The Digital Stage

Andi Graham (00:02.497)
Good morning and welcome to The Digital Stage I'm here with Warren today and we have a little bit of a strange episode today where we don't have a guest, but we're going to talk about some of the work that Warren and his agency Plank are doing to build an ethical web process framework collective. And we'll talk through the evolution of that, but I'm really excited to dig into this and to get some of these standards adopted and this approach adopted and to join your collective. So.

Hey Warren, I can't wait to hear more about it.

Warren Wilansky (00:34.318)
Thanks Andi, hopefully it won't be too strange today.

Andi Graham (00:37.025)
It's not too strange. I want to know, so I'm reading about this ethical web collective and I read about it when you launched a bit. Can you tell me the origins? Where did this come from?

Warren Wilansky (00:39.118)
Hehehe.

Warren Wilansky (00:47.502)
you know, I think it was one Christmas holiday break, probably had too much time on my hands and just was like, you know, bantering about some ideas in my head. And I started to just think about this concept of like, trying to do and create websites that kind of bet, you know, do bet, do good for the world. And the more I started to think about it, I was like, well, you know, we do a lot of the things that we're now calling this ethical web collective. and a lot of it is just, you know, best practices for.

how to develop websites, but we just were not kind of calling it anything. We just were kind of doing all these things, half -baking it into our process and not formalizing it. So while I struggled with the word ethical at first, because it's just big, it's a big word that kind of takes a big stand, I was like, well, why don't we just take a big stand? What's wrong with taking a big stand? So we decided that we were going to formalize in writing.

Andi Graham (01:32.577)
Mm -hmm.

Warren Wilansky (01:43.63)
share with the world what we're calling, we used to call it ethical web framework. And our team decided that they really wanted to focus more on the idea of a collective, which then means we wanna not be the ones who are kind of are holding up ourselves against the rest of the world to some standard, but a shared standard that we hopefully all can live by.

Andi Graham (02:00.897)
Hmm. I love that idea and I can't wait for us to start implementing these things as well. I think the first framework you came out with was tied to sort of the, you going through the B Corp process. Is that right?

Warren Wilansky (02:16.206)
I think it kind of ties in, you know, it's this idea of holding ourselves accountable for the things that we say we are. You know, I think we've always tried to run a company that does good and tries to make the world a better place. But it's one thing to say, yes, we do that and kind of believe that everybody else just has to believe us and trust us on it versus going through the process of becoming a B Corp, which then states the world by certain standards that we live by. And in the case of the ethical website,

collective same idea we want to share with the world the kind of four pillars that we build our websites based on and admit that we're not perfect and we're not always getting a hundred percent right but we're aiming towards them.

Andi Graham (02:58.305)
So before we dive into the four pillars, which I am excited to explore, I'm curious how this has been taken by your clients and in the world. Do you have these conversations in the sales process? Is this something you bring up during the build? How has it worked into your day to day?

Warren Wilansky (03:14.638)
So we always bring it up. It's baked into conversations we have. In other words, if we're having a conversation with a prospective client or an existing client, we will always bring it up and present it. We're not shy about it. We're not hiding it, partly because if it doesn't matter to somebody, chances are they probably shouldn't be a client of ours. We don't want to work with people that don't care about these things. And in fact, I would say almost every time we bring it up, people respond to it like it's a breath of fresh air and are happy to hear that we are willing to stand by these things. You know, we actually...

Andi Graham (03:30.305)
Mm -hmm.

Warren Wilansky (03:44.398)
got a project recently specifically because of our commitment to accessibility. And you know, it's a standard for us, but a lot of people who aren't experts at the web don't even think about its importance. And not only its importance, in many parts of the world, especially the United States and Canada, there's legal implications of not being accessible and compliant.

