So it is Tuesday, March 15th, March. It is the Senate government operations and we have, we are here. And Senator Ron Hinsdale is with us in spirit and kind of as an apparition up there is that the appropriate word, apparition hologram hologram. Yeah. Thank you.   You are you're about three times the size you are when you're in the committee because you're in the full screen. So what we're going to do is we're going to start with age 628, which is an act relating to amending a birth certificate to reflect gender identity. We have Tucker, who is going to do a walkthrough of the bill itself, but I'd like to defer to Representative Taylor small, who is both the reporter and the sponsor of the bill and to, to give us some context and why this is important. So I don't know that I'm Jenette White. I don't know if you know all of us, but I'm Jenette White from Wyndham County, Wyndham District. I know you. We're all from the Ruffland District. Allison Parks and Windsor District. Okay, great. Thank you. And Gail, you know Gail. Great. And that's Senator Ron Hinsdale up there from Chittenden, who I'm sure you know, since you're from Chittenden. This is the one I first went really out to them Taylor. It's a wedding. Oh, okay. All right. Well, there you are. Okay, so do you want to give us some context for this. Absolutely. And thank you so much for having me here today. I'm going to go back to Taylor small for the record. And age six 28 actually came from a constituent request, a resident of Vermont who moved to Oregon, and was looking to amend their passport to have a gender X marker. And in the process, they realized that they actually need to amend their birth certificate to have a same gender marker on there to be able to move through the federal process. And when they made the Department of Health, they said, we actually don't have rules in place to be able to do this. And then when they started to do the rulemaking process on adding a gender X marker, they realized that if they added gender X marker through rules, that it would create this inequity in the system where someone had a binary transition of M to F male to female, or male birth certificate. It's a more cumbersome process with proving medical interventions and having letters and going before the court to be able to have that change be made. Along of course with a fee that comes along with that, but that it would be a simple attestation process for a gender X marker. In collaboration with the legislative council legal advisor for the Department of Health. We worked in giving that rulemaking authority to the department to be able to make sure that there weren't inequities in the system and that it was the same process to move to a gender X marker, as it would be for a binary transition as well. So if you look at the bill itself. As you all know very well, our legislative intent and purpose is really important when it comes to the rulemaking process. And so looking at making this a simple and equitable system through means of self attestation as the main piece in the first part. So what I'll bring your attention to our one recognizing that the rulemaking process that we're looking to have in place is that simple attestation process with consideration for a third gender X marker. We're not limiting the department by any means of making a specific ask that there are at least three gender markers that are available for birth certificates. And also we give them the opportunity to add gender pronouns. It's not something that we are asking the department to do but are giving them the leeway to do so if they see it as important. The other piece addresses the emergency rulemaking authority, really recognizing that once the statute is removed, there will be no processes in place for someone to be able to amend their birth certificate. So the emergency rulemaking authority so that they're able to put these new rules in place for the simple attestation process. But as a reminder, in the background as the emergency rules are in place, the full rulemaking process is still happening, and will happen with both public participation and consideration from Altar. Okay, the legislative committee and the straight up rules. And really the whole peer is making it easier for trans and non-binary folks here in the state of Vermont to be able to amend their birth certificate. I think a really powerful piece of testimony that we received was one from the Department of Health recognizing that when we made the change for drivers licenses to be able to have a simple process to use a gender X marker. We now have about 2,000 Vermonters who have now made the switch on their driver's license without any kind of outreach campaign. About 2,000 Vermonters have moved to a gender X marker on their license. One piece was hearing from youth from outright Vermont who really said that identity validation is like saving and being able to have their identity validated on vital records meant the world to them to have it in place. And that is really my testimony on age 628 and open to any questions that you may have. Yeah, I do. I don't know how their committee members do that.  You know that I've done that in the past, haven't I. Yes, Taylor was part of was with me when I did that. But anyway, for every day. Sorry. So the three identity would be M F X. Yeah, is that what it would be so anybody who doesn't want to identify as either male or female would identify as X but people would have the choice of any of the three, how they did that. And consistent with again what we've done with drivers licenses here in the state of Vermont, as well as we are not the only state to put such a marker in place. So we'd be joining about, I believe I can fact check myself afterwards about 24 will 23 states and DC that have moved to a gender X marker as that non binary option. So X doesn't stand for anything except I don't want to be identified as male or female.   That is a good question.  So, I think this is great but I'm going to put on my genealogist hat and my history and my date longitudinal study have all those hats history longitudinal studies. And accuracy in data. This immense it doesn't change the original birth of a person for tracking over time and for research and for genealogy. I mean, this doesn't change. This doesn't. This actually does to a birth certificate because I will, I have to be honest, I will have a curious and little challenge by the idea that you would actually change the sex you were born, because I think that's important, historically, and from a data point of view to keep collecting. That was a great question for the Department of Health, but to my knowledge, it is an amended birth certificate but would be the only one accessible to the public without an amendment addition on there. The person themselves and their family members would be able to access the prior unamended birth certificate, but for the general public as we included here in the bill would not fall under the public records. So that amended does not mean the original document and I think Tucker has an answer over there. I'm seeing chopping it because that that is really a major concern so I'm happy. I'm happy to switch seats if you would like that answer from legislative council. Let's see if there are other questions. We're talking about the same lines. We've talked about changing to in person to say ever X. Is there never a possibility that somebody might want to change from F to M or F to F. Yes. And so that was the reason why we did this process instead of just allowing rulemaking to add the gender X marker. It's making it a simplified self attestation process for any of those transitions so M to F, M to X, F to X, et cetera. So I don't really understand. I mean I understand rulemaking but talking a little bit more about what you just said about how you're making the process simpler now instead of going to all the rulemaking first that kind of thing. That's a valid question. So this statute that is being removed currently allows for that binary transition of M to F and F to M. And so what we are doing is allowing that addition of the gender X marker. We are also making it a simpler process for that transition from male to female or female to male on a birth certificate. So I know it's a cumbersome process that involves medical documents that involves going to the courts and paying a court fee, as well as that additional letter from a psychologist I believe. And this would take a lot just like saying I want to do it. That would be determined in the rulemaking process but yes. So we don't we don't actually have the rules yet for how it would be implemented and that would be that as part of the expedited rulemaking process. Correct, which involves public comment as well. Any more questions. So I'm just curious that other states that have done this I assume several other states have done this where we sort of in that trajectory of I will check these numbers but I believe it is about 13 other states that have moved to a process that allows for a simple attestation process for changes. When we were able to do it today for a process and I didn't know they did that I'm just not aware of that. They did that through rules. Yeah, and they did it a while. We did do it a while ago. Yes. So we, we did this. A few years ago, as I remember, but what we must have done was just the ability to change from M to F or F to M. Right. We didn't have that third option on there and it was cumbersome. We, we, I mean, we, because I remember addressing this issue, but we didn't address it fully at that time. And our understanding of gender has really changed a lot I would say even in the past 10 years. Right. And so I think we thought we were doing what we needed to do, but as it turns out, we weren't. But we, I mean, we did what we needed to at that time, but now, yeah, you're right. Yes. So Ron, you still have any questions. Well, I just didn't know if, if representative small was going to stay through Tucker's more formal walkthrough, but I just want to thank representative small for bringing this forward and I feel like it's a change we can make quickly and just look forward to passing the bill.  