Rhyw unrhyw pethau. Thank you very much, it's from me. Dwi'n ryw i'ch gwaith, I'm Rhyw. I'm here today, as Ben said, to give a developer's guide to working with marketing teams. So as a very brief introduction, as Ben did so with Wonderfully, I started with WordPress in 2016, I then worked as a search engine optimiser slash WordPress developer for an agency based in North Wales until 2010. I then moved to Manchester in 2010ser sydd yn rhoi ddinshwm ar y cyfriddfa digon yw. Mae'r gyrdd yma i waith i gyrddwch ddinshwm yn cyfriddfa sydd wedi'i'r ddim yn y cyfriddfa? Fydda'r cyfriddfa yn cyfriddfa yn 2012 a ddim yn flynyddio o'u ranmagunol yw y byddai chi. Yw ddim wedi bod gennych? Dwy, y dyma efallai fel ydych yn eithaf i'r cyfriddfa cyfriddfa, yn ei ddatblygiad ar y cyfriddfa cyfriddfa cyfriddfa, yn ei wnaeth ei wneud ar ymargrifennu'n ymdeithas. There's like a few big conferences, a Brighton SEO next month. I go to a few marketing conferences and I go there. I start speaking to people and they look at me like how the aliens look at the claw in the original toy story because it's all like, ooh, like that, it's really, really good.  They go, that's really, really good. Eventually we start a conversation A ganddech chi'n mynd i chi gael yw ychydig yn gweithio fyddechrau'r ffordd gyda'r rhagor Cynnydd ar gwrs am y drafod o'r lluniau'r cyfrifiadau Ac yn dweud, rydyn ni'n dyfodol yn gweithio'r gweithio'n gweithio'r gwrs Ac yn y ffordd mae'n tynnu'r eich defnyddio'r ffordd ac yn yr ysgafod Oni, ac mae'n hynny'n ddodol yn gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r ffordd neu'r gweithio'r cyfrifiadau .. acceptable communication. By the end of the discussion you'll be able to work on a team... ..and achieve amazing things like what Wales did in 2016.  Right. So why should you do it? If you get them on your side, they're great people to know. They help a lot. They're a great source of inspiration and ideas. You'll hear all over this weekend great talks from developers. Felly, gallwn ychydig yn cyniu i flynydd y cyffredin sydd gyda cyfansiol gyda newydd. Roedd ylchydig y mae'r cyfansiol yma ar bobl yw'n amlwhau ar gael i chyfo 22 yn gweithio. Ac initiatives gweithio cyffredin o phonellu. Zodd, gallwn hynny'n hynny'n lleol gweithio ar gael y gyffredin o'r cyffredin neu'r cyffredin o fwy modd ar y cyffredin, bod gennych chi'n gwaith gael gael i'r cyffredin, ac mae'n gweithio gweithio, wrth gwrs, bobl o'r cyffredin, Chadwg, yn eich symud. Mae cefnod o dfodol yn y ddarparu. Mae o'r dweud ar ei fudgol i hyn. Yn gwrs, mae'n ddiddordeb yn ddiddor mae'n ddiddordeb yn mwy bwysig a'u ardent. Mae'r ddiddor yn ei ddiddor bod ddarparu yn eich ddiddor, yn eich ddiddor sy'n ddiddor yn ddiddor fyadh am ddael. Felly mae'n defnyddio'n ddiddor. Mae'n annod agorodd. Mae'n ddiddor angen i gyllewd. Mae'n ddiddor i'r ddiddor. ond y gallu rhai'r cyffredin, maen nhw'n bwysig i'r cymryd ddweud. I'n gweithio'r yw'r gweithio'r cyffredin. Ymhwytaeth gyda'r gyllid yn gyhoedd. A yna ar gyfer y dyfodol? Y dyfodol yr dyfodol ar gyfer YKPI, a mae'r YKPI yw gwneud amgylcheddau. Ysbryd ymgyrch yn ymgyrch, mae ydych yn cyffredin, this is what it is judged on. So to judge the success or the failure of a marketing strategy is those KPIs. Now, there are usually things like sales increase, traffic increase, rankings improving, they're not things, I love Yoast for loads, it's not things like the traffic light in Yoast. That is a really, really good indicator, but it's generally not in marketing strategies. Find out which ones you can control of the KPIs and see if you can assist any. Now they'll generally fall into strategies that are on-page changes. So three examples, conversion rates, so any improvements to the user experience to make your conversion easier. Rankings, you may not think rankings, but Google has said that rankings can be improved with improving the speed of the site. So if you improve the speed of the site, you may be able to improve rankings. It's not guaranteed, but you can do. Click-through rates, so this is basically people clicking on the site through Google. Things like improving the site architecture, make sure the right keywords are ranking for the right pages are ranking for the right keywords. That can really help in search engines. Now the problem is you won't be able to control all of it. So for example, conversion rates, if the marketing agency will do a poor pay-per-click campaign, conversion rate will tank, if the marketing team builds really dodgy links, the rankings will drop and the click-through rate if the marketing team prioritises the incorrect page. So I guess what I'm trying to say is be aware of them, but don't be judged. Usually when you first get to work with a marketing agency, you get what is known as the list. The list is usually produced at the beginning of the project. Everybody is friends with each other. Everybody is really, really happy. We've got this great team together and the marketing team will go off and they'll produce this list of everything that's wrong in this website that you've probably built and they just pick through it and decided that there are lots of problems and they used to deal with such a fym yn vigour and it's really, really happy and it's really, really excited and then you get it and then go, okay, because it's usually quite long and it's usually quite detailed. Now, what you need to do if you get the list is ask for it to be prioritised and usually they'll go away and they're really, really nice and they prioritise it for you. Sometimes they'll go, oh, all of this priority, which is not great because if everything is a priority, nothing is a priority. So you may have to prioritise it for them. So to do that, you refer back to those three letters that I was talking about, KPIs. So at this point, it's very useful to get access to the client's Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools access, to get access to the Google Web... Yeah, you know what I mean. To get access to it because then you can start prioritising for them and making suggestions. So I'm going to use the three examples of KPIs that you can control and some things you can do in Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools. So, for example, to improve conversions, that's better than I thought. If the KPIs don't improve conversions, if you go to Google Analytics and go to behaviour, site content and landing pages, if the marketing agency has goals set up for their clients and they should, you can view conversion rates of landing pages. I don't know if you can see it. It's the top bar. It says, Goal Set One, an e-commerce. I don't know if you see it. I'll share them slides after. If you click on one of those, you can set goals into groups. So, for example, one goal set could be any sort of enquiry, so things like filling out a contact form, clicking on a phone number, things like that. One could be did I sign up to the social? Did I sign up to your Twitter, your Facebook, sign up to your newsletter? And there is also a special one, which is e-commerce, which is how they actually make a sale. So, you can kind of group it by those goals. So, if you click on one of those, you can see how much traffic each page gets, how many sessions they get, and also the conversion rate. So, the conversion rate for this goal set is 2.97. And most of it comes through one or two pages. So, a good idea is to prioritise improving the conversion rate so pages that already have some conversions, but more importantly, a high number of sessions. So, for example, in this example, you can't really see it here, one page has 100% conversion rate, but there's only three visitors to it. So, I'm not probably going to be worried too much about it. The one below, which I haven't actually seen the conversion rate on, but has 210 sessions. So, that would be a good use of my time is to focus on that page. Improving rankings. Similarly, in Google Analytics, look