Andi Graham (04:03.069)
And in parts of the world that are not the US and Canada, where there are extreme issues with performance and speed, it's even, it's just as important, but for very different reasons. There might not be legal implications, but there are accessibility implications of just being able to load things on your phone and, you know, have that great mobile experience that considers everybody and is inclusive of everyone. So I think it's really a broad framework. I think it's something that addresses a lot of the

things that we, like you said, we think about on our day -to -day. So let's go into the four pillars. So number one is...

Warren Wilansky (04:39.758)
Accessibility and inclusion.

Andi Graham (04:41.505)
Okay, and so what does that look like?

Warren Wilansky (04:43.982)
So the good thing is that W3C, which is a web standards organization that really tries to set standards for the web, has set out very specific web accessibility guidelines. For people who don't know it, it's the WCAG 2 .2, and we meet the AA guidelines generally. There are different levels, but basically these are just a series of specific expectations for a website to be able to meet the guidelines so that they can be accessible to people with lots of different kind of.

issues, lifetime, life concerns, standards, different things like that. So we make sure that we meet those standards.

Andi Graham (05:21.793)
And a lot of people think about inclusivity and accessibility with regards to people with sight disabilities, but it's so much more than that. It's more than just dealing with contrast because of color blindness. I mean, there's issues. I look at, you know, I have a friend who's got Parkinson's disease and how difficult it is for that person to navigate around a website where everything that you click is tiny and, you know, things like that. It makes it really hard. So, and then, so what's number two?

Warren Wilansky (05:51.758)
Number two is privacy and security. We take that very seriously. We are well aware of, you know, there's especially some clients have the need or expectation or think that they should just hoover up as much data as they can on people who visit their site or buy something from them. And our point of view is, you know, we believe that you should store relevant data. You should give people the ability to kind of be unseen at a certain point if they don't want to have a relationship with.

Andi Graham (06:07.713)
Yeah.

Warren Wilansky (06:20.654)
a website or a company and use the data in a responsible way. In other words, don't take it and manipulate it in a way that you don't have an agreement with. I mean, most websites have privacy policies at this point. And the key thing is be clear and live up to what you're saying you're going to do with somebody's data.

Andi Graham (06:39.649)
Yeah. And are Canada's, are there legal implications in Canada with regards to data and privacy? Because in the US, you know, we are not seeing that. There are some states who have implemented their own, but nationwide, we don't have the same standards.

Warren Wilansky (06:57.966)
Yeah, I mean, GDPR, which is the European standard, is usually the standard that we follow. I'm drawing a blank on the local law that was just put in place for Quebec, which is the province that I'm based in, is as serious as GDPR. And I think most Canadian provinces are going to start taking the same approach. I know California, for example, has very serious privacy standards, but not every state does.

Andi Graham (07:01.345)
Mm -hmm.

Andi Graham (07:14.849)
Andi Graham (07:20.929)
Very.

And a lot of the sort of plugins that deal with GDPR and data privacy, you actually can, which I think is such a strange practice, but you can actually set them so that they only apply to visitors who are coming from those places that have those laws rather than making it a standard across all users because it truly is a best practice. And so are you building in that way or you're building just across the board, everybody's using these same standards?

Warren Wilansky (07:53.166)
We usually build across the board same standards. I mean, I guess we could if a client actually wanted to go in that direction, but I just don't feel like, why not live up to a gold standard and apply to everybody? Like sure, we could limit it for this state or that state or this country or that country, but I think it's better just to look at privacy and security from one perspective and just apply it as a general standard. That's the way we look at it.

Andi Graham (07:55.105)
Yeah.

Andi Graham (08:05.217)
Yes.

Andi Graham (08:21.281)
Yeah, I totally agree with that. And this harkens back to the comment that anybody who would want to do it differently probably isn't the best client for you in the first place. Like there might be some misalignment of those values.

Warren Wilansky (08:34.734)
Yeah, I agree with that. I mean, and I understand, you know, like, you know, we live in a world where, you know, with, with cookies and things like that, and, you know, user data that people have, you know, you can start to mine a lot of information about people. And the question is, sure, just because you can, do you need to, you know, does it really matter that much?

