what show are you doing?

Marcus (01:04:06):
Yeah, sadly, Kathy and I don’t get to be on shows together very often, but Katie Keith from Barn two just became my co-host for the last few episodes. And we’re moving forward with the Woo Biz Chat, which is talking to mostly product and business owners about Woo WooCommerce. But the last one that we did was with Jason Rut and John Ang, which are lead sponsor organizers for WordCamp EU and WordCamp Asia. And it was super interesting to kind of pick their brain and get to see a little bit behind the scenes of how they think about wrangling sponsors and how they think about what they offer to sponsors and how the whole thing kind of comes together with booths and all that stuff. And so it was good to see kind of the things that are the same between the flagship camps like EU and Asia and some of the things that are different and some of the flexibility and stuff that the WordCamp Asia for being new and some of the things that EU is just used to doing because they’ve done it for a number of years. So yeah, there’s a number of different shows and maybe Kathy and I’ll get to do a show together at some point, but there’s a lot of really great content that spans across business and inside WooCommerce and dev chats and all of that stuff across all of the Do the Woo Universe.

Kathy (01:05:45):
Yeah, whether you’re interested just in product and marketing and getting more customers in the front door of your storefront, or if you’re building sites for others and are looking at the more emerging technologies that affect WooCommerce. There’s a show and content for everyone over at Do The Woo and Bob Lee curates an exceptional list of guests who really bring amazing insights. I’ve learned a lot through all of the guests that I’ve been able to interview over the shows. I think I’ve been on for almost a couple of years. I guess. I don’t know. I’m going to have to mute myself because we have a dachshund and I’m in Texas. There’s a neighbor with a chainsaw and chainsaw Texas thing. He might’ve seen the movie, so he’s barking a little. So I’m going to mute myself.

Marcus (01:06:33):
That sounds terrifying.

Brian (01:06:35):
Yeah, I would be barking.

Kathy (01:06:36):
It is Halloween. So

Marcus (01:06:38):
True.

Brian (01:06:39):
So to underscore that as a person who is not on Do the Woo, who does not represent Do the Woo, but who enjoys Do the Woo. And yeah, you learn a lot of stuff by listening to those episodes or by showing up and participating in those episodes depending on who you are. Even I consider myself fairly well connected in the WooCommerce space and I frequently discover new things, courtesy of them coming across on Do The Woo and I would’ve otherwise not heard of them. We’re going to get very quiet starting next week on our social accounts, but you can nevertheless follow us to be informed of future upcoming things. And our handle is sesh pretty much everywhere that we’ve secured one. Rather, it is everywhere we’ve secured one. We are on most of the platforms. I’d also love it if you talk about how great this is, so I can grab those testimonials and put them on the homepage to show off for future years selfishly.

(01:07:36):
But altruistically, I want you to do that so more people can find it and register and watch the stuff while I can afford to make it available for free. I should also say thank you for attending today. Thank you to everyone who spoke. Thank you to all of our sponsors for enabling this event. Our sashes winners are going to get a physical award. You’ll have to use your imagination. I don’t have one. In addition to getting a nice digital badge, should they choose to put that on display somewhere and mind size helped make all of this possible. And then finally, I think I should say thank you to each of our sponsors really quickly. In turn, there are 14 of them this year, and without them, the event wouldn’t exist. So thank you to ActiveCampaign, Amazon Pay, Avalara, Bluehost, GoDaddy in motion hosting Klaviyo mind size, my works, nexus ShipStation, tour, mageddon, WooCommerce, and WP Sessions.

(01:08:33):
Thank you to all of you for making this possible. And then I should tell you, this is the end of this year’s broadcast, but it is not the end of esh, and we will indeed see you next year kicking off the second Tuesday in October. Join our mailing list so that you can be informed of all of those announcements, follows on social, Marcus helpfully put together a handy list of all of the speakers who are on Twitter so you can follow that. I’ll make sure we get that linked in Slack. Again, I think you already shared it. We’ll share it against you. Don’t have to scroll back too far to find it. Kathy, Marcus, thank you for joining me today. Now I’m going to go and sleep for days and days and days. So have an awesome, amazing rest of your day and week.