We're talking with Warren Wilansky about his company Plank's approach to designing ethically driven websites. Which is where he and his team developed and released for us all to dig into; Plank's Ethical Web Design Framework.
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Carl: Every single week we get together, we decide we're going to do one more, to see if anybody cares, and every week one bastard sends an email, says, "Loved it."
Gene: And then next [crosstalk 00:00:19].
Warren: Then you have to do another one.
Carl: If I find that guy, I swear to God, Gene, let's roll. What are we doing?
Gene: What's happening?
Carl: What's this, Warren [inaudible 00:00:44].
Gene: Hey.
Warren: Hey.
Gene: What's happening?
Carl: I know him. And he is not Wonder Woman. It's just initials.
Gene: I see.
Carl: It's just initials. Gene, I saw you getting excited.
Gene: Oh, didn't know who we're meeting, dude.
Carl: Although Warren does like ice cream, almost as much as Wonder Woman.
Warren: I don't know about that.
Carl: Really you don't like ice cream?
Warren: I like ice cream, but I'm not like a Wonder Woman-level fan of ice cream.
Gene: I didn't know Wonder Woman was a fan of ice cream.
Warren: I didn't know.
Carl: She loved , It's one of the first inventions that she finds in the new world.
Gene: I got you.
Carl: I didn't even [inaudible 00:01:22]. Warren, speaking of inventions in the new world, this is the worst Segue ever. Please meyer Lansky, founder of plank joining us today. How are you, sir?
Lansky: I'm pretty good. How are you?
Carl: I'm good. I was just thinking about our owner camp we had up there in Montreal, that food tour you took us on was pretty legendary.
Lansky: There was a lot of fun.
Carl: It was you would've loved it, Gene, but you never come to our events. So I don't know why, were talking. Good Lord. It was months ago about something plank had done. I want to say it was summer of '21. Maybe I've got that a little bit off, but a lot of people talk about building websites the right way. A lot of people talk about doing the best they can in the world. And, since we came through 2020, there was all kinds of different things. But you put together a document about Ethical web design. But what are you thinking, man?
Carl: You get there and you go, you know it'll be great. Let's put ourselves out there, everyone to take shots because we're going to talk about building websites the right way. So tell me what's the origin in this, how did this come up?
Warren: So I had a meeting with my team. I don't know. At some point could have even been as far back as like late 2020, early 2021. We were just doing a bit of brainstorming and the team started talking about the way and the things that we do when we build websites and the word ethics came up and my first thought was to get scared of that. Kind of like that's a really big word. Like that's a word that's putting a stamp out there. And basically saying we are going to be doing something that lives up to a certain ethical standard. And my first thought was, God, that's a pretty big, bold statement. And then the more I started to think about it, I realized, why not be bold?
Warren: Like why not take a stand and basically realize we're not judging others when we're taking this stand. We're basically saying these are our ethics. These are our standards that we want to live up to. And we're not trying to be judgy about it. But what basically we realized is that there's a series of things that we already heard were doing and already were taken to account when we took on projects and started working with clients and delivering work, we just never stated it clearly. I never stated it and basically set standards. So what we've done here is basically set a series of standards for our clients to know what they can expect. Other beautifully designed and well thought out website, and also challenge our team to set a certain level of standards of... this is what we expect our team to meet, whenever we build a website.
Carl: Did you ever have anything like this?
Gene: No.
Warren: Sorry. No.
Carl: Did you ever think about it though? Did you ever go... We need to do this the right way. I'll say it Gene, like when accessibility and clean code, that was a badge of honor, but I don't know that we ever put it out there.
Gene: I was always adamant about the skip intro button. Like I made sure that was there.
Lansky: There you go.
Carl: I see what you're doing. I see what you're doing there, Warren and I are trying to have a legitimate conversation.
Warren: You're making jokes.
Carl: You're not in the flow of ethical decisions and design. So you said, "Hey, I'll make a joke," I'll allow it. I'm going-
Gene: Cool.
Carl: Let happen. Now let me get back to our guest who was very thoughtful in his response, Gene, maybe... I don't know how we can cover up and just have two panels here, but we'll figure it out one. So you go through... and what was impressive to me, but also made me wonder a little bit specifically around climate reactions was you didn't do this just based on let's build greener websites or let's build more accessible websites or things of that nature. You actually went all the way into code of conduct. You went all the way into just making sure everybody is included in what it is that you're going to be building. Did you have any pushback from prospects or clients? And if so, how did you handle that?