at pages that are getting a lot of traffic, and go to behaviour, side speed and speed suggestions. You can then filter it further. So, for example, you can filter by organic traffic, or, well, you should filter it on organic traffic. So, only traffic that comes from search engines because that's the traffic that is ranking and that's the traffic that matters. You can also filter it by device, so mobile or desktop. And then there's a link for page speed suggestions. If you click on that link, it'll give you some page speed suggestions. Now, I don't like clicking on that link. I prefer to get the URL, which is in the left-hand column, and put it into something like Google Page Speed Tool, or Google Lighthouse, or GT Metrics. But I'm going to talk about it from the Page Speed Tool because Lighthouse is pretty similar. You run Lighthouse locally rather than Page Speed Insight, which runs online because you can do things like throttle traffic. So put the URL of your chosen page into this page, and then click on Analyze. What then happens is it analyzes the page speed, and it will give you some really useful things. First of all, it'll give you a score, which you can't actually see here. Ignore the score. It's at arbitrary number. Look at things like the speed it takes to your time to interactive, which is how long it takes for the user to be able to interact with a set page. But what's really useful is that it will also give you suggestions. In Page Speed now, it gives you things like suggestions focused on WordPress. So, for example, on this page, 2.2 seconds was loading JavaScript and CSS on this page that's not necessarily needed to be loaded. So what is suggested is like saying, right, split the JavaScript and CSS into two separate files. Load the important stuff at the top, load the stuff we don't need until later in the page at the bottom, and here's a list of WordPress plugins that can do it for you. That's really, really useful. Okay, next up, the final one was the click-through rate. In Google Webmaster Tools, this is. Click on Webmaster Tools and Performance. Get a page URL, so any page which has a lot of traffic from Google Analytics. And make sure you filter it by that page. So you only show traffic for said page. And then filter by click-through ratio, ascending. So all these phrases for my page get zero, which is probably a bad example. But these are all pages that go to the home page and see if there's more relevant keyword to rank for said page. So, for example, on my personal site, I have a maintenance package page for WordPress. So update plugins and things like that. When the home page ranks, the click-through ratio from Google drops really, really quickly. If the dedicated page ranks, the click-through ratio increases quite a lot. So see if there's more relevant page to rank for certain keywords. So, for example, this is actually the home page. The second example, WordPress maintenance packages, gets a click-through ratio of zero, and it's to the home page. So the chances are I want to focus on that keyword to go to the proper maintenance package page, so, therefore, it ranks better, and more people will click for it.  It is quite a long process, so you probably only want to do it for a couple of keywords. For example, one of the keywords there, SEO for freelancer Manchester I rank for. Don't care about that, because I don't offer SEO. So don't focus on that, but focus on keywords that you can rank on. If all else fails, estimate time and cost for each task. This is a really, really useful way to kind of focus mines, because once you come to them with a bill, they generally say what's important and what isn't. Right. Number three, soft skills. This is becoming more and more important. So soft skills is the ability to communicate and things like that. Communication speaking to marketers can make the difference between a good experience and a bad experience. So it's a very, very important skill, and it's beginning to get more focus in the WordPress community, which is great, superb. This is something that happened about three, four, five years ago. I used to come to WordPress conferences and WordCamps and Meetups, and somebody would speak to me about SEO, and then somebody else would interject and go, all you need to do is write good content and you will rank. No, no, that's not true. It was really frustrating, because it's almost like saying, if you run really, really fast, you can win the Olympic gold. It's true, you can, but you're kind of missing everything in the middle, so try to avoid saying that. Luckily, this is dying, so it's great. Next up, avoid micromanaging.  Right, micromanaging, this comes in two forms, micromanaging the client and micromanaging yourself. Regarding micromanaging myself, I kind of give like twice daily updates to my clients at the absolute most, or the exception of one client who demands three, but apart from that, everybody else kind of is like twice daily updates, just a, hey, it's lunchtime, here's what I've been doing this morning, or hey, and it's usually something in a Slack message, or something like an email. Micromanaging the client, if something is going to change on the site, make them aware of it as soon as you think it's going to change, don't wait until you actually need it, and, you know, and then you begin chasing every hour and it just becomes really, really frustrating because there's chances are there's nothing they can do. A couple of, well, example recently, we did a non WordPress to WordPress site conversion. As soon as it became obvious that the URL structure had to change, we told the marketing team, because it was just like, this is not going to work within WordPress. I mean, I actually didn't know this, but we were supposed to be changing it anyway. But grateful, because then they could prepare a bunch of reader and go, right, okay, we want this page to go to here, this page to go to here, here's a list, here's a CSV, you can run with it and it's great. I also like saying, right, I need this, it's not a blocker right now, but if you get it sorted, that will be great. That's another thing I kind of say. Ask why and explain why. What do I mean by this? If a request is made that you don't necessarily agree with and it happens, rather than saying no, ask why it needs to be done. Because either one of three things will happen. You can either get some understanding on why it needs to be done, which is great, because then you can, you know, put it in. You can by them explaining why it needs to be done, they may realise it's a good idea. It's not a good idea, so that kind of, you know, it kind of focuses them, actually not really that important. Or they explain why and you still disagree. If that happens, then you explain why it's a bad idea to them. Don't just say computer says no, because it really, really isn't helpful. Generally what's often perceived in our world, outside our world is a 10-minute job, isn't a 10-minute job. And another example I had recently on a project, a client wanted to change all the ID numbers on a WordPress site, like all the post IDs, there were quite a lot of post types and one post type in particular was kind of pushing to like 10,000 or 15,000 and it was just like we kind of want smaller numbers and it's like, actually what do you think maybe a quick job? Actually isn't. We found a solution for that. Next up, don't assume knowledge. I do this talk to marketers, but the other way round. And there's a slide in there where I said the worst three words that a marketer can say to a developer is can you just? The worst three words for a developer to say to a marketer is can't you just? It can be dangerous to assume knowledge. It's a very, very difficult skill and I have been guilty of it. I've been guilty of this this weekend. It just can come across quite frustrating and it comes across as lazy. Now the other side is you over explain things. I kind of think