I would be happy to stay through Tucker's walkthrough. Okay. Yeah. And I just want to say this, you know, Jeanette referred to this earlier, but I'm so proud because Chris has been bringing up this issue Chris pray for a long time in the Senate so I'm really proud of you know that we do have a senator who's been working on this for a long time and we've touched on it but we haven't. It's great the House act at first. Well, we backed off I don't remember what number it was here, but I did tell 273 there it is right there is 273, and he got it in right in the make of time and I, and then I said, we're going to just, we'll take the bill when it comes from the House. So, thank you. Thank you. All right, good afternoon everyone. You were someplace warm and sunny. Yes, Massachusetts. I, my skin tone changed from here to here is I was, I spent a long time running with a buff. So I'm just on some more. Well, yeah, you have in front of you age 628 representative small did an absolutely excellent job of giving you the high level overview. There's not going to be a lot of mechanics that will have to work through is part of the walk through some brief background and history here under the current statutory process. I personally petition the probate court to change the sex that is recorded on their birth certificate, the work that this committee and the House Government Operations Committee did three or four years ago on the vital record system was to add some of avenues for change in sex on a birth certificate and to change the requirement that a birth certificate be stamped as amended when those changes were made. Another change that came as a result of the updates the vital record system was to alter access to these records and that gets some of the questions of Senator Clarkson. When any person in the world could request an official copy of a remanders birth certificate, and could then just have a verified copy of Tucker Anderson's birth certificate. If I was born in the month and use it for whatever purposes they wanted that change, and the statewide registration system now keeps the verified birth, death, and other vital statistics within a statewide registry and agents, where predominantly your town clerks can then provide either certified or non certified copies of a birth certificate. There's no more marking a birth certificate as amended. And at the time, town clerks were instructed that any time a birth certificate was changed that the original certificate was to be destroyed. That was something that was put in four years ago. So there would still be an official central version of whatever the vital certificate was, but the original version, the unamended version would be destroyed. And that was pulled out last year, because the Vermont Municipal Clerks and Treasures Association flag that as a serious concern on their part for knowing when they were destroying the right record, or when they were supposed to be discarding a record that was kept in physical form they didn't know if it was duplicated in a chain of custody within the state registry. But the answer to Senator Clarkson's question is that when the record within the registry has changed, that is the record that's going to be available for searches moving forward. So once the amendment is entered into the system that is the official record that can be requested by members of the public by the individual by their family, and now by public agencies which is another amendment that was added last year to the vital record system. So it's going to be the amended version that replaces that original version that is going to be the official document that is available to everyone. You may want to check with David Englander to see whether the statewide registry keeps archives information about the changes that have been made to a particular particular vital record, but the official copy that will be available for genealogical changes and for official government purposes will be the amended certificate.  I mean I think this is, I think somewhere we have to be keeping an original verse certificate. And even if you amend it, I mean I understand amending it. I think this is great, but I also from a, from a research point of view and from a. I think it's essential that an original be kept and you know you can have limited access to it but there has to be some way for research to continue. I thought he said they are kept now that we would know. And I said we removed this is the problem, I think. Unless, to be clear, moving forward, the issue that you dealt with the clerks where they were destroying the older records. That was typically where there was a physical certificate kept in the indices of the individual town clerk. I'm not certain how much that happens now that there is a electronic based central repository where the information is kept. I'm not sure how many clerks out there are going into the system each time there's a new certificate recorded in their visibility and a copy, a static copy of that electronic record on x state and filing it away in the archive. I would suggest that you get some testimony from the department about what chain of custody is David and Tonya. We have to get both. It is a, this is the Department of Health vis-a-vis does have some archival records going back, but those have also been transitioned into the statewide registration system. I mean, just think of health issues.  My imagination runs wild thinking of the research that people might do. And part of this was prompted by an article in the last week about the number of LGBTQ families that we have here in Vermont and marriages and, you know, that we're tracking this kind of data and, and, and talking about it and writing about it. The same research might want to be done on how many people in this state or in the United States transition has that grown. I mean, we haven't collected data on that in the past. I think it's a great way to collect, you know, to be able to amend your person certificate, but to alter history is, is, is, I think another issue. And I think that's, I have concerns with that as a, you know, person who loves history and as a person who loves research and being able to write about how this might be the one, one very friendly state to, to transition it. I just need to ask a question to, in my own mind. I thought you said that there is a birth certificate. The original birth certificate is there. It says the, the gender that you were born with it was determined when you were born that that's there. You can amend the birth certificate. It doesn't get stamped amended anymore, but now you could change it to M, F or X from whatever it was, but that this original birth certificate still remains there and is available to the person to their family, and I don't know to who else but I thought you said, maybe either you or I think representative Small said that. So that original copy. Yes, would exist. If it was kept in physical form, and it was not destroyed in that two and a half year period where the agents were instructed to destroy the original copy. Big breath, big pause. We're going to get into it in this bill. And this is not a change from current law. Amendments to a birth certificate related to a what was formerly a change in sex and here is a change in gender are confidential. So, even if that original record exists, the record that you are going to be able to request, which is the important distinction here, discussing Senator Clark Clarkson's question, we're going to be able to request be certified or non certified copy of the birth certificate. You are not going to get that original value. Right. So, the only people that it impacts here are people who might be doing research because the person, the person themselves, or their family, if they choose to let their family know but the person then self will have access to that, assuming that in this two and a half years it wasn't destroyed but from now on they won't be destroyed because that was taken out last year. Well it was taken out last year so they aren't destroying anymore that's what we just heard. So there was a short period of time there where they may have been, and if they were that's the way it happened because apparently we didn't get it written. That's exactly right. And, but, so the researchers are the ones that won't have access to that original birth certificate. Thank you Madam Chair. At what age can an individual choose to do it. That was a question that came up in the house, and the response is that it's going to depend on the rules that are adopted by the Department of Health. The request is open to a person. So, if you are a person, you can request this. The issue is going to be when will a person's capacity to make the request be a self attestation that qualifies under the statewide registration system. What have other states, what ages of other states, have they set ages or that is in research that I have done to this point. Typically it is, if you are under the age of 18, it is with parental consent, and then over the age of 18 would be up to the individual's choice. That's how marriage happens. Marriage. Well, no, no, I mean that is the rule for marriage. Under 16 to 18, you have to have parental consent. 