Warren: So the first thing I did is we floated it by some of our existing clients and some of our existing clients weren't scared off by it. They were actually excited by it and they actually were happy that we were trying to take this stand. And you know what? It actually fits with the kind of clients we're taking on. A lot of the time, a lot of the work we do is with nonprofits, with arts and cultural organizations. So these values actually fit most of those organization values as well. So it's kind a natural match for the clients that we have right now. It won't match clients, but for at least the kind of clients we want to attract, this seems like it fits them. So I'm feeling okay with this. I'm feeling okay with taking the stand, even though I had an initial month of questioning, if we should take this kind of stand.
Carl: Gene, did you just see that glitch?
Gene: A little glitch there. We heard you.
Carl: You're a little bandwidth challenge there, or something's going on Warren, Canadian. We want to come live with you. We're trying to get up there, but I don't know. You're going to have to, work on your Xfinity up there.
Warren: I blame it on being in a hotel room.
Carl: There you go. I do as well often. No, I'm glad that you said that about how Gene, What?
Gene: Nothing. Just laughing.
Carl: That's cool. I want you to be happy. You said that none of your current clients... Like you shared it with them and they were cool. But if I may, I printed out your little document and you said he read, we've seen that some clients are frightened by what they perceive to be the bureaucratic nature of these obligations, but from our perspective, most of it follows common sense, principles that allow for clear and measured use of information. So now I think that might have been referring directly to GDPR or something of that nature. Like I just grabbed the big poll quotes. I didn't actually read the thing. I'm sorry.
Warren: I read it. Gene is over there doing his taxes. I don't know what's going on. He's not even paying attention.
Gene: No, I have questions. Keep going.
Carl: But with that, like you say that some clients are frightened. What led to that phrase or what led to that statement being put in the document?
Warren: I mean, I probably was making that assumption before actually presenting it to a lot of our clients. So I was assuming that they were going to be frightened by it. And truthfully there probably got some that are going to be Frank by if we were working with organizations that were heavy on marketing and were heavy on kind of like living in a Facebook kind of world where it's all about mining data and keeping data and ensuring that you can do as much with it as possible. That kind of organization, some of this is not going to work for them. GDPR probably doesn't work for some very marketing focused, online marketing focused organizations. I get that's their choice as an organization or company to work that way.
Carl: Well, and I like that you said that you were anticipating, they might. But you went ahead and left it in there. Because you may have future prospects. And also to me, I think we mentioned one before. I think it's a great way to deflect so did some of those not great clients, like people who are coming in, not that anybody's going to be, devious or that they want to do the wrong things, but they may feel this is going to cost more. It's going to take longer. They're going to put all this time into trying to squeeze out one second of load time. And I mean, that's kind of what I thought people would come with, is just I really appreciate that you have to build this the right way, but we're on a deadline. So is there any way we can just like sneak past some of this and then we'll come back and clean it up later. Did you get any of that kind of pushback?
Warren: Not yet. I could see that being a pushback, but if let's say somebody wants to have proper search engine ranking, like let's say you want to ranking the site has to perform well, it has to be accessible. You are actually damaging the launch of a site or damaging. We can get there quickly and launch something in a few months and kind of cut corners. But then at the end of the day, the site's not going to rank well.
Carl: And you even mentioned in the document. I did read it. You mentioned in the document that you're recommending people use green search engines. You're recommending not the giant highway of Google, but obviously you're, still working with Google. You're just trying to promote up this other search engine too?
Warren: We're also still searching ourselves. We haven't found all right tools yet ourselves. I mean, we're trying to find even now the right balance between green hosting and then the simplicity of some hosting options like it's going to be constantly be a slog. So we don't assume that we're ever going to be a hundred percent perfect and accurate with all of this. We even internally debate we use, let's say Google's web.dev benchmark for a lot of this and we have honestly debated in-house well, to what standards do we meet? Are we meeting 100%? We're meeting 90%, we're meeting 80%. Every organization has to figure out what the balance is. And we've had contracts. We've had in our contracts that we're meeting 90% on all of those. And then the team is scared by that. And so we've sometimes had to pull things back and it's always going to be a negotiation per client on what is their best expectations?
Gene: Can you help me understand a little bit of green hosting? I get a little bit of it, but how does that... How is that something that-
Carl: There's a little bit of a right.
Gene: Help me close the gap on that.
Warren: So green hosting, I mean is pretty much probably going to be carbon offset hosting in other words. So let's say the green hosting company accepts that they will do offset, whatever CO2 that their servers kind of create. Other ways you can do green hosting is maybe the servers, maybe the server farm itself is already using electricity. That's, let's say from hydro instead of whole. There're different things like that.