that's a better thing than assuming knowledge because then you just kind of I just find it really frustrating. And everybody's kind of working off different knowledge levels. I've been freelancing for a year. It's going great. I know very little about SSH. Cannot SSH into a server at all. Always get struggling. And I'll admit that right now. An example I gave recently this was for a client and what we were doing was we were creating a new theme for the client but we had to use some theme some few files from the old theme. I sent an email and said can you send over the old theme? They immediately fired back and said can't you just download it from the server? I can. It's a fairly straightforward thing to do. The problem is I didn't have FTP access. I didn't have SSH access. I didn't have any sort of access at all. I also they had this weird kind of get versioning system on the server and so you had to go to a really long folder and it was really, really difficult. What would have been a too many job for them actually turned out to be about two hours for me and it was just really, really hard. Next point is the relationship between the clients, the marketers and developers. Offer to be liaison. This is a win, win, win situation. It's funny because of my last name. If you speak to somebody on behalf of clients, you can help make the relationship better. It benefits you because it saves time. It also makes you a little bit indispensable which is superb because marketing budgets get changed. It benefits the client because things get fixed a bit quicker. It benefits the marketing agency because there's less responsibility for them. Who should you liaise with? Three good examples. Any in-house developers a client may have. Any designers you could be working with on a project because if you're going to be building a theme that somebody else is designing, you kind of want to you want it in a format you can understand so you may want to speak directly to them and hosting companies as well although reputable hosting companies will not speak. You have to go through your clients first of all to make sure that you can speak to them. It may not always be possible this due to NDAs and whatever but if you can it's a good thing to do. Agree to boundaries. Every single project that kind of goes wrong at some point boundaries have been crossed. I worked this isn't a previous job now I worked with a marketing an in-house marketer for a client and literally they would send an email and within 45 minutes I would receive a phone call saying why has this not been done. The problem was we didn't agree to boundaries at the time at the start and as soon as I got the phone call I immediately became defensive and negative because chances are I didn't read the email it's 45 minutes. If you agree to boundaries before working with people then you can kind of not necessarily hide behind them but it puts you less as a defensive and negative point. So I try and I try and try and agree to boundaries beforehand and SLAs and things like that so that's a really good thing to do. Have one point of contact as well. Problem arises with more than one contact on both sides especially if you're following a process for bug reports and things like that. If you have one person who can kind of prioritise it at their end and one person who prioritises it at your end it just makes life a lot easier. Usually if you're a freelancer obviously it'll be yourself but if you're in an agency they'll try and get a project manager involved and the final point is document everything you change. Very important if you document it somewhere even an email or a Git repository as long as you document everything you change it's great. One of the cool things you can also do with Google Analytics is you can annotate in Google Analytics so if you put a new version of a theme up and the rankings tank you can see that this is when it happened kind of thing so you can begin to idea on how to put things right and things like that. Just when things go wrong because everything invariably does.  Use documentation to refer to decisions made and why things are done. When you're writing documentation at the time and if you document things when decisions are made you generally write it in a more neutral more kind of calm language because whatever has gone wrong hasn't gone wrong yet. So if you refer back to the documentation you can kind of go okay this is why it was done and it's not usually and nobody's really blamed for it so it's a really good thing to do. I've hidden behind the agreements at times not always the most intelligent thing but sometimes when things go really really wrong you can kind of go look you know it's the weekend I can't really look at this right now. Not always smart and this is when things begin to go wrong and when things get to the point of you know what this is not going to work it's far better just to come to an agreement for exit if the worst comes to the worst if you come to an agreement for exit then you can kind of say right this is where our agreement ends. The worst thing you can do is to ghost the client and ghost the marketing agency because invariably you'll get an email four or five months down the line asking where you are so don't try and do that if something's not working just come to an agreement for an exit and then go from there. Don't want to end on a sad note so what to do when things go right because projects do go right it's wonderful recommend them if you've been working with an external marketing agency recommend them to people I have three that I will happily recommend if anybody needs a marketing agency to work with. One of which will work with budgets one of which will work with slightly smaller one and a free lancer kind of thing the cool thing about that is if they if everything goes well for you as a developer if you work with the external marketing agency then they'll probably work with you on this project which is great keep an eye on the team wherever they go on LinkedIn especially for team members you enjoy working with because people move on people change jobs they could work in another marketing agency that could be even though it's a different marketing agency to one you recommended if you're working with the same team members that's a superb thing there are a couple of marketers I've worked with in four different jobs that's just the way it is because we just kind of end up in the same place and people recommend each other it's great and if you become really friendly with them ask them for opinions on your own site usually coffee or a beer a lot of marketers like giving their opinions on things usually fill a price of a coffee and a beer which is a lot cheaper than what they usually cost so Diolch yn fawr, thank you very much and I'm happy to take some questions Excellent, so am I on? Hello, good stuff, wonderful talk Rhys so if anyone's got any questions we've got a microphone that's kicking about hands up in the air, there we go just from the back there That's a really good talk so I'm an ex agency project person now marketer and I thought that was like a really interesting insight and one of the things that kind of came up that I was thinking about as I was watching your talk was what can marketers take responsibility for a little bit more because I've been there in agency where they've got developers to do everything like even redirects and can you add a new because we're talking about SEO specifically here can you add a new site map and these are things that with a little bit of training marketers could do potentially right so it's a tricky one so my kind of rule is that anything that is technical I would probably like to do so even things like, I mean redirects are an interesting one because in WordPress you can there are plugins like 301, redirects and things like that I like using them but the problem is for me and again for me I prefer all redirects to