18, you can get married. I did a lot of research on ages, when you could do something in anticipation of a potential override. Yes, I did a lot of research. Can you remind me what the difference between a certified and a certified document is? The answer is paper. So, there is very special and expensive paper that a certified copy is printed on that has watermarks and some other sophisticated paper technology. So, when it's taken to a government office for an official governmental purpose, they can see the watermark, there's a code that's embedded in it. I believe that a few years ago when you were working through the vital records changes that the Department of Health testified that each sheet of paper is some insorbent cost. People were paying up to $10,000 a sheet for it so that they could create false identities. And they're also numbered. So, if you have numbered 20,000 and then 20,001 and then nobody can attest to find 20,002, somebody's in trouble. And they're also sealed. Working through the bill. Okay. Section one of the bill's legislative intent and purpose. It states it's the intent of the General Assembly to promote equity by allowing all individuals regardless of their tender to amend vital records to accurately reflect and affirm their identities. There's been a long history of discrimination and violence against the LGBTQIA plus community. And that the bill you have in front of you is acting to mitigate future harm through the creation of the simple and equitable system that represents small or difficult. Section two of the bill. First, we repeal the current process for the issuance of a new or amended birth certificate to reflect the change in sex. We discussed some of the history and the current process in place there, which as representative small highlighted requires the submission to the court of evidence, either through an attestation of a physician or through documentation of medical procedures, a change in sex. In its place, starting subsection a here, new language on page three for a state deep policy proceeding section, it says this policy the state to honor and acknowledge all gender identity standards to protect public health and dignity of all individuals regardless of their gender. Accordingly, the state shall adopt a simple process by which an individual may amend the marker on a birth certificate to reflect the individual's gender identity, including a third non binary marker. So we call out the third non binary marker here is representative small highlighted typically the gender marker X. Subsection B, we have pursuant to the administrative procedures act department shall adopt rules as necessary for the purposes of implementing administering or enforcing the requirements of the section. So there will be a full API rulemaking process behind this. Subsection D, we have adopted rules to add gender pronouns to the list of markers on a birth certificate in order to foster a gender littered environment and reflect individuals to your identity. So again, through this rulemaking process, they add to the list of markers that can be used on a certificate. And the subsection D, except is otherwise required by law. That clause to come back to records related to the amendment of a birth certificate pursuant to this chapter shall be confidential and shall be exempt from public inspection and copy under the Public Records Act. These sorts of records were already confidential under the terms of the current vital record system. This is just making sure that moving forward with this new language. And there was a question the house about that opening clause and subsection D, except as otherwise required by law. When may it be required by law that these amended records would need to be produced, potentially pursuant to a court order for some reason. And there were some various student questions in the house human services committee about whether original records can be procured for purposes of, for example, an estate after you have someone pass away, would they be able to use this report process to identify a beneficiary officially. For some reason, and the answer from the department was potentially yes. Yes, I mean that. But the original one, one that they would be that the courts would guess what would be or archives is not the original than a record from the department indicating that the amendment to place, which would be just as useful for that process. That's not to do with the archives. Yes. Well, it leads money to a person who has become another who has changed their sex. That is a big legal challenge. And that was what that would be why they would have to go and find the original person to make it so that they would know that that person was the same as a changed person. I mean, if I say I'm leaving this to my son, but in fact, my son has changed and is now my daughter. Correct. I mean, I think that would be an issue, particularly for families that may not know. I mean, not everybody is. Okay, okay, I just know why. Section three provides the department with emergency rulemaking authority. Again, your emergency rules when they're adopted are temporary. They're valid only for a brief period of time. But as was pointed out, this would be the stop gap so that they're still a procedure in place while the department goes through the full process. May I go up to see on page four questions there. I don't know what that means that the department may adopt rules to add gender pronouns does that mean they could add a B and a C and a D or they could add, but I never seen a gender pronoun on a birth certificate. I mean, do they say he or she on birth certificates. I've never seen that I'm actually not certain, but in addition to some of the words that may be used in the form of the birth certificate. The intent here is to allow dependent on, again, the rulemaking process and the input from stakeholders, the department to implement something in addition to the X marker. Okay, so it's the, the, I didn't think of that as the, as a pronoun, but rather as a marker marker. I know, but it's, I was confused by their pronoun there and thought maybe it should say marker instead gender marker, since that's what we used. The, that was my only question. The final wrap up of this subject area and questions that had come up in the past. So any questions about how this squares with federal law and federal processes. The answer is that by and large, the federal government is making this change now. And that there is currently no requirement when a passport is issued that the underlying birth certificate match in terms of either sex or gender marker, what the person is requesting for a passport. The State Department is undergoing rulemaking process now to add the X marker to US passports and there have already been passports issued with X marker. So I believe the first was pursuant to a court order. All right, well, yes. So that cover any further changes the fence might make. I mean, if there are other changes the fence might make. Would we want to incorporate them in this. Or, right, we could do that another day. I think there's enough room here with the department particularly in that subsection C to deal with any changes that may have the federal level. I just want to cure it because we're doing this with the paid family leave task force in economic development. We're also, you know, leaving room for anticipating the feds may act on it as well which. Any other questions for Tucker. So, do we want to have David come in and talk to us about how they're kept who will have access to them and how that will work. I, I'd be very interested. Okay. All right. We'll have him come in. Find out how this would work for. Yes, I did get correspondence from David if you would like that answer now. We certainly could take it. Thank you. So the information is that the statewide registration system will keep track of the original core certificates, but they will only be accessible to the person and the person's family. And the personal case. Yeah. But it does not include to answer your question. It does not include researchers explicitly in that right here, man. So. I would include the court court. Yeah. So. Yes. So I wouldn't be curious to have David because I would be curious to ask David about other research that's done because all very certificates are, I mean, going forward now are only accessible by individual requests, right? No, you can get an uncertified copy. You could go in and get an uncertified copy of Tucker's. Anybody can get uncertified copies. You just anybody can't and anybody. A researcher or the local dog catcher or. I'm sure probably lots of people want to have copies of my birth certificate. Well, I wasn't warning for fun, but yes, anybody can get an uncertified copy. And the thing about we just did something. Judiciary about having allowing access. For people to research on. Expunged records. I think that's what it was. But the problem is, is that how would you, if you opened it up to people doing research, how would you even certify or verify who is doing legitimate research? I could go in and say, I'm doing research on on this. And anybody could claim that they were doing research. I actually don't think that's. I don't think that's the case. I think there are ways to prove legitimate research and have institutions affirm who people are and what work they're doing. I guess with all of these things, all historic records. It is, it is the challenge if people can't access aspects of history that are. I mean, it's just a question for me and it's like, is it worth putting it's like a copyright of a book.  