Let me share something fascinating: The Web is experiencing its most significant transformation since its beginning in the 1990s, shifting from human-centric design to a "robot-first" approach where AI systems are becoming primary consumers of web content.
While early web protocols helped manage human access across devices and restrict access by robots like search engine crawlers, today's websites actively court robot engagement for improved user experiences, automation and to feed the algorithm and language models. However, this shift brings challenges – from AI manipulation concerns to questions about data privacy and algorithmic bias.
Remember when "mobile-first" was the hot trend in web development? Well, get ready for "AI-first," or with all the confusion around AI as a term, let’s just call it what it really is: Robots-first.
New standards and protocols are emerging to help website owners manage AI interactions while preserving the web's core mission of democratized knowledge sharing. This article will explore how these changes impact web development strategies impacting how one approaches web development.
Read moreOnce again the big stories this year covered AI (surprise!), but also articles on designing sustainable systems and digital equity made it to the top 5 alongside a piece on universal CMS.
It’s that time of year, where we look back at another year of learning and networking. We really like to have a good conversation and meet in person, but sharing openly as much as possible is also an important part of what we do. Sharing is caring!
Keeping with tradition, here are the five posts, which seemed to resonate the most based on readership and engagement numbers.
Read moreWhile CMS vendors have historically failed to meet accessibility needs, we have now started seeing large corporations concerned about ensuring their digital platforms are accessible.
With the arrival of more and stricter legislation, and importantly also enforcement, there is growing pressure to improve, with accessibility now a central factor in procurement decisions. The European Accessibility Act (EAA) is coming, very soon, and it is already having a big impact on businesses around the world. In Ireland it is being implemented with the threat of prison time!
In a recent members' call we were joined by Gavin Colborne from Little Forest in the UK, who told us more about what's happening with digital accessibility right now and what's around the corner waiting for us next year.
Read moreIn a crowded and confusing marketplace, buyers increasingly turn to their digital agencies for platform decisions, but will the winning agencies of tomorrow keep pushing open source CMS?
The marketplace is also moving quickly, innovation is happening at a breakneck pace and will open source CMS be able to keep up? In particular when it comes to AI and the need to create faster, safer, smarter digital experiences.
To make matters more bleak, as these lines are being written, WordPress is struggling with trademark lawsuits and other messy stuff that’s threatening to implode the community, Drupal is reinventing itself with the release of Drupal CMS and what about good old TYPO3? Why should next gen digital leaders chose to work with any of these 20+ year old dinosaurs?
Change is necessary, already happening and it’s not too late. I consider myself both a champion and good friend of open source and in my keynote at the TYPO3 Conference 2024 held recently in Düsseldorf, Germany, I delivered a call to action both for TYPO3 community and also for the broader open source CMS community to keep changing to survive.
Read moreAt this year’s annual end-of-year collab meeting in Hamburg, we took a closer look at what we have learned in 2024 by bringing together our local groups with an open invite to other community members, a few selected speakers and created a curated packed afternoon with a dozen lightning talks.
Attending this year was a bigger crowd than past years — a diverse set of digital leaders from large, complex and global organisations like Canyon, Jungheinrich, Lufthansa, OTTO alongside agencies such as Diconium and Thoughtworks as well as software firms like CoreMedia, Magnolia, Staffbase and a few other friends from near and far.
Employee communication platform software firm Haiilo hosted us in their charming offices, which was a fitting scene for learning and networking.
Read moreAI is clearly a big thing, but as the old saying goes: The devil is in the details, and small details can make a big difference, also when it comes to meaningful usage of AI.
Kontent.ai, a CMS vendor from the Czech Republic, last week won the 2024 Small Feature Award showing how AI can help editors inside the CMS with those details that are a part of every day tasks — tasks that have mostly been under-served in a crowded CMS market so far.
Held at the Boye Aarhus 24 conference and competing with 4 other vendors, CEO and Founder Petr Palas, completed his winning pitch in just less than 6 minutes. In brief: We saw how the review process inside the CMS can assist the editor in adhering to pre-defined guidelines. This could be to assist with the tone of voice, or for regulated industries it could be legal requirements that you need to follow.
Read moreAs someone who has witnessed the evolution of programming languages over five decades, I've noticed an interesting parallel:
Writing prompts for AI is remarkably similar to traditional programming. The only real difference is the syntax we use to express our intentions.
Let me take you on a journey through time.
Read moreWe all work to live. But we feel most alive at work, when we are doing something that seems valuable.
In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, artificial intelligence (AI) is redefining the very essence of work. Beyond just automation and efficiency, AI holds the promise of making our work more meaningful—but it also poses significant risks.
Richard Harbridge, Chief Technology Officer and Microsoft 365 MVP at Toronto-based Microsoft partner 2toLead, joined a recent members' call, where he unpacked how AI can both enhance and challenge the value of our work.