be in one place and I usually put them in like hasty access things like that because they're more technical things you can kind of do if you prepare like a redirect file which is just a CSV any competent developer should be able to just turn that into something that can put in a hasty access file anything which is preparing and the other thing is don't leave things open to interpretation I kind of say to clients look send me the URL don't send me go to this page because as a developer I have hopefully quite a lot of clients so anything that you don't leave anything open to chance because if you leave it open to chance things will take longer to get done because I will be an email back and forth or I may do it to the wrong page anything like page titles anything with a WordPress plugin like a WordPress SEO WordPress SEO to a degree probably not redirects but anything you can do to kind of help those kind of things are kind of useful I hope that answers your question Yeah it does thank you Dunder So obviously agencies all have their own project management styles and they all have their own project management tooling and you glitter between the various different companies so presumably you have your own internal project management style and tooling how do you sort of marry the two so that they don't start separating and people think that they're further along in one process because it says so in there The internal ones that I use so my project management is I have Trello boards and things like that What if the client uses that's the one that I will probably focus on The Trello boards are there to kind of manage a day to day and it's I don't I don't want to share that because it works for me and it's kind of complex but it's one of those things that kind of just works so I always try if the client says for example use Asana or use Monday.com I will be using whatever they choose to work on Sometimes there's a separate one between the client and the marketer and the client doesn't know that I'm working on the project at all as a freelancer so there can also be that so whatever either the marketing agency or generally the marketing agency whatever the marketing agency works on that's the one I will be focused on and I have my own internal tools myself Any more questions folks? Well Rhys, that was a wonderful talk please everyone put your hands together for Rhys Wynn Thank you very much


Oh my goodness. What? My baby. See that? Taking pictures and sending them to me. I'm Rick, key silky. Today, a new trailer just dropped last night. What? And I didn't know about it? That's what I get for living in the bathroom. No, it's the new Vicky Khrushal. Oh, the one that he got hurt doing? Maybe, but and Sujit Sarkar, who we love. No, remember he was making a film where he cut his face and got seven stitches or something. I'm not sure if it's this, but this is the teaser for that film. I think that film comes out this month. Cool. October 16th. Hey, cool. Interesting. So maybe we might have a break from horror. But this is, let's see. Is a movie about the person who assassinated O. D. Moudwire? D. Moudwire, who was responsible for the Jallianwala bag massacre. Okay, so it's a movie about the person who assassinated the person responsible for the massacre. Gotcha. Speaking of assassins, did you know that I'm kind of glad his name was escaping me. The guy who shot Ronald Reagan, President Reagan, is out. Is he really? Yep. They let him out, said he was healed.   Well, yeah. Well, Reagan's already dead. That's true.  There's a cool video of Reagan after he was the assassination attempt, right? He's speaking, and while he's at this event speaking, there's a really loud pop. It sounds like a gunshot. Reagan doesn't even flinch. He's talking, it goes like this, and he goes, you missed me. It goes right back to his speech. Everybody goes, yeah. Here we go. Corbin Singh. Well, I wanted to see more than his passport photo. So I'm guessing we're gonna get a trailer here soon. We better, because that doesn't work. Because if it's October, my bet is next week, if it comes out on October 16th, we'll get a trailer in a week. That's like so much. It's so weird, it still boggles my mind that they draw trailers for films like a week before the movie comes out. It still boggles my mind. No, but that teaser was kind of like if you were gonna try a brand new kind of tea, right? And you wanted to get a tease of what the tea is like. You wanna either see it or smell it or just, right? And somebody stands outside the window and holds up the box and goes, hey! And then runs away. I wasn't, but also we don't know much about this story as well. No. Like if it was like- And I still don't. But if it was like a story about the assassination of JFK, we all know almost every single part of that. That's true. That's a good point. And so they probably know, like, oh, I know exactly- That's true. And this was the thing about JFK and you saw his, you know, setting up at a window. Yeah. Grassy Knowles. So Lee Harvey Oswald's passport. Was there somebody in the Grassy Knowles? Yep. There was. Of course there was. That didn't take a rocket scientist. Oh, there's such a good show. James Franco, did you ever watch that one? The James Franco one? 1126, I think, or something like that? No. It was a Hulu mini-series. It was like almost sci-fi retelling of the JFK assassination. Oh, wow. It's really good. No, but I've had a book about the assassination and I've had a conversation, well, let's, yeah, anyway. Read that. Indian Revolutionary, Udum Singh, who's better known for the assassination of Michael Udwar in London, who was behind the Jellian Wallabag massacre in April 13th, 1919. The story sets out, how Udum Singh survived the massacre on day of Bhaisika, Bhaisaki, sorry, I'm mispronouncing that, I'm trying, which killed around 400 people and injured around 1,000 of the Avengers, those who died. Cool. Yeah, that's a great point. I'm sure for those of you who know the story, that would have some level of attention. I'm sure we're gonna get a much more detailed trailer within a week, probably. And it's directed by Surya Sarkar, who is a fantastic director. We know him from Piku, Pink, Vicky Donna, which we haven't seen. What else? He's the director of October. And I think we've seen one other of his, or is it just a bunch of? We've seen some trailers, obviously. Okay. Vicky Donna. Yeah, and when we saw the behind the scenes of Piku, remember he did that behind the scenes of the sequence with the knife in the car? Yeah, so I think it'll be, when directing, it'll be really good, but also having Vicky, which will be wonderful to see him again. Yeah, we love Vicky. He's a fantastic actor. God, I don't recognize a lot of him. Who's Tim Barrington?  Oh, I know him. Yeah. Why do I know him? I don't know. That's what I was pointing out. I know the name. I think he's been like a character actor in a lot. Succession. Anyway. Yeah, I think he's like a small, he's been working for a long time, I think. He's one of those, but if it's about the British and something I like, yeah, the British role, then it's gonna have a lot of white actors. Hopefully that won't, hopefully they're trained professionals. Not just some white guy on the corner, but that'll be very exciting to see Vicky Krushal and another Sujit film. So, let us know what we need to know without spoiling anything. Yes, if you know the story, don't tell us the story. Let the movie tell the story. Because all of you probably know this story already. It is. We don't. Is this the massacre that happened in Amritsar? Or is that a different one? I, no, I think that's a different one. Because there's been a couple. Yeah. I think that's a different one. That's a different one. I think so. Well, let us know what we need to know without spoiling anything that we're gonna need in the film and hopefully we'll get a trailer here soon. That's it. Have a good day. Josh!