I don't know, I have a question. I just, yeah, Senator wrong and sale. Well, I'm I'm just with you, Madam chair, I feel like that actually opens up bigger questions that we don't have time to answer about people accessing really sensitive information period, we're trying to do more and more to protect people's identities for theft reasons, etc. And the health department, I imagine and believe and we could probably get confirmation of this though. You know, it's my it would be my sense because they track everything marriages divorces this information will probably end up helping them track census information when people take a census they list their preferred gender. So that to me seems like the critical component to research I think that it's frightening to think about somebody who's going to go look at individual birth certificates or ask the Department of Health for information about who has switched genders in some way or asked for a different gender marker were Vermonters. You know, we don't really want our information out there so I think anything we do to try and give some, some nod to somebody's original birth certificate doesn't seem right and I, I guess it's problematic to me to call it history. But somebody is often doing this because they they feel like they their identity has remained the same and that the information around them identifying our gender does not feel accurate to them so I don't I you know I think just calling it history is is unfair you know gender is already a social construct so I just think we should be really sensitive about this and just recognize when someone changes their name or changes sensitive information on their birth certificate it just doesn't seem appropriate for us to go that deep. I think that there are the Department of Health, I'm sure keeps statistics so there's probably aggregate information this can be accessed without identifying information but it would be just the idea of opening it up to research is. I mean, I, I can legitimately be doing research for my, my capstone project or something else and my thesis and get access to stuff that I really shouldn't have access to and so I, and I. Yeah, I don't think that's a problem I think that the Department of Health deals with research all the time right and they have a lens through which they look at it and hoops that you have to jump through is serious research I think that's, I think that is probably manageable. I just would, and maybe I just have to, I don't, there's nothing rushed on this bill so I don't want to feel pushed on this and I actually think there are questions that we may not for David. So, I just don't want to feel rushed on it. No, we can, we can definitely have David come in, I, and we should figure out what it is. We want to ask him, because I doing they, they do the Department of Health as legitimate research all the time with HIPAA protected information by, by using aggregate information. And there was help with specific information might be interested in. But, but we don't need to tell the department that they can, they can do that research, and I don't think in here we need to say they can do that research. No, I agree. It's, it's, I thought, I thought when you said open it up to research, you meant me going into research. So, that's not research. No, I couldn't be doing research for a, but if he says, if you did a state, a country wide study on cancers or different health outcomes that happen, you know, that are specific perhaps to people who've changed their gender. I mean, there may be issues, health issues that, that may be very legitimate and that the LGBTQ community wants to know. And the Department of Health can do that. And the question is, are they, would they be able to do that? And would they be able to participate without the individual saying, yes. Okay, so that's the kind of question I'm talking about. And this may be research. Okay, everyone wants to know the answers to. Okay, we'll, we'll hear from David. My understanding is what we're doing here is we're doing a power to adopt emergency rules, which is something pretty quick, followed by a full rulemaking process that takes longer. And it seems like some of these questions about whether it's open to researchers or not seem like kind of questions that could be, that could be raised in the process. So instead of us having to decide whether. I can just ask David. Right. That's a question for the rulemaking process. Brilliant. Good idea. That means you're serving on rules next time.  So, okay, so we will schedule this again, and have David come in and I'd like, I'd like to do it next week so that we can start. So we'll schedule this for sometime next week. I don't know if we have anything scheduled for Thursday or Friday of this week. We don't have anything scheduled on Thursday. I'll call him and see if he can come in on Thursday. Okay. All right. Thank you. Thank you Taylor for moving on this. My pleasure. Thank you for taking it up so quickly. Yes, well, I did. I promised that. She needed to get it represented to that she needed to get out quickly so we could take it up. And she did. She did.


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I feel you are here to learn how you can make your plugins more adaptable as far as Gutenberg is concerned. Is that about right? Yeah, some shaking hands, perfect. So today, during the presentation, we're going to talk about software as a service versus WordPress. So how Gutenberg is actually adapting to the software as a service world as far as the massive improvements in web technology that we've experienced in the last 13 years. Results, positions, these are at those changes as the SAS user base continues to grow more year over year versus the WordPress user base. Second of all, we're going to talk about how Gutenberg is actually the wake-up call that we needed. A lot of people, or if you look at a lot of the views on at least the WordPress reviews page for the Gutenberg plugin, about half of them are not so great. But it's actually a really, really good thing because Gutenberg is or the reason that there are so many negative reviews is that none of us like change, especially as developers. We love to get into a routine or as content creators. We like the tools that we like to use. And now that they're changing the landscape, we're all very or a lot of us are extremely resistant to that. But change is always for the better that I've experienced. So we're going to talk about how this change is going to make from an access community stronger and in an increasingly competitive landscape for software domination. And finally, we're going to talk about whether you are a content creator or you are a developer, how you can flourish with your product or services. It will say era of Gutenberg. I'm going to give you some tips and tricks, at least from my personal experiences as a developer. But a lot of that can also translate to content development as well. So before we get started in all of that, is it OK if I tell you a little bit about myself? Fantastic. So I went to University of Toronto. I studied computer science for several years until I dropped out just recently in order to pursue my passion of the WordPress community and developing plugins for people just like yourselves. I'm currently in the process of developing a plugin called Groundhog. Just getting that off the ground, we looked about two months ago and we're seeing some great user feedback from a lot of our users. It is a marketing automation plugin for sending emails. So it really expands the WordPress interface to bundle in all of your marketing that would traditionally belong to a SaaS model that you'd have to pay a monthly subscription fee.  So we made one for WordPress. In addition to that, I also have a company called Form Lift, which is a form builder plugin for WordPress as well. It's about 1,000 users. It's doing all right. So that's what I've been up to since dropping out of university, which may or may not have been a great idea. We'll see how these turn out. And today, I'm really focused on not necessarily, I'm not in it for the money at all. I'm just in it here to help people, to help WordPress users and help business owners and help solopreneurs and entrepreneurs accomplish. And I'm going to be doing that focusing on the Groundhog CRM just for people like yourselves. So is it OK if I set a little bit of a few rules for the presentation today? Is that OK with you guys? Yeah? All right. So number one is energy. It's already up there on the board. So can everybody stand up? Thank you. You're welcome. We're just going to change the energy a little bit here. We've sat probably through a few presentations today. So it's nice to just change it up a little bit. So everybody, put your hands above your head. Thank you. Just give it a little lean to the left. Give it a little lean to the right. All right, take a step back and just let it go like that. Thank you, everybody. Have a seat. So can we all agree to participate at an energy level of 10? Say aye. Fantastic. Thank you. Rule number two is participation. A few times throughout this presentation, I'm going to be asking you to participate. I'd highly appreciate if I asked you to raise your hand or I asked you to shout out an answer that you do so. So can we all get an agreement to participate? Say aye. Thank you. Awesome. Number three is I'm going to be sharing some tips and tricks. So just as long as you're in this room, you can totally forget anything you say as soon as you leave. But as long as you're in this room, can we all accept to at least take a little bit of guidance? Say aye. Thank you. OK, so number one, let's target SAS versus WordPress. So Gutenberg is addressing a problem that the WordPress community, at least has pulled into in the last few years and technology development. A lot of the SAS programs are offering extreme benefits over WordPress as far as usability, customer experience, speed, and a few other things. And we're just going to address those. So in the last 13 years, WordPress has come into clash in some key areas, content building, page building, e-commerce, like Shopify, ClickFunnels, and Weebly, which are all doing very well in the face of what we all probably would understand to be a far superior content management system compared to some of these others. But they're all extremely popular and all doing extremely well. And the question is, why? So I'm going to do commerce versus Shopify as an example and kind of just to add a little bit of context on how we know a lot of these programs are doing or a lot of these platforms are doing very well, is this is taken from Built With. You are more than welcome to go look at these stats yourself. It's builtwith.com. You can go check out all of your competitors and any other websites and see what their tech stack is. You can check out how many people are using your plugin or your theme builder if it's big enough on Built With. So it's kind of cool. Anyway, so the big number there is WooCommerce currently has 2.9 million live websites. It's a little bit of a discrepancy between that and WordPress.org. But I'm just using the builtwith for the sake of transparency. Versus Shopify, which came out five years earlier. So WooCommerce came out in 011. And Shopify came out in 06. And it has just under 2 million live websites with 1.86 million live websites. And the big difference there is WooCommerce is an $11 million a year company. Shopify is an $800 million a year company. So why is that