We delved into the double-edged nature of AI adoption, exploring how it can amplify our skills, foster innovation, and drive deeper connections in the workplace. But with these opportunities come real concerns: AI’s potential to devalue human expertise, disrupt roles, and reshape what we consider valuable in our professional lives.
Richard guided us through the complexities of AI change management, offering insights into how organisations can align AI investments with employee-centric goals to create a harmonious coexistence between technology and employee intent. We also heard about actionable strategies to ensure AI empowers rather than undermines our professional growth. Finally, we wrapped up with some of the big positives and big negatives AI can have for our work.
Read moreWhat does it take to build and lead organisations where people want to work?
Morten Elvang is an expert on strategy execution and has toured many of our peer groups in the past months talking about strategy execution and getting big things done.
In a recent members' call, he told us more about how work is changing and its implications for all enterprises. It was an interactive session, where we talked about the need for more openness, strategy in a steering role, flexible organisations and more.
Read moreAfter almost two decades of only niche activity among the pure content findability experts, suddenly the topic of search has been a big one in our recent conferences and peer group meetings.
It’s almost as if when Google was added to the English dictionary in 2006, progress stopped. I realise that’s unfair, also to Google, which arguably has made progress, but still for many years, two things were certain when it came to search: Google was the king and on most websites site search was broken.
It's clear that something is happening at the moment
Read moreHow can you best leverage personalisation to create effortless and meaningful digital experiences?
Personalisation is one of those topics we keep coming back to in our community. To some, it’s the notorious next phase, while we also have members who have taken it quite far and built business-critical experimentation and personalisation practices.
In a recent members' call we heard 10 takeaways on successful personalisation presented by Alex Net at Infinitum Digital, a digital agency based in Barcelona, Spain.
Alex opened by setting the stage with this quote:
“Personalisation is about removing friction in the visitor journey”
Read moreEmail is far from dead. With billions of emails sent to and from individuals around the world each day, there is more email now than ever before.
The new book "Mailed It!" is due out on August 20 and changes everything by:
showing how to craft and send the most effective emails possible
assisting email marketers in improving results
demonstrating how to use emails to build trusting relationships
It's a guide book on crafting emails that build relationships and get results written by Ashley Budd and Dayana Kibilds.
We’ve followed the creation of the book closely (see Using email for action from December) and in a recent members’s call we celebrate the new book with the two authors and heard more about what's inside.
To get the conversation started, the authors shared a few slides on how email is changing and we also briefly covered a few helpful templates.
Read moreA new, efficient approach to building digital experiences and a much improved live demo from Toronto-based software start-up Kajoo is what edged them to win a very close race at the CMS Idol contest held at the CMS Connect 24 conference in Montreal earlier this month.
Kajoo offers an AI-powered digital experience builder, which converts sketches, Figma designs and legacy websites to modern Jamstack code.
It’s a solution to a well known problem in the crowded CMS space: How do I bring down the time-to-value and also the cost of implementation.
Read moreThe mission for Scale Consortium is quite simple: To inspire more enterprise companies to choose WordPress.
The Scale Consortium is a newly formed group made up of representatives from some of the most prolific and successful enterprise WordPress agencies. It was created to address the evolving landscape of the enterprise layer of WordPress and was formed in 2023 after a multi-year attempt at getting a collaboration off the group between WordPress agencies.
It makes good sense for the WordPress community to work more formally together, but specifically getting agencies to collaborate through ups and downs remains tricky. From the customer point of view, it’s long been confusing to navigate the immense WordPress community and we’ve often heard from group members that getting the implementation right remains tricky, in particular for those complex challenges faced by large, global organisations.
Since being formed, several other enterprise agencies have joined the Scale Consortium, so that as of writing 10 agencies are a part of it.
In a recent members' call we heard from two of the founding members Karim Marucchi at Crowd Favorite and Tom Willmot at Human Made. The conversation started with the problem they are trying to solve, so let’s dive in.
Read moreWith “Seeds of Change” as the conference theme, PSEWeb 2024 focused on innovation and progress. A perfect venue to learn more about how those pushing digital forward in higher education are thinking differently.
The event was held in Olds, Alberta (<1 hour from Calgary) and brought together digital communicators and marketers in particular from Canada. The program was well curated and avoided the current trap of only talking AI, but rather packed with sessions covering most of the moving parts at the moment, including sessions on social media, internal communications, digital marketing, journey mapping and reducing your university’s digital carbon footprint.
I gave a presentation on how we might make digital smarter, safer and more sustainable based on insights from our peer group meetings in both North America and Europe.
Before moving onto my talk (see further down for recording and slides), let me share a few other highlights from my conference experience.
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