Hello, in this presentation, we're going to talk about reversing journal entries as they are related to accrued revenue. When considering reversing journal entries, we're talking about those journal entries made after the financial statements have been generated after the adjusting process has been done. Remember that the adjusting process happens after all the normal transactions for the month have happened. Then at the end of the month, we have that adjusting process, all journal entries being made as of the same date as of the end of the month in order to make the financial statements correct so that the financial statements can be made as of that point in time, in this case the end of the year being 1231, that the cutoff date, that the point in time that we make the financial statements. Then we want to consider if we want to use reversing journal entries, those will be made the day after the financial statements have been generated in order to make those adjustments to some of the adjusting journal entries that may need some adjustment in order to make our normal accounting process work. So this time we're going to talk about those reversing entries related to accrued revenue and why we might want to use them within our accounting process. We have an example here where we have work was done, that the business has done, we'd have done work on 1215 of X1. We didn't invoice the work until 115 of X2 in the next year. So note that we have crossed over the cutoff date, the date of the financial statements between the time the work was done and the invoice was generated. This may happen because just as a normal part of the accounting process, because we did the work here, maybe we had to bill the client, see how much time was spent. So it may be natural that we don't have the bill go out till a later time, but under the revenue recognition principle, we would like this work, we need this work, to be recorded prior to the date of the financial statements. It should be recorded as of the date the work was done as of 1215. It was not recorded during the system until 115. Therefore the adjusting journal entry would bring this back to this point in time, back to the date of the financial statements. Note it does not make it completely correct, it doesn't take it back to this point in time, the point in time the revenue was earned. Why? Because we don't need to do that really, to make the financial statements right. If we pull it back to the date of the financial statements, then we are correct as of the date of the financial statements. That's the goal of the adjusting process and the reason all the journal entries will be made as of 1231. So here is that adjusting journal entry, we are going to debit accounts receivable and credit revenue. And it does this to our accounts, accounts receivable is going to go up by the amount of this journal entry and revenue will go up. It looks just like a normal journal entry, it is just a normal journal entry that happens during the accounting process whenever we do work on account receiving receivable and increasing revenue. The only difference here being the reason it needed this adjustment is that the work was done before the invoice was sent out and it just so happened that surpassed the cutoff date. The cutoff date landed in the middle and therefore we needed to pull this transaction back recording the revenue in the time period that the financial statements were covering. Then if we take a look at the invoice date, we also note that we have this same transaction still happening because when we pulled the transaction back in the adjusting process, we did not delete this transaction that happened at the date of the invoice. Therefore at this point in time, we also recorded accounts receivable increasing accounts receivable and we had the revenue increasing at this point in time. Therefore as of 115, this same journal entry has been entered two times due to the adjusting process due to making our financial statements right as of 1231. How can we deal with this? One you might think well we should be deleting this journal entry happening on 115 because it really should have happened back here on 1215. And that would be a reasonable assumption however we don't typically want to do that because this is actually even though it happened at a later point in time in terms of when the date was entered into the system, it actually happened at an earlier point in time in terms of when the actual transaction was entered into the system. So it was this transaction was entered into the system with a date of 1231 but it actually happened it was entered into the system at a later date. And we don't normally want to delete the invoice. One reason is because we want the paper trail and we almost never delete anything so that we have that audit trail. Another reason is because this journal entry here is typically more of a bare bones journal entry just a journal entry whereas this often has more of the detail in terms of the full invoice backing up the journal entry that gives possibly more detail in terms of a subsidiary ledger and what not. Therefore typically do not want to delete this entry. We could also have a reversing entry basically as of this date or we can just do a normal reversing entry process and just put that in as a normal part of the system as we basically have with the adjusting process. So at this point in time here's our problem with the adjusting journal entry and this is the tension that happens between the adjusting journal entries and the normal accounting processes these types of things can happen and we have to put together a system to deal with them and that would be that the adjusting journal entry created this journal entry being pulled back and recorded as of the date of 1231. It's also being recorded as of the date of 115. Neither of these are necessarily wrong. Neither of the accounting department or the adjusting department did something necessarily wrong. They both did what they had to do in terms of their system but we need to figure out how we're going to adjust this. Then if we have the reversing journal entry note the date of the reversing journal entry as of 11X1. So we're just going to do the exact opposite. We're going to debit the revenue, decreasing the revenue and credit accounts receivable. So what happened is we put it into account receivable. We increased revenue as of 1231 made the financial statements with that and then right after that the day after the financial statements are generated we are then going to do this just reverse it out reduce the revenue reduce the accounts receivable the day after. That will be a good system because it will reverse what we did as of 1231 and get it back to the point in time that the books were at almost. The problem with that however is that the revenue should look funny we almost never will debit a revenue account because revenue accounts only go up in the credit direction. So as of the first day of the new year in this case we have a debit in revenue which is really weird that would be negative revenue that doesn't make any sense. However it will make sense at the point in time of 115 the point in time that the other journal entry was made because the journal entry was debuting the accounts receivable and crediting revenue and therefore this will then reverse it out. That journal entry will reverse out and pull the amount back out bringing us back down to zero those two amounts will net out as of the date of the invoice until that invoice happens it's going to be out of balance the thing will not look correct and that's just the price we pay just like it's the price we pay when we do the adjusting journal entry process and we make the adjustment as of 1231 and ignore the fact that it's not quite correct as of the day before 1231 or the day before that we're making it right as of the financial statement dates. This will have its problems between in this case January 1st to January 15th we're just going to recognize that there is a problem there and note that it will be correct as of the date of January 15th and that will make it so that our adjusting department and reversing department can do their jobs have a simple system that we can put in place to reverse this journal entry so that both of those departments don't have to do anything too different


Democratic Party Corcos in Adamawa State House of Assembly has passed Board of Confidence on Governor Amadu Umar of Interest Administration for various transmission projects executed in three years. The lawmakers say they were impressed with giant strides of Interest Administration citing payment of wayek and neko fees and feeding of school children aside numerous capital projects executed across the state. The Speaker, Honourable Amino Iye Abbas, said the governor achieved achievement compelled the 14 PDP members in this House to pledge a buying nomination and expression of interest forms of the PDP for a governor of Interest Administration. The Speaker of the Assembly, while briefing newsmen in his office, said the members have contributed 21 million Naira to purchase the form for governor of Interest Administration. I'll mention for you that people are not seeing paying for the school fees while feeding students. These are things that are mostly direct, the masks are direct. Not everybody comes to Yola, not everybody applies on the road to their construction, but every citizen of Adamawa State benefits from the school fees, the payment for the lack of payment of school fees and the feeding of their own works in schools. I mean this is a very big tax of which the State Assembly is trying to come up with a law. At the same time without a number. Then we come up with a law that after this administration it will become mandatory for every governor comes to pay for students who are in school fees and they pay for their feeding or whatever in the schools. We are coming up with a law and we come out with a law and this will be the best thing that would be Adamawa State people. Members of the People's Emergency Party construction PDP in the House have now contributed the sum of 21 million there for the purchase of the special tickets and the mention for its excellence in the executive board of Adamawa State.