when WooCommerce is a free platform that most people should be able to use fairly easily? It's on WooCommerce. It takes nothing as far as hosting costs. Versus Shopify, which as soon as you sign up after your 14-day Friday trial, it's $297 US per month. $297 for their medium package. So not their basic package, which is $99, but $297 US per month for the reporting and the stuff that you're actually going to need if you run a semi-legitimate business. And we can see that I have here this is the top 100,000 sites. And these are the growth charts. So WooCommerce at the top there. And Shopify is listed. And we can see that the WooCommerce one near to today's date is kind of leveling off. And we can see that the growth chart for Shopify is significantly more in the top 100,000 users of sites, ranked by Alexa. This is from Amazon. That Shopify is actually getting a larger growth number per annum than WooCommerce is, which out of the gate had a massive growth rate. So they were able to amass several million users within the first year of being out. But as the internet or as technology progresses, we can see that Shopify is actually starting to gain more traction as far as year-over-year user acquisition is concerned. And the question is, why is that? Why is something that's obviously free and something that is obviously built for the betterment of humanity and open source and has a massive developer community and all things losing out year-over-year to a company which is charged for everything, is closed source, has arguably a less sophisticated developer community and all of these things and an extremely volatile stock of any of your day traders? And the answer is to that question, user experience. Shopify has developed an incredible user experience over their 12 years of being in business. They've developed some incredible software that is extremely easy to use, while WooCommerce has become, well, not necessarily outdated. And we're actually expecting a big update from WooCommerce after 5.0 was released, which is going to be really exciting in terms of reporting and stuff. But they've just developed such a massive commanding of what their users are expecting in terms of an e-commerce site. And I have two screenshots here. I have WooCommerce on the bottom. Elements, but don't let go of it. Once you're there, you can continue to push it. All right. And why do you use it? You can see some sales. And that's all well and good. As soon as we look at the Shopify one, it's, boom, first name here. Today, your site made X amount of dollars. You have currently 57 on-store visits and all of these things and all of these stats for immediate consumption as soon as you log in. You don't get that with WooCommerce. You don't get that personalized experience. You don't get nearly that level of reporting. All right? So it's all about, as soon as you log in, what do you expect from your distributors or your, yeah, distributors is a good word there. Best company to book a vacation with. Given that customer experience is the be-all and end-all of the success of platforms these days, Shopify has incredible user experience from creating a product, takes seconds. You upload your pictures. They optimize it automatically. They crop it automatically. You just put in your price, and they'll generate the rest. It's all automatic. The page doesn't even reload as soon as you add a product. As soon as you log in and get a beautiful welcome message, it's like, hey, Adrian, today you made X amount of dollars. In order to make more, you should try out this other platform that we can upsell you to so you can understand more what your customers are doing so that way you can make more money and they have built-in upsells and all of these things that just create a beautiful, tied-in experience for your e-commerce. Now, WooCommerce doesn't do that. And a lot of plugins that WordPress offers don't do that. But a lot of SaaS industries and a lot of SaaS models do do that. If anybody uses MailChimp or if anybody uses Constant Contact or any of the big marketing automation platforms, as soon as you log in, it's like, all right, here are your reports. You sent this many emails. You made this many dollars. You got this many link clicks. And here is how you can improve all of those. Take this training for $199 or install this plugin or this add-on and get this reporting so that you can do or view so much more reports so you can use that data to better improve your email marketing and all of these things. But WordPress doesn't do that. WordPress plugins don't do that. WordPress themes don't do that. We have the page. Everybody knows the page as soon as they install a freemium plugin. They have the page that's like, here are all the benefits that you can have from our pro add-on. How many of you go to those pages, spend any time there, look at them, read them? No, nobody. Because as soon as you install a plugin, I got the free thing. It does the thing that I need. That's it. I don't need any of those paid upgrades. WordPress is free. I don't need to pay for stuff. Go to GPLDL for that, right? Anybody GPLDL? No? All right, GPLDL is a basically what they do is they go to all of the popular WordPress premium plugin sites, download them, and they host them since they're all licensed under GPL, open-lice free user software. You can download for free without having to pay for a license key. That exists. Don't do it. Pay the developers. They deserve it. So next we're going to talk about why, given that SaaS has come such a long way in providing an excellent user experience, Gutenberg was designed to provide the better user experience. Shortcodes are great. I love shortcodes. Everybody loves shortcodes. How many of you use shortcodes? One. But you get a shortcode. You get a shortcode. But in modern editors, if anybody uses click funnels, lead pages, a few people, those drag and drop page builders are Thrive. Everybody uses Thrive here, right? Thrive Architects. Yeah, get a hand for Thrive. Those guys are great. Really good at what they do. That's why it returns. Just drag and drop the size. You put it in the mobile editing view. Just adjust the margins, right? So, so easy. And yet, as soon as you install WordPress, you get this WSIYG editor. That's like, it's good.  But often content building, you know, people don't have time to click the type in word, preview, page load, back to tab, type in word, preview, page load, type in word, right? People's attention spans for getting things done are so much less than they used to be. The modern attention span is like seven seconds.  It's no fun. How many of you prefer the WordPress editor versus a builder like Thrive Architect or Aveda or any of the front end preview? Does anybody here prefer the original WordPress editor to something else that they've already replaced it with? Nobody. Case in point. Someone?  Last hold out. What's your name? Mira? Miro, all right, thank you, Miro. Well, they have a classic editor plug-in, so I'm sure they'll be installing that. So with that in mind and with, you know, Gutenberg trying to address a problem that is attention span, user experience, all these things, we have to ask yourself, who is building websites? Who is actually, who is building a website these days? Is it developers? Is it solepreneurs? Is it entrepreneurs? Can anybody tell me who is actually building a website these days? Hence, entrepreneurs, pardon? Entrepreneurs, everybody's building websites. You don't even have to be a developer.  It's on a subdomain. You can purchase an actual domain from them, and they do everything for you. There's no DNS changes, automatic SSL. It's so easy with software as a service, right? And it's not developers who are building websites. It's mom and pop shops. It's entrepreneurs. And God knows, they don't have time to learn all of this stuff. They're trying to run a business. It's content writers who all they want to do is they just want to sell stuff. They want to sell their ideas. They want to sell their ideologies. They want to sell their news. What is the purpose of a website? Sell stuff. It doesn't matter what it is. It's text. It's products. It's videos. It's courses. You know, a purpose of a website to sell stuff. And who's selling stuff? It's not these guys, right? So these people, this guy is running some sort of coffee shop. He's got banana bread. And I'm sure he doesn't sell that on his line because it's perishable. But he's trying to get people to come to his brand new coffee shop that he invested $50,000 in. And she's got some sort of clothing line selling socks, scarves. And she is working at the Till because it's a one-soul company. She doesn't have time to be spending, you know, changing short codes and tax rates on WooCommerce or WordPress or anything. So if you are one of those people and you tried to build a WordPress website, the first time you did it, probably looked a whole lot like that. Raise your hand if your first WordPress website looks like that. Yeah, so when you try to do yourself, is that something that you want to show to your customers? No. It's probably certainly not something that I would want to show to my customers. So what are they going to do? They don't got time, right? They're going to go to someone who tells them that they can take care of them. Don't worry about it. Just upload your products, set your images, put in your prices. You're good. And you've got to shop up and ready? Or you've got your blog up and ready? WordPress.com does this. They just do manage.  