Andi Graham (08:50.945)
Mm -hmm.

Andi Graham (08:56.641)
Yeah, it is a big conversation and I should think people, you know, my husband and I are very different in this place where I actually love giving up my data and I like having really targeted ads sent to me so that I can see the boots that I might want for Christmas or I can, you know, shop from an e -commerce perspective anyways. I find it to be really useful. And my husband is completely the opposite having worked in public education and dealt with student and, you know, sort of more protected class data.

And just seeing how the future could be, where it could be used in very nefarious ways. He's always been a very, very private person and has very private, doesn't have social media, et cetera, et cetera. And so those conversations are always really interesting to me. I'm also really shocked when people learn how data is collected and used and that they don't understand that sometimes. So it's a strange place for us as the people building these systems and tools.

to be educating our clients on that stuff a lot of the times too. So that's good.

Warren Wilansky (09:56.558)
Yeah, but you know, I respect your point of view. I mean, if that's the relationship you want to have because it creates a better buying experience for you, go for it. You know, like what I actually do is I've done things like go onto Facebook and actually like ads, which I don't like, and then dislike ads, which I don't like to kind of mess around with the algorithms and make sure that it's so irrelevant to me that I almost the advertising disappears because I don't want to see it. But, you know, you know, whenever I talk with people who are shocked that

Andi Graham (10:01.057)
Exactly. Yep.

Andi Graham (10:20.449)
Yep.

Warren Wilansky (10:24.782)
You know, they went to a website and then all of a sudden the boots that they were looking at are suddenly following them throughout the internet. They're like, how are they doing that? It's like, well, that's how these cross browser, these cross site cookies work. You know, you do something on one site, they're going to track you along. I mean, some of that's going to change as we go to more of a cookie list world, but there will be ways around it. You know, everybody will find ways to do things. Yeah.

Andi Graham (10:28.609)
Yeah.

Andi Graham (10:36.129)
Yep.

Andi Graham (10:43.457)
Well, they just delayed it again. Yeah. And they just delayed the deprecation of the cookie again, which, you know, Google has to figure out a way to make money and the cookie is how they make a lot of their revenue. And so that's going to be, it's going to be a really tough way, tough move for them. I think Apple does a good job with sort of the walled garden situation and keeping your data a little bit more private, but that's funny that you say that because that is, that was my husband's move. He has an Instagram because he's an artist. And so he has to put his art out into the world.

So to prevent people from tagging him and the algorithm or, you know, meta learning who he is, he frequently goes into Instagram and will randomly tag objects as himself. So a toaster or a tree or a random, you know, girl, or just all kinds of strange things so that it's never trained on his facial recognition, which I just think is so funny. So yeah, I'm not that way, but I love, he gets to be.

Warren Wilansky (11:38.574)
Right. I think it's going to be interesting as well when we start to get to a world where we're depending. Well, I was going to say something which I don't think will be true in a few years, which is, you know, people are going to be using AI bots a lot more often. And as people feed data into it, it's going to suddenly start, you know, personalizing itself to a lot of different ways. And we're lucky now that we're not seeing much advertising at all through this, but somebody is going to monetize AI.

Andi Graham (11:51.489)
Yes.

Warren Wilansky (12:05.166)
You know, like that's just the reality we're gonna live in. There's no question that if we're not being fed an ad directly, it's somehow gonna be fed directly through the discussions that we're having.

Andi Graham (12:14.337)
Yeah, that's interesting. I hadn't even thought about those implications. I mean, we talk about AI all the time, but as I was just mentioning facial recognition and now I'm thinking about the new OpenAI 4 .0. Is that what it's 4 .0 that just came out and how it does ingest video? And now all I'm thinking is like, it'll start learning who's in what videos and then be able to match you with other videos or see that these videos are related to these products and this type of behavior. And so now you're going to get targeting based on that, which it is a very...

it's a very deep well and I don't know where it ends. Like it just can keep, we can keep digging that. So I really do appreciate the, this is where the word ethical in my mind is the perfect word for how we address individuals' privacy and data because giving people that choice is so important, especially parents, you know, and giving parents the choice to make those decisions for their children as well, which is pretty highly regulated in the US as well, even though, you know, any kid over the age of,

10 knows how to get around it or eight, six, I don't know, they know how to get around it. So.