Today we're going to have Katherine Robson speak about how to handle a usability PR crisis. I'm very excited about this. Thank you, Beverly. Hi, everybody. I'm Katherine Robson. I'm going to share my slides, and we're going to hope that works well. Really just do an entire screen share. Okay. Can we just confirm that we see the slides? Beverly? Yes, we can see you. Okay. Thank you. All right. So today we're going to be talking about how to handle a usability PR crisis. I have oriented this talk in a way that is speaking to sort of a UX leader or UX designer, but I think it can apply to anybody that's handling one of these situations. So if you just kind of take a kind of UX person out of that and think of it from a lead developer's perspective or anybody else that is trying to handle this situation, I think it can apply well across the board. My name is Katherine Robson. I am a user experience design manager at Red Hat. I have over 15 years of experience in user experience design. I started as a designer, became a lead, and have managed teams for quite a while now. Right now, I'm managing a team of 33 designers, developers, and researchers on developer experiences for Red Hat. So really enjoy that job and that position. And I've had the opportunity to have a lot of great projects, but I've also had the opportunity to deal with a type of PR crisis during my time. And so we'll talk about that as part of this discussion. Alright, so first of all, what is a usability PR crisis? Let's define what this looks like. There are many different types of crises that can happen. I think probably what most people go to immediately is like the full meltdown, which nobody wants to be in the full meltdown emergency PR crisis situation. And you know, one that comes to mind is Facebook privacy. You know, this obviously was very much in the public eye. It was a huge PR crisis. There's a lot of attention on Facebook overall about how they were handling this and how they needed to improve users' ability to control their own data and their own privacy. So this is sort of a worst case scenario of a PR crisis. And hopefully nobody ever has to go through one of these. I can't imagine the pressure that is involved if you're going through one of these. But there are a lot of other PR crises that might be a little bit more subtle that occur regularly. So one of them is a social media emergency. This one could be that you have a user that is talking about your product or service, and they're talking about a negative experience with that product or service. And if this gets a lot of attention, a lot of likes, that can be pretty damaging to your brand. The other thing that can happen is with social media influencers, you know, if you have an influencer that is talking negatively about your brand, that can really be quite damaging pretty quickly. Another type of PR crisis that can happen is a bad release crisis. And Target had one of these a few years ago. They released a new version of their website right before the primary shopping season of the year. And they also did it right as they were launching a new brand onto the Target platform. And so there were a lot of eyes on their experience at that point in time. And they put out a new release with a new look and feel that wasn't stable. And so users immediately were having negative reactions because they couldn't get anything done. They were failing their tasks and they were posting about it. So you don't, you know, this is a kind of the release caused this is what happened. And then another release mistake that I've seen happen pretty often is that teams get excited about, you know, taking their, their product or service from what it's running on today and adopting modern technology moving it forward into the future. But as part of doing that, you're, you're taking a legacy system with a lot of different capabilities. And often you can't release it again on a new technology with all the same capabilities. So you've kind of brought down the amount of capability that your product has and you're, you're expecting to expand that back to what it used to be over time. The problem here can be that in that first MVP release, you didn't actually meet the primary use cases that your users really needed. And so they're now not really happy with the end result because you are not meeting their core needs in the offering that you gave them, even though it's now on better and newer technology.  I would say this is the most common kind of crisis that I have experienced as a user experience professional. And you know, this, this happens more often than I like to say, and it has happened at Red Hat. It's happened at other companies that I've worked at. And thankfully it's internal. So you're not in the public eye dealing with this. It's just, you know, kind of internally, there's a little bit of chaos maybe and you're trying to like get things moving faster because there's a lot of attention on it. So this, what does this look like? Usually this looks like a CEO or other high level executive tries to use your product. Something isn't working the way they expect. And they kind of raised that red flag across the company and say, Hey, I just tried this, what's happening? Why is this not working? And this happened at Red Hat. We had several different products that should have worked together quite seamlessly. Unfortunately, they were not working together as seamlessly as they should have because of some architectural differences that were underlying them. And because of that, you know, our executive tried them, couldn't get them working together, and came back to, you know, us as a company engineering team and UX team and said, what's going on? Like this is not working and this is not what we should be sending out to our customers. So this is probably the best kind of crisis because it's generated internally. It's going to make a difference, but you don't have to worry about what's going on outside of the company at the same time. So the next thing I'm going to move on to is talking about how do you actually handle this usability crisis. But before I move on, I'll take a break here to see if there's any questions about the types of crises that I talked about. We don't have any questions so far. All right. Okay. So you're here. There's usability crisis. What do you do? The first thing you should do is to reframe. As usability professionals, often we are already identifying a lot of the problems in the product usability and product releases that we are working on. So we might have, you know, a list of situations where we feel like, hey, you know, we already knew that this wasn't stable. We already knew that this user journey was a little risky or not ideal. We already knew that the design was a little disjoint between one system to another. So we might have a list of things that we feel like we have maybe already raised the flag about to the company. We've already tried to speak our two cents about and say that we weren't comfortable with as part of a release. And so it's very easy at this point in time to go into victim mode and to feel like, you know, I told you so. I told you so. We knew there was problems and now here we are. But that's not the right place to be. That's not where you want to be to handle this PR crisis. So as quickly as possible, you want to let the past go and move from being that victim to being a leader. This is your opportunity to really think about how does the user experience practice in your company advance and how can you show what your team can do right now in this crisis and what it can do in the future to prevent future ones. Once you've been able to change your own mindset and really understand that this is a great opportunity, you also need to pass that new mindset onto your team. You need to invigorate your team and make sure that they understand that this is a great opportunity for us to bring user experience practices into the company, really showcase what our teams can do and what design impact can have on product development when we're doing it the right way. At the same time, we are in a crisis. So it's going to be hard to work right now. So you need to prepare your team for the fact that we're going to go, you know, nose to the groundstone. We're really going to be working hard for a little bit of time here to get through this crisis. But on the other side of it, this is going to be a huge opportunity and open doors for us