They don't got time. Everybody say, who's got the time for that? Who's got the time for that? Thank you. Which has brought me to say, WordPress has become the choice of the internet literate. The people who understand what DNS actually means, the people who know that you have to close a short code after you open it, they know how to read HTML and JavaScript, while SAS is now the choice of everybody else, because it's easy. So what do we do? How do we make WordPress not the solution for the internet literate, but WordPress the solution, as it used to be, the solution for everyone? The democratized software as a service model, where it's open source, everybody contributes, and everybody gets a free ride. Which brings me to, how do we flourish in the era of Gutenberg? Probably why most of you came here in the first place. And I'm going to start off with this. So if you have a website, or you have a theme builder, or you have a plugin, then the first thing you're going to have to do in order to make any of those, flourish in the era of Gutenberg, is drop the refresh. Oh. Everybody say I love technology. All right, here we go. Drop the refresh. If you use any of the modern software building tools or page builders, you never have to refresh a page. Because if you're editing something on a mobile device or on a 3G connection, reloading the page takes for frickin' ever. If you're scrolling on your phone, or if you're on Facebook and you get to one of those pages, click to the next thing to read the next of the 24 stars that have children that you didn't know about. Do you click it? No, I don't want to wait for that. I'm using my data. I don't want to have to reload the page every time. So if you're building content, or if you're building a page builder, or you're doing anything in the WordPress back end, drop the refresh. If you can do it with anything else, if that's your infinity scroll or anything, just do it. Don't reload the page, because in the new world, everybody's on the 3G networks, or the 4G, or LTE, or whatever. And as soon as you introduce page freeze, you lose people, because it just takes for frickin' ever to load. WordPress is going mobile. Matt Mullenwick has said just as much that WordPress is going to eventually be a mobile first editing experience. So as soon as you're on a trip to Florida, and you're on the beach, and you find a typo, and you're trying to edit something, limited refreshes is possible, minimum page loads. Number two, label everything. I said earlier that WordPress is the choice of the internet literate, and that may be true. So to make it the choice of everyone, that means we're going to be dealing with people that are not so internet literate in everything. So that means in order to cater to everybody, we've got to make sure that stuff is easy to find as possible. Nobody necessarily knows that in order to set up your plug-in, you have to go to the Settings page and configure it properly. You're going to have to tell them that they have to go to the Settings page and configure everything. And every setting needs a label, and every button needs a hover over to explain what that button does, because people ain't got time to trial an error. Everybody's saying, oh, we've got time for that. All right, that was OK. Remember when I said energy level 10? We've got to keep that. So let's try that again. Ain't nobody got time for that. Thank you, much better. So label everything. If you're on your front-end website, if you've got a Facebook share button, you've got to point 10 arrows to your share button. It says, share this, right? If you've got a small Facebook share button in the bottom right-hand corner of your website, does anybody see it? Nope, probably not. Chances are not. So label everything. Number two, and this kind of ties into your page refreshes. If it takes more than two clicks to find something, it's too hard to find, right? Everything on your website, whether it's on the front-end or on the back-end, needs to be found or be findable in two clicks or less, preferably less. Again, tying into ain't nobody got time to reload the page, like 60 different times in order to find their account or their cart or whatever, everything should be done within two clicks or less. So that means if I'm going to go find a post, I need to click blog and be able to click to the post. If I'm looking for the shopping cart, it needs to be a direct link from the menu. If I need to go to the Settings page, it should be the hover over icon in the left admin bar. Anything should be done in two clicks or less. And even better, if you can just load content on top of more content without refreshing the page at all, better. That's what Facebook has started to do. Maybe click an ad. It just opens an ad in a pop-up. They're beta testing that. Has anybody seen that at all? Yeah, it's really cool. So instead of taking you outside of Facebook, they just keep you in Facebook. Put the ad in an iframe, and then you've never lessed. And that offers a way better user experience, at least for Facebook users, maybe not so much for the advertiser. But as far as Facebook is concerned, that's great. That's awesome. So if you can start doing that in WordPress content as well, front-end or back-end, then you're going to see a lot of people being able to better use your site and better consume your content. I don't remember what that one was. Drag and drop. This is mostly probably for the developers in the room. But everything is moving towards drag and drop. Gutenberg is almost drag and drop. But it's basically close enough. Just dragging dropping things and providing a front-end visual experience, I want to be able to see what I'm getting. WSIYG, I hope I'm saying that in the right order, whizzy. All right, perfect. Thank you for that. Is not necessarily true, because what you see is technically not what you get in WordPress. As soon as you start introducing themes and short codes, it's like, well, this doesn't match up. So providing that front-end visual experience in a drag and drop kind of implementation way is extremely beneficial. And if you look at any of the major competitors to WordPress, at least in the content creation space, it's all this. And people love it and it's easy to understand. So last thing is, or not the last thing, but close enough, is it's got to make common sense. If something doesn't make common sense, then some people aren't going to understand it. And what does that mean? It means that if I need to change an option, the option needs to be in the Settings page, because that's where options go. If I need to edit page content, then I need to go to the page where that content is supposed to be, not in the form editor. I should be able to edit the form where it's supposed to be on the page, because that's where it is. So everything needs to be tied in to something that makes sense to the end user. Because if they install your plugin on a whim, they're not necessarily going to know that you have to go to the fourth tab on the last setting in the section where it says miscellaneous in order to understand that they have to change that option in order to get it to actually show on the front-end if you're not an administrator user. It's got to make common sense. If I'm thinking, as an internet non-illiterate, where is that supposed to be? Where is the most likely place that that's supposed to be? And I'm going to go there. And if it's not there, I give up on to the next plugin. Or I give up on WordPress entirely. I'm going to go to Shopify. Since they said they'll just take care of it for me, they have 24-hour customer support, I want to do that. So as long as it makes common sense on the front-end and on the back-end, then you're OK. For it to apply this to a content creator standpoint, if you have menus within menus within menus within menus trying to lead people to the correct place, that's what we call out of context. Now, you've got to put everything in context on the front-end of your site in order for it to make common sense. So if they come to your home page, you give them two buttons of where the most relevant places that your services or products go. And then as soon as they click that button, they get to where they're supposed to be. They're not going to go spend 30 seconds browsing through seven different menu items in order to get what they want. As soon as if they don't find it immediately, they're out of there. They're gone. So make sure that your layout on the front-end makes common sense. If you show it to your best friend and they say, I don't get it, believe your best friend. They may not understand how WordPress works, so they may not be a developer. Or you might think that they're totally out of their wit's end. But if they say that doesn't make sense, then you've got to take their word for it because we're trying to make WordPress the solution for everybody. And your best friend is included in everybody. We've got to respect the user. What does that mean? I don't know. Provide quality support. If you don't provide quality support for either your theme builder or your plug-in or whatever product or service you provide, then that's a no-go, man. One of the first things, at least I look for when I'm purchasing products, is that there is a reliable support team that I can count on to go if I have a problem. Because if there's no reliable support team and you have a problem, then what are you going to do? You're out. You're fee of whatever you paid. And then you've got to ask for a refund. And then, of course, there's no support team, so you never get that refund. So you request a chargeback, you lose. And it's just all a big mess. So make sure that you're providing quality support. If you're a content editor, go have a live chat button because people have questions. And I'm not sure if you noticed, but nobody leaves WordPress comments anymore, unless you're looking at WP Tavern, in which case there's too many. But nobody leaves comments on blogs anymore. I haven't received a comment for frickin' ever. Maybe that's just my fault, and I just don't know how to get comments. But people are way more keen to get an instant response than they are to receive a mail notification about a week later that you replied to their comment, that they no longer care about. They've already forgotten about they left a comment there. When was the last time you left a comment? Do you even remember? He remembers, but he still uses the regular editor. So provide premium support. Make sure that you're listening to the users. Make sure that, oh, I remember what that meant. Doesn't matter. We're past it. Make sure that you're listening to the users, that you're answering their questions, you're respecting their intentions, and that they want to support you as much as you want to support them. They're all for giving you money, and giving you credibility, and giving you reviews, as long as you provide a seller service. If you provide a seller service, then that's all they want. They just want stellar service. So if you provide it to them, then they're great. And you're never going to receive a chargeback or a refund request or any of those things, unless they hate you. Probably the least favorite for you, everybody's. And probably one of the hardest to implement, at least in the WordPress admin area, is stuff's got to look pretty these days. If you ever look at any of those SaaS programs or software as a service, then it's got to look beautiful. I showed you the Shopify and the WooCommerce one. And one of those was categorically, without a question, more pretty to look at than the other. And it wasn't WooCommerce. Although it's coming, they say. So if you're implementing a theme builder, and if you use Thrive Architect, which many of you do, it's pretty good looking. It's a little bit convoluted. And they could definitely should be in this presentation to learn that it's got to make common sense. Their new options panel is just crazy to navigate. But stuff's got to look good. And that ties into the common sense bit of it as well. Because if stuff looks good, then it's easy to look at. It's easy to read. And then they can better navigate your planned user experience, as it were.  