Warren Wilansky (13:14.698)
Hmm. Yeah, I mean, as you're mentioning that, what I think would be, and I'm not going to, I say interesting, but you know, these are the kind of implications we're going to have. You know, we all sit on Zoom now and have these calls. What happens when an AI bot starts to, let's say, look at the books on your bookcase, you know, and starts to analyze based on past book reading experiences and start recommending things. I mean, we're going to end up at that at some point.

Andi Graham (13:33.377)
Yeah.

Andi Graham (13:38.465)
We had something strange happen recently and I know these things are anomalous, but where we had a conversation in Slack about a particular product and then we're served ads for that product, both of us who were having the conversation within the next two days. And, you know, ad targetters would tell you that that's because.

they've just launched campaigns, you're their target market, there's all these other things that would signal that you would get the ad, but the timing of it is just always a little bit too suspicious for me to truly believe that there's not some sort of data sharing going on between these huge platforms. So I don't love it, but yeah, that is a piece of it for sure. And there's so much protected data out there that we don't consider, but all right, so data and privacy, that was number two. What's number three?

Warren Wilansky (14:22.126)
Number three is responsible development. That means taking into account search engine optimization, quality assurance, mobile experience, and speed and load time. Basically, what we want to have is we want to follow development principles, which means that sites are well optimized, bug -free, code -free, malicious code -free, device -independent so that people can have a great experience no matter what device they're on.

Andi Graham (14:45.025)
Mm -hmm.

Warren Wilansky (14:51.535)
and just generally follow best practices so that we are making sure that what we're delivering to people's browsers is a modern, quick, and you mentioned before the whole idea of somebody being on a slow connection. We wanna make sure that we're serving up an experience which is inclusive of as many people as possible.

Andi Graham (15:09.149)
Yeah, and this one too, I wonder how it relates and here's where the collective piece comes in. One of our core values at Big C for a long time, which we have recently changed into a different word, but was think long -term. And it wasn't just about making decisions that have a longer horizon than just the quick wins, but it was also about like building the right product for the users and for that being our clients and their own clients or customers, but building the right...

that sustains, that's sustainable for them, that they can actually go in and use and not sort of overselling and building something more big and complex. And I wonder how that sort of fits into that sort of responsible web development side as well, which is like actually building the right product sort of a thing. So I was thinking about that as well that could fit in that bucket a little bit too.

Warren Wilansky (16:00.366)
I think it totally fits in the bucket. I think it totally fits. Another one that our developers have talked about is developing code and documenting code for yourself from five years from now. In other words, if you have to run a project five years later, how is it going to be to actually do that? Or truthfully, we should be building for our clients' benefit. So let's say hypothetically, a client decides they want to work with somebody else afterwards. We believe in open source. We hand off the project.

Andi Graham (16:12.769)
huh.

Warren Wilansky (16:26.862)
but we should also hand it off in a state that is able to have another development team responsibly take it over and not kind of make their lives difficult.

Andi Graham (16:33.217)
Yeah. Yeah. We talk about that all the time as a WordPress shop, you know, a WordPress gets a, gets a beating sometimes when we're up against big clients or other agencies who are proposing a Drupal build or something else. And we just talk about the accessibility of finding other development teams to work on it. Like should our relationship not go well for whatever reason, you can take this to hundreds of other web shops who can dive into it and work on what we've built for you. And that.

I think that says a lot about who we are as humans and the sort of abundance mindset as well of just sort of doing business in this world from an ethical perspective. So, all right.