in a new way. So once you have your mindset and you've reframed your ability to look at the situation, you then want to move on to evaluating. As you evaluate, you really want to identify what the core issue is. It's so easy. Like I said, we all have this list of things in our mind. We might have a whole list of Jira's or whatever of abusability issues that we know about on the product. But we need to step away from all of that data that we have for a moment and really look at this from the PR crisis point of view. What was that user experiencing? What was their core issue? And how do we address that problem? And so identifying the core issue could look like a lot of different things. If your user, if you're looking from the user's viewpoint, it might be that you actually have the capability that they're complaining about or that they've raised as a problem. But they weren't able to find it. So you have a discoverability issue. It might be that it's not something that the UX team or the designers can fix alone. It might be that there's a performance issue or a stability issue with the product. And you need to assemble really a whole team of people with different expertise around the company to address what core issue is. The first thing is making sure you really know what is going to fix this PR crisis and what's at the core of what created this problem. Once you understand what that core piece is, then you can say, okay, how do I take this company out of the immediate crisis they are in and move them into a better place as quickly as possible? You need to recognize that executives, especially in an external PR crisis, executives, product donors, they're having a big spotlight shown on them right now. And it's not a pleasant one. And so you want to be their ally and get them out of that spotlight as quickly as possible. But also recognize that this is your opportunity to really stand up for the right thing as far as user experience goes. So help them identify how they're going to get out of that spotlight as quickly as possible. And then how are you going to help them into the future continue to have great usability so they don't run into this problem again? And how are you going to do that? Well, we want to build a plan. The first part of your plan should be your immediate response plan. Like we're just talking about, there's a spotlight. And that spotlight is bright and not very pleasant. So your immediate response plan is all about how to get out of that spotlight and how to be able to have a very stable, reliable response to the current situation. You don't want a band-aid response because the worst possible thing that you could do at this point in time is band-aid the problem and it comes back a week later. That is going to be worse on your brand than if it takes you a little bit longer to get a fix done. But you fix it the right way. So you really want to say what is the medium viable product of what we need to do to have an immediate response plan that fixes the core problem in the right way for moving forward. But fixing the core problem might mean that you're fixing just one piece of a larger puzzle. And so you also want to recognize that once we get out of that spotlight and we fix that one little piece, all of these other problems potentially that are kind of around the parameter of this PR crisis that could lead to your next one. And so you want to build a roadmap that's going to allow you to make sure that you start fixing all of those other areas so that we don't fall into the situation again. The last thing you're going to want to do is to communicate very clearly during this process. The first question is should we release anything publicly? And answering this question is not simple and it's situational. So it's going to really depend on exactly what's happening for you. My best advice is to involve your marketing and PR teams because they're experts at this domain. So involve them, have the conversation, think through thoroughly what is happening and whether it's something that you can address publicly in the right way or if making a public statement is just going to add fuel to the fire, there might be still be doubt in the company or doubt in the brand and that's just going to create more negative attention and kind of like draw out the negative attention cycle. So we don't want to do that if that's the path that your team is thinking it's going to go. Alternatively, if you have something that you can really definitively say you're going to do in response to this PR crisis and you can show good merit on the way to that path already, then it might be viable to release something publicly to talk about what you're doing, what you've already done, what you're going to do and what's your full plan in the future and really put users' minds at ease that you're listening to them and that you're taking real action from the situation. Regardless of whether you release something publicly, an internal communication plan is going to be key. Talking internally, you're going to want to capture a couple of different internal stakeholders. The first set of stakeholders, if you are in an external PR crisis, are people that do have connection external from the company. So they are speaking with customers, they're speaking, you know, maybe on social media or other platforms, they have external communication paths. You want to make sure that they all have a common message and they all know how to address the problem because especially in a public PR crisis, other people are going to be asking questions about it. So you need to have a consistent internal response plan in place so that everybody has the same messaging to use when they're meeting with customers or in these situations. The second group of people is your stakeholders who are in the spotlight, your executives, your leaders, your product owners, anybody else that is responsible at the end of the day for the product, the company, the brand, the platform. This set of stakeholders, you want to make sure that you are communicating very clearly with them what that immediate response plan is that you're putting into place and then what that roadmap is that's going to help in the long run. This is the absolute best time to make big UX requests. It doesn't initially feel like that because you feel like I just have to address their immediate problem. We'll worry about how to fix the fact that we had these UX mistakes in the product process later once we're out of the situation. But the reality is right now they are feeling the pain of the decisions that were made in those product development processes up to this point and it's fresh. It's something that they're thinking about. So this is the best time to make those big asks about how to change UX processes, UX resourcing, future UX planning, et cetera. And you don't need all the answers to that but you need to make it clear that you have that roadmap and you have expectations around what you need in order to make this better in the future. And then the last group that you want to make sure you're communicating internally to is the teams that are going to help you execute on this immediate response plan and also the roadmap overall. Everybody should understand how their role fits into this roadmap and what they can do to support the current problem. So we want to make sure that we bring all the teams together that are going to be part of that immediate response plan and communicate what they should be doing and how they should be executing and what their deadlines are to meet that plan. And then we should be also giving them a glimpse into the roadmap and an idea of where we're headed in the future so that they understand the longer-term plan and how to proceed in the future to make sure that we are executing in a new way and building out all of those extra pieces we talked about that might need to be fixed around that core problem. Once the PR crisis is over, you've gotten out of it, everybody's out of the spotlight, people are breathing a big sigh of relief, we've made it. You're not done. You now have that continued execution on that roadmap and you have the opportunity now to continue a line of communication with those high-level stakeholders that you might not have talked to you on a regular basis before. And this is, I think, one of the biggest opportunities that these PR crises bring for UX professionals. Often it can be hard for UX professionals to make