If you're a content editor, nine times out of 10, someone is navigating there from Facebook. Now, the Facebook mobile experience and the Facebook desktop experience are extremely similar in that they're both easy on the eyes. And so if they're traveling from point A to point B, then you necessarily have to extend the look and feel of where they come from to make them feel OK with staying where they are. So if you have a landing page that's coming from Facebook or a blog post that's coming from Facebook, I'm not going to go as far as I should look exactly like Facebook. But it should be like navigating Facebook. And that way they feel as if, or psychologically, they never left. So if you have a content editing experience from the front end, make it look like where they're coming from, aesthetically pleasing, easy to navigate. And if you have a WordPress developer experience, then a lot of the people that are using WordPress use WordPress. They don't use any other different kind of content management system. They use something called WordPress if they're in the WordPress admin.  This ain't WordPress anymore. I'm certainly not in Kansas, which is confusing to a lot of people. Now they have a lot of great reviews and stuff, so I'm not going to go too harsh on that because obviously it works. But to get people feeling comfortable in your WordPress plug-in, it's got to look like WordPress. Don't totally change the gambit on them and totally change the user experience from regular WordPress because that's something that they understand. You'll get much better results and usability and reviews if it looks like something that they're used to. So don't change the H1 tags and the font types and the colors and all that stuff. Leave it looking that the way that WordPress was intended to look so that adoption is easier.  At that point, you're too big to fail. But keep it simple. Make it sure that the editing experience looks like what they're used to. OK. I don't remember. Honestly, I should have put a little tag or a note here. Didn't do that. Points for next time. This is something that a few WordPress plugins do. And whenever they do it, it's awesome and great. A lot of work homes don't do that.  And it's hard. And you have to go search for answers. And that is the welcome page. So as soon as you install WooCommerce and you click that activation button, it brings you to a guided setup or a welcome page, which tells you, all right, here's how things work. This is what's up. This is what you're going to need to do in order to be successful with this plugin. If you install Storefront, which is their official WooCommerce theme, same thing, brings you to the Storefront home page, edit your settings. This is what you've got to do, step one, step two, step three, all good. I prefer a e-commerce solution called Easy Digital Downloads, any easy digital downloads users in here? Doing that, easy digital downloads. It is easy digital downloads. Digital. Did anybody not get that like her? Everybody, OK, great. So they don't provide a welcome page experience. And I can tell you, it was a job and a half. I was dedicated to using this platform because I sell WordPress plugins. But it was a job and a half to get this thing configured and understand what it meant. It's a developer platform, but I certainly, as a former internet illiterate, then it would have been really, really, really nice to have someone coaxing me along the way and saying, all right, this is step one. This is step three. This is step three. And it just would have been really nice. And I was this close to just switching to WooCommerce and using one of their add-on plug-in subscription options for that instead. I eventually figured it out, though, and highly recommend them. They need a welcome page, though. So if you have a complex theme, you've got theme options out the wazoo, and you've got this short code experience, and you've got tutorials, welcome page, tutorials in one section, add-ons in the other, getting started steps in the top. That's all you need. It's going to take you two seconds to build. You just code it out in HTML. And you're good to go. Upload it, add it to the plugin or the theme, and that's it. And you are going to get such a better churn rate. Does everybody know what churn means? All right, for those of you who don't know what churn means, churn is when you get a new user and within three months, they abandon, go on to the next. A lot of SaaS companies have problems with churn because they don't provide an awesome welcome experience. So you've got to make sure that in order to retain, getting active installations is all great. It's only great if they remain active. So in order to keep people actively using your plugin, give them the welcome page experience, tell them what they need to do, make sure that whatever it is that they need to do, they can do it in less than five minutes, and then your golden. Last thing is guided setup. So if you provide guided setup, then you're immediately better than 99.9% of WordPress plugins out there. Guided setup can come in many forms. You can come in the WooCommerce experience where it's step by step. You set your settings, and those will populate the settings page. It can be in the form of a guide hosted on your website, where as soon as they install the plugin, you just say, go here to watch your guided setup and just walk them through a video. Most people have two screens now. You've got screen one, you've got screen two. They got the video on this screen, and they got the website on this screen. And they just follow along. Providing guided setup to your theme plugin or whatever is really great. Content editors' guided setup is also applicable because if you have someone new come to your site and they haven't necessarily realized what kind of content that is you're trying to push onto them, providing a video that says, hey, this is what this is all about, and what you need to do in order to get the most out of our content would be probably a very, very good idea. Maybe not necessarily a video, but a guide that says, hey, listen, if you subscribe to our list, these are the things that are going to happen, and these are what you can do in order to react to the things that we're going to do in order to make your experience with us the best one possible. Statistics. So statistics, big part of developing websites these days. Everybody, every single website is only trying to sell something, whether it's a product service or whatever. We need statistics in order to be able to better realize what our website is good at and what is not good at. Stuff like active visitors, sales, added to cart, but abandon rates, stuff like that, or as far as e-commerce is concerned. But providing a statistics view for if your plugin is relevant to that is always a plus, at least to the end user, so they can absorb the information relatively quickly and provide a service or an update to their website to better act on that. There are plugins that allow you to do this. So if you are a website owner or a content distributor, what I'd recommend is you write this down, type in clicky.com. Clicky.com is an analytics plugin. It's super cheap for what you get out of it. You get these things called heat maps. Does everybody know what a heat map is? A few people don't. So a heat map is when you get an overlay of a web page, which is super cool. And it'll show you circles of where people click. And the brighter the circle, the more people clicked on that area within a certain time frame. So you can check the last seven days, the last 24 days, the last 30 days. So you can see where people are actually interacting with your site. Really, a wake-up call for me one time was I threw up the heat map on a landing page we're sending traffic to.  