Warren Wilansky (17:09.294)
I mean, we take the exact same approach to, you know, we do a lot of WordPress development as well, probably about 50 % of our work. And that's one of the arguments we make. Other arguments are, you know, given that the internet is driven, 40 % of the internet is driven by WordPress, you're setting yourself up to have, to be a part of an ecosystem, which, you know, is wide and vast. And then coming to the fourth point, actually, one of the things that we've discovered is, you know, we partner with WP Engine. This isn't an ad for WP Engine.

But by focusing on doing on WordPress specific hosting, we know that they take pride in making sure that WordPress is secure, speedy. There's a caching system in front of it. And it comes to the fourth point, something that we know the WP Engine is carbon neutral. And environmental impact of our development is like the fourth pillar. And we want to take that into account. It's funny that people think that when they're loading a website, they don't realize.

Andi Graham (17:38.369)
Thank you.

Warren Wilansky (18:05.646)
well, how much energy could it be taking to load that web page? But if that web page is loaded and it's a let's say a high traffic site and it's loaded by millions of people, there is an environmental impact of the internet and the use of the internet.

Andi Graham (18:17.257)
Yeah, there is massively. That's been one of the biggest criticisms of AI is just the computing power that it takes is so environmentally heavy. Same with cryptocurrency, right? Like that's the biggest downside of these things. So I think those are some of the biggest problems people are trying to solve. But I love that we as web developers actually have the option to make choices in the vendors that we use and the tools that we provide. And then, like you said, building high performing sites that are fast is also really helpful in reducing that.

that burn.

Warren Wilansky (18:48.494)
And there are some just simple wins. Like, I mean, here's a simple one, and I'll just put it out there for anybody who is uploading an image onto a website. You don't have to load a five -meg image. You don't have to load a 10 -meg image. Like, you can actually just optimize it slightly and get it to be, you know, one -tenth the size. And you do that across the internet, it makes a difference.

Andi Graham (18:59.009)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Andi Graham (19:08.225)
Makes a huge difference, I know, and for the people using your website, for you actually doing that work, for the environment, all of it, it's always the best practice, so that's funny. So how does this play out in the process of you guys building websites? Do you have checks and balances? Are there certain things built into your process that you are sort of measuring against? Hey, did we hit these criteria? What does that look like?

Warren Wilansky (19:33.294)
Yeah, so I mean, I'm not the most technically minded on my team anymore. So I can't list off the top of my head all the different tools. But there are certain ones like Lighthouse Scoring, which isn't built into Chrome. There are other tools. And now we don't only exclusively depend on that, because actually you can build inaccessible websites that actually can fool Lighthouse reports. But using that, there's a few other different tools that we use.

Andi Graham (19:38.497)
Heheheheh

Andi Graham (19:45.569)
Mm -hmm.

Andi Graham (19:55.329)
Yeah.

Warren Wilansky (19:59.982)
So we actually don't depend on one tool because one tool can get skewed in one way or the other, but we use three or four different tools so that our front -end developers, back -end developers, designers, project managers, even our content team go through and use all the different tools to ensure that everything is meeting these standards. We've developed some checklists that are constantly evolving, which is probably why we call it a collective, that unfortunately, if we set a standard today,

Andi Graham (20:12.257)
Mm -hmm.

Andi Graham (20:21.505)
Yeah.

Warren Wilansky (20:26.35)
a new browser version comes out and we have to reimagine the standard. So it's a constantly always evolving process. That's why we always state that we're not perfect citizens, that these are things we're striving towards, just because the goal posts are constantly changing.

Andi Graham (20:29.633)
Yeah. Yeah.