Carl: Well, I remember, this would've been shot well over a decade ago that Google was trying to put all of their server farms next to free flowing bodies of water so that they could use the natural cooling to come in. But then I think something happened where they were this hot water back into the cool stream. I'm starting to mess things up, but there's so much stuff like that out there. I know Warren, one of the things you put in there, and this to me was like, I never thought of it this way, but if you save one second of load time, not only is that good for humans, it's also a little bit less processing power. It's a little bit less energy that's going to be required. And if you multiply that across the entire internet, it's a big deal.
Carl: When you say it," Hey, we're going to save a second and that's going to save a tree, maybe not." But when you're looking at it more as the collective of trying to get everybody doing things a little better, so it can raise everything up. That to me was pretty cool. Did you have much debate, like when you were putting this document together in terms of, was there anything in there that you and the internal team went back and forth on? Should that be there? Should that not be there?
Warren: I like your point about the kind of say tree, because it does sound very tree Huggie and that's not what I do here. Like it come back down to like this ethical word that I was stuck on myself at first, I would say probably the environmental considerations are probably the squishiest one in that they're the one that we've probably debated the most because it's the hardest to measure. Or if it's not hard to to measure, it's the impact is harder to measure. In other words, like the idea that we're saving one second, how do we get that number? And what are we actually doing? Like we have a high traffic website. Is it actually making a big difference? What if it's a bunch of low traffic websites?
Warren: Those kind of things are going to be still a work in progress. And like I said before, a lot of this is going to be a work in progress as we try to figure a lot of these things out. But I mean, for if anybody a good example of this, which is a clearer one outside of building websites, but this might be something to help people understand. If anybody knows anything about, let's say cryptocurrency has to be mined and farmed. And as a result like the server power on that is substantial. And that is something that where outside of building websites, which is our little small part of the world, we're trying to affect, there is a growing and is going to continue to be growing effect on the environment from just even my cryptocurrency.
Carl: You just, you just bypassed us straight into the future. Gene, are you feeling left behind?
Gene: Little fossil fuel here, well, I have a question about how does... How do you engage your clients with this? Do they know that you're about this and therefore, like they just kind of expect to get this, or is this something you bring up and then what sort of response are you seeing? Are they just like great. We don't care or are they like really attached to it?
Warren: So it's been in our proposal template for about a year now. Some just wash over it and kind of go this is who they are, and these are their values. Nobody has yet challenged us from the perspective that you brought up, which actually we've debated internally, which is the... this is going to cost more.
Gene: That's where I was going with that.
Warren: So nobody's challenged us on that. I'm not. I'm kind of surprised. I probably think I would if I was the other end, but in the document and you read the quote before, I feel like if there is some added costs, there is some, but it's not substantial. A lot of this is baked into the way we would build things. Anyways, in other words, if we were building proper modern web sites, we need to meet accessibility, that standards, we need to meet development standards. So maybe they are baked, but they're baked in the same way. The whole internet has been baked as we've evolved. Like there was a day 20 years ago where building website was building HTML page and it became building HTML pages and CSS that it became content management. And then it's just, there're these layers of things that are built on expectations for websites. And they just keep growing with time. And I just feel like this is the one that is the next layer that needs to be built on top.
Carl: I like that a lot. And, as much as this is a layer, it really permeates everything that you've done. And it permeates everything that you do going forward to that point of will it cost more? That was why we never told anybody we were a web standard shop and we never told anybody really. I mean, we would once we got into it, but we never talked about accessibility. And to your point, Warren, you kind of have to decide what is your percentage you're going for? I think you use 90% on quite a few places. You might add one that was like 70 or 75%. I can't remember exactly. But, when you go through and look at it, even when we were talking about web standards and compliance, we would always have to say compliance is kind of a fictional goal because things change all the time.
Carl: What we're going to make you as compliant as is known, right? What we can do to make sure, but things are changing right now that are going to shift all that around. And normally if you started talking about those types of things, that was when we had clients, that would be like, this feels like more work. And we know our customers. We know what they're doing. We know how they access our web. And we would be how the people that make it through are doing it. You don't know how many people that you're losing and so just looking at that, I even remember we had a client we didn't tell it was the call council here in Jacksonville. And we didn't tell them that we built their website so that it was accessible and standards compliant.
Carl: And they went out and got a grant for $50,000 and called us so excited, "Hey, we got this grant for $50,000. We can now go in and make the website accessible. And we can do all these things." And I was like, "can I put you on hold for one second?" And I put them on hold then, the website had been out for like six months. I remember called out to Travis Meiser who had built it. I was like, "Travis is the cultural council website, like as accessible as we can make it." I put extra time into it because it was such a civic project. Went okay. And then I had to tell them they were so pissed. They had hired a great writer. They had done all these things.
