Matt Sutherland
Head of Technology, true digital
Bristol, United Kingdom
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Matt is an Umbraco MVP and a keen advocate for all things Umbraco. He brings over 15 years of agency experience to try and distil client needs into actionable, technical problem solving,
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Everything you need to know about the upcoming European Accessibility Act
So, you might have heard about the European Accessibility Act. You might have heard that it is imminent (like right now!).. but we both know… you haven’t really done much about it yet.
That is because for a lot of people it’s actually pretty confusing as to what is required for us as digital creators and for the web platforms we build.
What the European Accessibility Act is here to do is to unify standards within Accessibility across Europe.. whilst also allowing each country to have their interpretation of those standards.
In this talk I will highlight:
- The guidelines as they are set out that you now need to adhere to
- Which sectors and ‘who’ the guidelines apply to
- How that impacts you and your process
- How you might test whether you are meeting the standards
- What might happen if you don’t comply (spoiler.. they’re pretty big!)
I will then outline a set of principles and considerations that you can implement on your websites, your digital products, services and platforms.
Structured Data: Getting Your Products Cited by the Machines
Admit it — you've spent hours agonising over your product pages. The photography, the layout, the microcopy on the "Add to Basket" button. But you've probably never really stopped to consider what happens when a shopper stops searching and starts asking — when instead of typing a query into Google and scanning ten blue links, they ask ChatGPT or an AI Overview "which of these is best for me?" and simply get told. In that world, you don't win by ranking. You win by being the source the AI trusts enough to cite. And whether a machine can confidently repeat facts about your product — or quietly makes them up instead — comes down to whether that product's data is structured, consistent and machine-readable. Behind every rich result and every AI-generated recommendation sits structured data. And behind good structured data sits a product model built for the job rather than bolted on afterwards.
In this talk we'll arm you with:
- Why structured data is now table stakes, not a nice-to-have
- A reason to treat your PIM as the single source of truth and some of the fun things this means for you
- A practical, repeatable way to ship this in Umbraco
- A clear-eyed view of the shift from SEO to GEO and what even is AEO?
Delivering Enterprise Commerce simply: Bringing multiple brands under one roof
Admit it. When you think of Commerce platforms you mostly think about a website where you can buy clothes, or beers, or something ‘off the shelf’ as a B2C customer.
But what if the platform you’re building needs to provide commerce to wholesale, to trade or custom made to measure products whilst also considering B2C?
Through our case study we will demonstrate how we took multiple separate platforms serving different users and built one platform to accommodate them all.
We will discuss how we and why we made important tech decisions and arm you with:
- Why we used headless Umbraco Cloud
- How Struct PIM and Umbraco Commerce make complex products super simple
- How Umbraco wins in the Enterprise market
- The difficulty in trying to move multiple platforms into one place whilst keeping the ‘make sure the logic works the same as before’ requirement in place
- How this project considers Orchestration versus Composability versus platform administration
A Website, an Email, and an AI Summary walk into a Bar…
Ok, so in a world where OpenAI processes around 2.5 billion prompts per day and around a 5th of those are product related requests. It is clear that the way people are searching online is changing, and the source of their information is changing too.
Optimising for this new way of searching is known as GEO. Generative Engine optimistation.
And therefore we have to start asking ourselves.. are our commerce platforms or products ready for this?.. are we ready for the rise of the agentic AI and its role in purchasing journeys... and what are the implications if not?
In this talk we will highlight:
- How you can get your platforms ready for GEO
- How you can align all of your product data sources utilising Umbraco and Umbraco compose
- How we can use tools like Struct and utilise AI successfully to counteract hallucinations and unreliable product data being returned
- How the introduction of Umbraco AI can help us build for a world of agentic commerce
Navigating the web through colour-blind eyes: It's not all black and white
Admit it. You've launched a website without considering the impact of your website on people who are colour blind.
I know I have and I AM colour blind!
Colour vision deficiencies come in varying degrees of severity and therefore it can be difficult to know how your design decisions impact your users who suffer.
In this session, I will discuss my journey with colour vision deficiency, highlight how it affects internet users on your site and arm you with considerations and tools for a more inclusive website design process.
Fighting ghosts and monsters: How we prevent scary hallucinations in our AI platforms
AI is everywhere and will no doubt be prominent within the talks at Codegarden either discussing its use, how technologists can benefit from it or how it can be used to infer or predict outcomes.
But our predilection to assume that all answers from AI are correct is fraught with danger. Data is fundamental to the ability of an LLM to perform effectively.
There’s a reason why one study started to predict that measuring rulers being present in an image was a sign of a malignant tumour and there’s a reason that ‘Tay’ a Microsoft chatbot learnt discrimination within hours of going public.
That reason, is the data that was used to train them.
In this talk I will discuss how we can protect ourselves against data bias. How the quality, quantity, and representative nature of the data used to train an AI system directly affects its ability to perform and I will highlight some of the examples where this has not been the case and where remarkable (and scary) AI hallucinations have occurred.
Decomposing a monolith, one API at a time.
We will explore our long term digital transformation project with St Austell and how after winning the work we built a successful monolithic architecture to support them across 40+ sites with 3 different users (holiday and pub seekers, information seekers and commerce) all underpinned by Umbraco
However, there were a few key decisions that have allowed us to slowly break up the monolith and move them towards a more composable, API first approach to their architecture
We will talk about the introduction of microservices, how we overcame initial restrictions of the monolith that stopped us from load balancing, how we introduced Algolia as part of the upgrade from Umbraco 7 to 10 which helped us focus on the ROI of each commerce user and how an API first approach to 3rd party integrations has meant that we have successfully swapped in and out ERP systems, product import tools and many things inbetween
Building a world class commerce platform through collaboration and composability
Focussing on client needs is key to the successful launch of any software project. But how do you exceed expectations when you are only responsible for one part of the process?
Too often, the Agency/Client relationship can feel like a game of tennis – but it doesn’t have to!
This talk will arm you with the tools to collaborate across client, agency, 3rd party tools and vendors to create a shared cross-team ownership that is working towards a common goal, meeting your client’s needs.
After years of continuously iterating on their previous legacy platform we worked with the client to outline a roadmap and architecture that re-platformed, re-built and re-establishes their online presence across their suite of e-commerce sites. Utilising a component-based approach to facilitate multiple brands, multiple personas, multiple sites all under one Umbraco instance.
We will discuss the advantages of keeping the client involved at every step of the process like:
- Collaborating on the architecture we were working towards
- Collaborating on the buying decision on each of the components in our composable architecture including how we landed on Umbraco, Umbraco Commerce, Struct PIM and Azure.
- Collaborating through the build process itself to prioritise quickly, solve problems as a combined team all whilst iterating and innovating on their long-standing approach to selling shutters.
This talk will impart knowledge to developers, innovators, business owners, content editors, account managers, RFP and procurement professionals and most people in between!
Content recommendations in a world of composable architecture
A composable DXP allows complete flexibility around the solutions that are integrated into each Digital Experience Platform.
Each tool can therefore be selected based upon its ability to meet the specific requirements for a specific client. This essentially means we can handpick the right tool for the job.
Within this talk we will discuss some of the 3rd Party tools available to adopt for your content recommendations engine (including the recent Umbraco integration with Algolia) and explain how the AI behind the recommendations work so that you can choose the right approach.
We will dive into how tools like Algolia provide product recommendations and personalised search, and why that is extremely important for your clients, their end users and some of our real world experience and live client examples.
Codegarden 2024 Sessionize Event
Umbraad 2024 Sessionize Event
Matt Sutherland
Head of Technology, true digital
Bristol, United Kingdom
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