inroads and having time with executives and making sure that their point of view in the product development process is heard. And this is a door opening for you. This is an opportunity to say, hey, we're here. We're here to support this crisis. We're doing everything we can to make sure that we get you out of the spotlight. But we want to continue the conversation long term. We want to talk about how UX can play a big part of your future in a new way so that we don't do this again. And so as you execute on that roadmap, you want to make sure that you're setting up milestones where you can come back to those executives, show progress, and continue the conversation about how UX improvement happens at your company. So in summary, if you're in a usability emergency, you should reframe. You want to change that mindset as quickly as possible from victim to leader and bring your team with you. Then you want to move on to evaluate and understand that core problem, really know how you're going to get those stakeholders out of that spotlight as quickly as possible. What is the thing that's going to really make that happen? And how are we going to do it in a way that ensures it's done right and the same problem won't occur again and cause damage to your brand? Then we're going to build that immediate response plan and start executing as quickly as possible on that plan to get those stakeholders out of that spotlight. And also make sure that we're building that full roadmap so that we're not just, you know, responding to this situation, but we're building a better platform for our future. And last but not least, we're going to communicate about all of these pieces as much as possible. We might choose to communicate externally, we might not depending on the situation, but we're definitely going to communicate internally and make sure that we continue that communication with our internal stakeholders over time after this crisis ends. And that's what I had to share today. So thank you for your time. And I'm happy to take any questions. I'm going to stop sharing the slide deck so that I can actually see the other tool here. All right, let's see. Sally, so refreshing to see the outdoors. Yes, I'm in a beautiful spot here looking over a lake and can be happier. And Radick, how often do you deal with a big crisis? You know, Facebook's scale full meltdown I have never dealt with. And I hope in my career I never have to deal with that. Like I said, I can't even imagine the amount of pressure that that would put on a person on a team. That's really tough. So I don't think we have those like full meltdown crises often, but they happen, obviously. I think what's more common is, like I said, definitely the internal crisis. And those can be rather big depending on the company and the culture and how that comes down. Here at Red Hat, I think we have a very positive good culture. So the crisis we went through was not targeted at a person or a team. It was much more of a, whoa, we got to this place. This isn't great. Let's fix it. Let's put some focus on this and build a plan and see if we can really fix it. And that's, I think, the best case scenario where everybody's coming at the problem as a combined effort and really trying to solve it together and recognizing that we're in a place, this isn't the greatest, but we found it. We found our issues. Let's fix them. Social media problems are becoming more and more common. And so I think we do see those. Those can, again, depending on the culture, the company culture, I think those can arrange from glitches or actually just opportunities to reach out to users and build a relationship and then those fences. And it's not a big crisis at all, too serious crisis because there's no real way of handling it in the company. And there's no good communication mechanisms to address users' problems at the small scale before they turn into big-scale problems. I hope that answers that question. If I went around your question, feel free to ask it a new way and I'll try again. And how do you best communicate when you truly can't give a good answer with the information you presently have? Beverly, do you mean communicate externally to users? Okay. Yeah, so this gets back to that, like, when do we speak externally? And how do we speak externally? The tone can mean a lot as well. And recognizing what your brand value and stances already can make a big influence on this as well. So Facebook is an easy example, so I'm going to take them for a minute. Let's say Facebook had a privacy crisis. They then post to their users on feeds, hey, we're going to make some updates to our privacy. We've heard you. Well, unfortunately, some people might take that in a positive light and some people might really not take that in a very positive light because the brand reputation for protecting my data has already been so destroyed at that point that it just sounds like lip service. And so, without telling me something real about how you're going to change my privacy settings, I don't feel like I trust anything that you're telling me in the first place. So I think that really gets into, like, understanding when to communicate to your users. Do you need to just take the heat for a little while and go get some stuff done while that heat comes in, and then come back when you have something to show for it and you really have information on the real answers? Or should you, you know, do you have a brand reputation that's good enough that you can respond to that user without any real kind of data or good information behind it and just say, hey, we've heard you, we're so sorry this happened to you. We're going to, we're looking at it right now and we'll come back soon with some answers. And so that's really going to depend on, on your brand reputation. And Rod, do you help with communication for the big security issues? Meltdown, help bleed, et cetera. I guess the way we talk about Red Hat customers about this is important and we need some consistency in the messaging. That's a great question. No, I have not, the UX team has not been involved in security issues and the PR communication for those. I would absolutely be interested in talking with the, the marketing and PR teams about how that is handled and how we talk about those. So I actually might follow up after this, this talk and see if I can find the right context to have that conversation because I think that would be a really interesting use case of, yeah, we had a security issue at the end of the day. That is, you know, security is part of your experience with our products. How do we handle those and how do we make sure that users are getting what they need? I think the good news is that open source and Red Hat, you know, in general is well known for being very open and transparent with these security issues. And so, like I was just talking about brand reputation, Red Hat has built a brand reputation where we can go out and talk about these very openly and honestly and transparently and give users tools as quickly as possible to do something about those security issues. And we make it through those crisis crises pretty smoothly because of how we handle those situations. So I think that's actually a really great example of company reputation tied into crises and how we handle them. All right. Any other questions? All right. Well, thank you everybody for coming to my session. Really enjoyed putting together the information for this. If you want to reach out to me anytime afterwards, feel free to. My contact information is crobsonatredhat.com. Thanks, Catherine.


Today we know that the universe was a joint entity and the big bank separated everything, but Prophet Muhammad told us this 1400 years ago and being so correct would definitely not be but a higher power. As a former atheist, I have become a much better person than I was. I believed in capital punishment for murderers, but Islam put me that we are all sinners and we have no right to judge people and the best judge is only God. His entire case is that Muhammad knew things when he didn't know them, that he couldn't have known without God, which hasn't been demonstrated, that he's personally a better person with regard to capital punishment. I'm thrilled and happy, but that doesn't tell us anything at all about whether or not Islam is true. That which can be asserted without evidence can be rejected without evidence and no, it's not just the case that can only come from God.