Carl: They ended up having to give the money back and all they could think was I could have taken the money, but that didn't feel right.
Gene: It would not be ethical Carl.
Carl: Exactly. And ethical Carl is somebody I've locked away. So you don't have to worry about him anymore. He's done. Warren, I want to spend just a minute looking at this from another angle. And, and first of all, I just want you to know, I truly respect this. I'm looking at it as an owner as well. And thinking about how does this come in? This is a marketing push too, right? It is who you are. It is what you believe in. So it's not like bullshit. This is something you're going with every day, but from a positioning standpoint and the space that you're in, did you find many other companies that were positioning themselves this way? I would imagine B Corps, right? Like that's kind of their main focus, but did you find anything like that? Like you had been bumping into stuff or you just saw other people that were, doing something, but you decided to take it to the next level.
Warren: There are a few other digital agencies out there that have this as part of their story. So we're not singular in this. And if we were, I be totally surprised, but there aren't many, there is actually all of us on like being a part of the bureau community. We obviously know about a book apart, a book apart just launched a book about this a few months ago. So there was another agency in the UK that is focused on this. And it's just, it kind of lined up at roughly the same time. Also, I had done a bit of research and somebody had written a book about ethical website design, few years back. And then in the past few months the website went down. So this has happened. Like there are other people thinking about it and there are other people writing about it. So I'm not going to claim to be singular in this, but definitely it's something that I just hooked onto as I feel it a bit who plank it as a company.
Gene: So that's solar hosting company, that's why I went down.
Carl: If they had gone with wind, it would've been fine.
Warren: There you go.
Carl: No good. Just ask Florida, Warren, when you go back and look at the code of conduct.
Warren: Specifically.
Carl: Can you dig into that a little bit because it's not just the code of conduct for what people will experience when they work at plank and with plank, but it almost crosses over into a code of conduct almost at what it's going to be like to interact with Plank's work. Do I have that wrong or is that kind of the intention?
Warren: I'll explain some of the thinking and then tell me if I get this right. The code of conduct, the whole idea behind it is as a development company, a company that develops code and as a company that collaborates with people, there's a certain expectation that they should have from us. And we want to kind of hope that the industry elevates to, I know, and we all know like, developers have a habit of getting through their work and not commenting, it and documenting it properly.
Warren: But even to that we want to make sure that the work that we are do is commented to a manner that the next person coming along, either on our team, or if we have to hand off a project to somebody else, there's a certain level of expectation thats on our team that we will do things in a way that makes the next Developers life easier. And part of that has come up because we've been hit ourselves. We've been around 24 years. We have seen work that somebody on our team did. And then the next person who inherits it has to now work on something from 10 years ago or five years ago and looks at it and goes like, I don't even know where to start with this.
Carl: I've heard those Yelps. It sounds like a dog that gets hit with a stick. What is happening? I've got two more questions, Gene. How are you doing? You got-
Gene: I'm good.
Carl: You good over there?
Gene: You're hitting on them.
Carl: So Warren, obviously I have mad respect for this. How are you measuring it? What I know of you is that when you, or Stevie or somebody at plank is putting something in motion, you don't just launch it and walk away. Like you're going to come back around to it probably every three months or so, you're going to review it. You're going to look at all that. But how are you determining if it's working or not? How are you making that assessment?
Warren: Here's something that we started working on. And you mentioned before the idea of marketing. So I recognize that taking the stand definitely has a marketing spin to it. And that wasn't the intention, but we're a company that wants to tell our story and telling our story is marketing. So I was working with our marketing coordinator over the past few weeks and came up with an idea to measure this stuff. So what now to add more onto this word of ethical website design framework, now I'm going to add the word diagnostic onto it. So the idea is we are now in the middle of having and tracking very specific numbers and very specific benchmarks so that we can then say, we can check all of these boxes.
Warren: These are the 35 boxes we can check to say that we have done these things for your website. Now the marketing spin on it is we're actually going to be launching next month. We're going to be doing one of those industry reports. Those where we're going to do an analysis, let's say 20 of the largest arts organizations across North America, and then apply this diagnostic against their website and then do an Industry report about how all of them are doing.
Carl: That is amazing. And I want to hear all about that because there is some time we used to do that in the early days of the web. It wasn't the same thing, but it was that whole, Hey, your product is great. Your website sucks like that. We would basically say, we love what you do. My God, can we help? This is horrible. Nobody understands the true value of who you are. They don't understand the soul of your organization because they come up against this little gift. That's like jumping across the screen and they have no idea what to do. So when you go out there and do this, how are you going to make sure those organizations are aware that they're included in the report? Is this the kind of thing that you're going to reach out to them? Or are you just going to kind of put it out there and see what it attracts?