Guess what? It wasn't a button. So a lot of people are clicking there. It's like, why isn't it working? So we replaced it with a button that actually did something. And all of a sudden, the opt-in rates went up, right? So get clicky or any comparable analytics tool in order to better serve your front-end customers. Because if they're clicking on places that they're not supposed to be clicking on, then you either make it clickable or make it less noticeable. And that way, you can guide them to the place where they're actually supposed to go in the first place. So analytics tools like those can certainly help you optimize your front-end. Statistics for back-end developers. Providing statistics, A, coding in a way in order to be able to provide useful data about the things that your plugin is doing. Or, and you have to be careful of this because this is technically in the WordPress terms of service for plugin users, is you have an opt-in availability. So you have to make your statistics collecting service. So receiving data from your users in order to make a better plugin or a better theme user has to be an opt-in service if it's hosted in the wordpress.org repository. So if you're collecting data from your users through, there's one off the top of my head. It's called Freemius. If you're a developer, write that down. And it provides collection stats. It has to be opt-in, though. So you can't just collect it off the bat. That is against WordPress terms of service. Wow. Everybody say that was a lot of content. Wow. That was a lot of me talking really, really fast and you trying really, really hard to understand. So but what we're going to do now is we're going to do a little bit of an exercise. And don't worry, it's not going to be as physical as that. Everybody take the next three minutes and think about what it is your service, your website, your plugin. And think immediately where you could eliminate or provide a better user experience. And then we're going to take the next three minutes to do that. And we're going to hear what some of you have come up with. And you are more than welcome to shamelessly put in a plug for whatever it is that you do. All right. Sound good? Everybody say that sounds great, Adrienne. Thank you. All right. Three minutes starting now. Feel more than welcome to work with the person next to you. It's not a test. Either or, your choice. So the question is, did anybody not hear the question? No? You didn't hear the question either? Perfect. All right, so the question. This guy was yakking too much. So product to service, if you're a developer, then you can do it all based on your plugin. If you're a content distributor, you can do it based on your website. Think of a way immediately, given the points that we just discussed. Page refreshes, content loading, aesthetically pleasing, reporting that you could use to improve your product and service and provide a better user experience. Make sense? We good? Good, you have two minutes. Oh, you're great? Awesome. You got some good points? You already know the answer? I have my answer. Oh, perfect. All right, well, we're going to be talking to you first then. Needs like music. Needs like jeopardy music. Technology is moving at an increasing rate. That is for sure. All for the better, though? Yes. All for the better. Everybody saying nobody got time for that. Everybody raise if you need more time. You need more time? All right, you have an extra minute. And then we're going to take some answers. So did we change it up? Did I go to do it up? Yeah. Yeah? It's good. Is that all right? Yeah. Yeah. At least if it's built a good nearer, instead of a short, you know, it's something that the client can probably use to edit, edit, so they need to. Exactly, because if it's a short code builder, they don't know what's going on. Like Beaver Builder, Thrive Architect, all that stuff. They don't know. Yeah. In one ear or the other? No, it doesn't stick. Yeah. They're changing it, if ever, and then a month or two down the line, they're like, how do I do this? It's like the simplest thing. Thrive's me nuts every time. That's why I got out of that business, though. And I understand entirely why I don't retain it, because it's like taxes. Yeah. But once a year, it will remember something. All right, hold that thought. All right, stop. Thank you. All right, let's take, you know, let's hear what some of you have thought of about how you can greatly improve your user experience for the benefit of the entire world in the WordPress community. Raise your hand if you'd like to share. Great, thank you. What's your name? Nicholas. All right, stand up, Nicholas, and tell everybody what you would do. For appealing visual design, I need higher readability. Faster page loads, yeah, close three. All right, great. So W3 cache plugin for faster page loads. If you can eliminate page load altogether, that'd be preferable. Better design, theme builder of choice. And what was your other one? More readable. More readable? Bigger font size. Everybody say thank you. Thank you. All right, who else would like to share? Please stand, tell us your name. What's your plugin? So people get to know who's behind the hot sauce before I actually become the hot sauce person. My takeaway from you today was about creating user experience, because I'm changing over so that when you go to the website, you find the hot sauce first. Because I'm realizing if you go there and find the hot sauce first, if you're looking for hot sauce, you'll be discouraged by seeing the blog and not seeing the hot sauce. Makes sense. If you go to the hot sauce, and then if you go there for the blog, and then you find the hot sauce, it's OK. So I'm going to change the user experience by making it so that when you get to my page, it takes you to the hot sauce. If you've done something with the blog, it takes you to the hot sauce. If you've done something with the hot sauce, it takes you back to the hot sauce.  That is a eureka moment. All right, who else wants to follow that up? All right, we got one. I work with this guy, full disclosure. That's a great idea. So home page, come to the button. They got two buttons. They're there for one of two reasons. They either need a truck, or they need a truck part. Direct them to the area of choice. If they got multi-site or whatever, then take them to the appropriate multi-site for whatever e-commerce portion of the plugin that they have in there. So if you sell to products and services like your blog versus hot sauce, they could be there, or it could be there for either one of two reasons. Direct them to the most appropriate page and the least amount of clicks possible, just by giving them a simple two buttons and that massive overlay sliding header that you really need to get rid of, because that's so 2007. And making sure that they have the easiest way of finding what they need. All right, who else would like to share? We got one in the back there. What's your name, please? William. William. Gratis, and Judy, you have a site to our practice called condoinformation.ca. We get 35,000 to 40,000 visits every month. It's a lot of visits. People looking for condo information when in crisis. Condo information when in crisis. That is to say, there's some crisis in the building. Things aren't going right. Otherwise, they just fall asleep and pay their fees without care.  So my concept, which I struggle with, is that I would like to monetize that, because we give away all that advice now. We get data. We get insights into things going on. We see the politics of the industry and we understand who's crooks and who's not crooks. We get intel, which is valuable for our other work in products animation. But what we don't do is monetize those people who are in crisis and presumably motivated to pay what I would colloquially only call a membership or a support, hand-holding, some kind of thing that says, join us. That brings up a whole set of issues, which include terms of service, performance, et cetera. But the idea of a membership-driven or subscription-driven or back-end-driven, multi-tier membership. I would leave anything that has multi-tier in it immediately sounds like a pyramid scheme. No, I don't think that's a question. But would anybody like the opportunity to answer that question? I would just say, either give referrals to professional services or ancillary services that can help them in their crisis. Help organize their building, politically incite. There's also other resources we control. Thousands of pages of material that empowers people. They get empowerment and knowledge, which is really what it's all about. We can't do the work. Empowering is knowledge. Clarity is power. We have a suggestion. Let's take Nick first, and then. I was going to say, just get some lawyers to put some ads on the page. Well, yeah, there's a bunch of crew lawyers, so that's a problem. Still, you can show them. Yeah, we give referrals to the recruit lawyers. Yeah, so. Yeah, have them paperwork. No, that's not a, that doesn't work, because they establish their relationship directly. Adrian, talk about Charles Fournier. So Charles Fournier is a self-taught day trader. He has a very conservative and long-term investment strategy that he used to post publicly about his wins, his losses, his dividend earnings, and all that stuff on a blog that he published for free, and he gained about 2,000 followers, subscribers to his website, users, and he came to us and asked us to monetize that. We threw up a WP member on his site. We gave them two subscription options. They could pay monthly, or they could pay yearly. People don't understand multi-tier, add-on, stuff like that. Make it simple, keep it easy. One price, you get a discounted price. You play yearly, you get a monthly price, right? Those are your two options, and that's what works the best. And then everything else is a one-time fee. Don't add in subscriptions and upgrades and all that stuff. That gets complicated not only for you to manage, but them to understand. So keep it simple. Protect pages, so easiest way in order to get those people is they read half a blog post, so they read half of an article. They get to the bottom. It's blurred out. It says, hey, you want to read the rest of this. It's going to cost you whatever, 14-day free trial. So all you got to do, they're going to read their article, and they're either going to realize that this is the greatest thing this slide shows, or they're going to cancel within the 14 days. Either way, you're not really out. It doesn't cost you anything to provide free content for 14 days. And if they decide to leave, then you're not out of any money. If they decide to cancel after the first billing period, you're not out any money. You're not out of any money at any of those periods. So it's a really smart strategy to just give them a very simple, and I'm supposed to wrap this up. Does that answer your question? Everybody give them a big hand. I'm done. Thank you for coming. Everybody have a great day.