Andi Graham (20:41.697)
Yeah, and a website should not be considered a project that launches either, right? It's a presence and it's an ongoing investment that you need to be coddling and tending to like a garden. It should be growing and changing with the growing, changing needs of the world around it and the ecosystem that it's a part of for sure. So that's how we, I mean, I know you guys do too, but that's how we always talk about websites. Yeah, we need this, we need this, we need this, we need this. And I'll say, well, do you need it?

to launch with that or can we continue to add things and, you know, it's a way to talk through budget issues or talk through even timing issues, all of those different things. That's, you know, that's what I liked about the web is when I started working in the web in 2000s, I loved that I could change things. I'd throw something up and I'd say, I don't like that tomorrow. I'm going to change it. I'm going to fix this. I'm going to do that. And I've always, I still love that. I know it's gotten a lot more complex since when I was, you know, slinging code back in the...

early days, but it still allows us to constantly be better and do better versus having that printed brochure where it lists the price of something that has now changed and we've got to throw out boxes and boxes of paper. So the old days.

Warren Wilansky (21:51.086)
Yeah, I love the I still love the iterative nature of the of the internet and it's part of the reason why we like working with with on projects that are long -term and not just one -off and go away we want we like having Clients we can collaborate with for five years ten years, whatever it is I mean it's and and also we like being partners because if let's say hypothetically we had a site off and now a team of ten people With our clients take it over

Andi Graham (21:54.529)
Yes.

Warren Wilansky (22:15.214)
Not everybody is gonna do everything. They're gonna forget an alt tag here. They're gonna upload an image that's improperly sized. They're gonna put a video in a place that maybe isn't the best place for it. And if we can be there to be an advisor and give our best advice on top of doing additional development to make the project newer and fresher, like we usually will talk with clients about redesigning a website every three to five years, but we've had websites kind of last longer than that as long as we're continuing to iterate on them.

Andi Graham (22:38.881)
Mm -hmm.

Warren Wilansky (22:44.334)
so that they then five years later, we've improved them enough that they feel like a different website than what was launched five years before.

Andi Graham (22:50.785)
Yeah, it's incredible when you put that level of thought and care into something upfront and you're not building it with all the modern trends and you're keep building something that's sustainable and performative. You should be able to get a little bit more use like, you know, life out of it for sure. So I'm impressed by the massive scale of how all of this flows into your projects. Do you train?

when you hand off a project and some of these best practices and here's how you guys can keep up this sort of approach and what you need to think about from a content editing perspective.

Warren Wilansky (23:29.87)
Yeah, now that we've got a content strategy team, we definitely invest time and energy into documenting best practices for our clients, doing training with them. You know, we cannot be assured that they're going to always follow it. And that's okay. I mean, like, you know, everybody's at a different level of technical knowledge or content and strategy knowledge. But we do what we can to hope that our clients can continue adopting the best practices as much as possible.

Andi Graham (23:43.137)
Mm -hmm.

Andi Graham (23:58.209)
Yeah. So if we want to get involved at, because we do, how do you suggest that other agencies or other web teams or other, you know, individuals sort of contribute to this collective?

Warren Wilansky (24:11.374)
I mean, I think what we probably with our limited resources, we need to take the next step. So we launched, you know, a kind of sub domain where we talk about what we're doing. I think the idea now should be to start creating resources and tools so that we can start to, you know, share some of our knowledge and then invite others into it to kind of share theirs. And hopefully as a, as a collective, we can actually create, you know, standards that are even better, even stronger tools so that people can measure more.

Andi Graham (24:24.385)
Mm.

Andi Graham (24:38.945)
Yeah.

Warren Wilansky (24:39.502)
We're not there yet, but I think that's probably the next step that I think we should take.

Andi Graham (24:43.393)
I love those ideas and I want to be part of it. So I know you'll let me know. We want to build too. Good. All right. Well, thank you so much for sharing all of that with us, Warren. I think it's really interesting. I can't wait to see it sort of trickled out into the world. I think it's a really important initiative and I appreciate your work.

Warren Wilansky (24:47.662)
Yeah, we will. Absolutely.

Warren Wilansky (25:02.478)
I appreciate the interview and you know what? I know we have some other interviews coming up in the next podcast episode so maybe we'll just bring this up with different people and just see what they think of it.

Andi Graham (25:12.449)
I love that idea. That's excellent. All right. Have a good afternoon.

Warren Wilansky (25:17.038)
Okay, you too.