Warren: So we did this once, maybe about 10 years ago, where we actually did an analysis of somebody's website that we really loved the organization. And their site sucked at the time. And I don't think it was well received because it was directed at somebody specifically. We're kind of like, "we are here to tell you suck." And it didn't go over well because nobody wants to hear, they suck. If you do it in private I have sent emails people basically saying not you suck, but basically saying we would love to work with you. We think we could do a fantastic job on your project.
Warren: I think that's a fair thing to approach, but in this case, what we're going to be doing is taking a look at the 20 organizations or so, do a general trends. I don't want to call somebody out and say, you individual X, you suck. But more like, "Hey, here are the five things that you're all doing really well. Here are the five things that you could do better" and take it from there and then let it sit in the world and let all of the organizations see it themselves and let them just get a sense of what the trends are overall.
Carl: So you're not going to go out there and go, all right. Montreal museum of modern art. It's a C plus. Here's exactly. Instead, you're going to say, here are 10 of the most well respected arts institutions. And this is how collectively, they kind of Faire here are the places where they could all use somehow help. So you're going to do it more like that kind of group them. Which actually also from a marketing perspective means that if one of them finds out, there's a good chance that it's going to proliferate to all of them. I am using my big words today. Gene, I want to impress one. I've used proliferate that I said it wrong. I'm done with that.
Gene: I don't think you know what that word means?
Carl: I don't. I did another one with the layers. Maybe it was also using the same word twice. I'm sorry.
Gene: Kind of it's okay.
Carl: I'm not doing that, Warren. When are you sending this out?
Warren: We're supposed to be in the... Was supposed to be this month, but we've gotten bogged down in other things as well. Like we all do, so it'll be next month. We'll be sending this out.
Carl: Well, I want to hear how that goes too. And, then I've got kind of one final question. I have always been a big fan of your patent projects, the way that you pick one, or maybe it's two a year and you go after it and you... I mean, the most, notorious one I know of is rebuilding the rush website. And, Lori who's at the bureau had an opportunity to be part of that, like helping with the lyrics and all this kind of stuff making sure all that stuff got over there. When you go after your passion projects now, are you framing yourself a little bit different than you did before you had this ethical web guide or is it still kind of the same you're making it all about them. I just have this vision that you're kind of also saying we're really good people and we're really focusing on building great things. We're not just focusing on getting really nice logos out there.
Warren: I mean like the passion project thing has always been something that we've been behind. I think in some ways, as a company, the kind of clients we're taking on now are kind of passion project. Maybe not always my passion, or somebody else in on our team's passion. So I think this all just kind of, it all feels like it fits well together. Because if it's something that someone of us is passionate about, we want to show people the full view of what work with us is going to look like. And this is part of the full view and somebody is either going to be, or is not going to be excited about it, but we're just trying to really be the truest version of ourselves. So-
Carl: Well I think all of it just comes together really nicely. And I want to thank you for putting it out there and even if there has been a book out or there's been this out or that out the way that you framed it, the way you've put it together and the way that it's talking, not really just to clients, you're kind of talking to the industry. You're speaking out to everyone about how we can all be better, Gene, I think we should take notes and try to get better.
Gene: Me?
Carl: Thank you so much. Where can people find the guide?
Warren: It's on our website. Our website is plankdesign.com and you can go there. There's a story section stories which equals blog. We decided to name it slightly differently and it should be right on the front page. You can go there. There's a PDF. We are actually going to create a shorter version of the PDF. It's 17 pages long, which is a lot for people to take in. So expect a shorter version of it for those who just want to kind of take the two or three page notes on there on the whole idea.
Carl: That sounds great. I'll make sure and put it in an upcoming newsletter as well so that we can get it out to the community. Because it's good work man. You did good work Warren.
Warren: It's legit.
Gene: Yep. Thanks Carl.
Carl: You got it. We'll tell everybody at plank that we said, Hey, we know quite a few of your lovely folks over there and we got to get back to Montreal. Gene Montreal is pretty amazing.
Gene: Sign me up.
Carl: Warren's there.
Warren: Come visit. But only in the summer. Don't come here in the winter please.
Carl: No, I've heard that.
Warren: They'll never come back.
Carl: Yeah. And, don't come to Florida in the summer, come here in the winter. So I think we've got the whole snowbird thing ready to go.
Gene: I'll figure that out.
Warren: Makes sense.
Carl: All right, Jean. Thank you, sir. Appreciate you Warren. Otherwise let's punch him. All right, everybody. We'll see you later.
Warren: Thanks.
