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This week, I — and other 10up + Fueled team members, including Chief Strategy Officer Jake Goldman and Chief Operating Officer John Eckman — are traveling to Portland, Oregon for WordCamp US 2024. The four-day event is the largest WordPress conference in the United States, filled with expert-led presentations, workshops, and networking sessions.

Also attending are VP of Commercial Strategy Brad Miller, Director of Partnerships Shannon Swenson, Director of Open Source Initiatives Jeff Paul, Associate Director of Open Source Engineering Darin Kotter, Associate Director of Engineering Joe McGill, and Lead QA Engineer Ankit Gupta. We can’t wait to see you there!

10up Partners with WooCommerce to Implement Accessibility Enhancements

Darin Kotter on August 20

As part of a larger effort to improve the accessibility of WooCommerce, the flagship open source eCommerce solution for WordPress, 10up has implemented dozens of accessibility improvements. Each enhancement improves the overall user experience of WooCommerce and ensures the plugin is in compliance with WCAG 2.1 Level AA guidelines. A few of these patches include:

Enhanced visibility and readability, reducing opacity changes on hover and improving text visibility against backgrounds, adhering to WCAG 1.4.3.
Better keyboard navigation capabilities to ensure folks who cannot use a mouse can still seamlessly interact with every feature in compliance with WCAG 2.1.1.
Increased screen reader support with the addition of ARIA labels that help visually impaired users navigate, up to WCAG 1.3.1 standard.

10up is dedicated to building a better web for all. If you’re interested in working with a team that dedicates thousands of hours to improving the open web per year, we are always hiring.

Learn more about the enhancements to WooCommerce in their blog post.

10up & Fueled Nominated for Four Webby Awards

Phil Crumm on April 16

Earlier this month, our wider company at 10up and Fueled received four nominations in the 28th Annual Webby Awards — a high honor from the award that recognizes excellence on the Internet. Out of the 13,000 submissions for the Webby’s this year, we are proud to have four projects nominated.

Celebrating Connectivity This Holiday Season

Jake Goldman on December 22, 2022 • 1 Comment

Having spent another year making the web better alongside our clients and partners, we’ll be disconnecting our screens and recharging our batteries so that we can bring our best, again, in 2023.

As we bring 2022 to a close, 10up will shut down for the holidays on Friday, December 23, and reopen on Tuesday, January 3.

With gratitude to the clients, friends, partners, and colleagues who made another successful year possible, we wish you a festive and relaxing season.

Nate Allen contributes to the WordPress Dashicon Library

Jake Goldman on April 24, 2019

Iconography design might seem an uncommon undertaking for a developer, but Senior Engineer Nate Allen recently saw an opportunity to make WordPress’s Dashicon library more inclusive. He took the initiative to tackle the design challenge himself, learning Adobe Illustrator in order to supplement the existing “businessman” icon with additional icons for “businesswoman” and “businessperson.” These icons, along with many more new icons, will be released with WordPress 5.2.

Nate’s determination to stretch his core skills and proactively contribute a creative, open source solution is a small but meaningful representation of the 10up way. Thanks for your dedication to the community and your craft, Nate!

Usability Test: Gutenberg for Professional Writers

Sarah James on May 4, 2018 • 4 Comments

The next major release of WordPress is slated to include Gutenberg, a new content writing/editing experience that will change how we craft content inside of WordPress by modernizing the interface and increasing control over the layout and structure of pages and posts. 10up is actively contributing to the development of Gutenberg and is deploying it for some of our clients, and we’d like to better understand how professional content creators will perceive and adopt to the change.

We’re conducting a professional usability study on the current build of Gutenberg. Our goal is to augment existing user testing to better understand a particular subset of the user base: professionals who write and edit relatively standard, news-style content inside of WordPress. We want to observe how this audience perceives and adjusts to this new experience by watching them use it to create some basic content. Our ideal participant has experience creating content with WordPress, and brings a reasonably fresh and unbiased experience to Gutenberg.

Would you like to help us?

10up Engineering Practices now mandate baseline accessibility standards

on March 30, 2018

W3C WCAG 2.0 One year ago, the popular government policy magazine Open Access Government stated, “Accessibility for all is not an option – it’s a fundamental right.” Creating equal access to digital content, regardless of age, size, ability, or disability, has always been a priority for 10up; it is inseparable from our mission to make a better internet for everyone. Creating accessible interfaces for our projects is consistent with our commitment to the principles of Universal Design. Because of this, we have updated the accessibility standards contained in our Engineering Best Practices to require all projects to have a baseline accessibility compliance goal of WCAG 2.0 Level A.

Sponsoring WordCamp DC

Taylor Lovett on July 14, 2017

Jul 14

WordCamp DC

Carnegie Library

Speaking Sponsoring

As one of the Washington, DC metro area’s local 10uppers, I’m proud to share that 10up is a Silver tier sponsor of this weekend’s WordCamp DC. With our diverse client portfolio including government, political, nonprofit, and national news organizations, an event celebrating open platforms and a better web in Washington, DC was a natural fit for our support.

If you’re attending, be sure to catch Lead Engineer Adam Silverstein speaking on Friday afternoon, in his session, Ten tips for securing your WordPress JavaScript. Pick up our postcard on the swag table, and find Adam and me roaming the event: ask us about working at 10up, hiring 10up for your project, and our newest hosted solution, ElasticPress.io.

Operation LiftUp: Welcome Lift UX to 10up

Jake Goldman on July 11, 2017

We’re delighted to announce that after nearly one year of discussion and due diligence, 10up has completed an acquisition of Lift UX: a boutique, distributed, Emmy-nominated agency that specializes in making user experience design driven websites powered by WordPress. The Lift team, including its founding partners, Chris Wallace and Brad Miller, join 10up effective immediately.

Founded as a boutique digital creative shop in 2009, Lift has delivered web projects for clients like Frito-Lay, The Next Web, eBay, GoDaddy, and Disney. Lift earned acclaim when a “second screen” experience built for AMC’s Walking Dead was nominated for an Emmy Award in the interactive program category in 2012. Their work earn a second nomination in 2015 for Mad Men: The Fan Cut. Among their innovations, Lift built and sold a WordPress themes shop (UpThemes), and started a career center for distributed companies, RemoteJobs.com. They recently launched CampusInsiders.com, a project spotlighted by Automattic’s WordPress.com VIP program; the project earned Lift an invitation to become an official VIP agency partner.

As 10up’s President & Founder, I am elated to welcome this outstanding team, award recognized portfolio, and client roster to the 10up family. This acquisition accelerates our growth in Experience Design, adding executive-tier design leadership and enriching our growing portfolio of design stories. It represents a special opportunity for all parties to go further and faster as we partner with clients to make a better web.

Restricted Site Access for WordPress optimized for multisite

Taylor Lovett on June 16, 2017 • 1 Comment

We’ve released a major update to Restricted Site Access, our popular WordPress plugin that intelligently limits website access. Designed to keep unwanted visitors out of staging, test, and private sites, the plugin is active on more than 20,000 websites and has a 5 star rating.

Restricted Site Access 6.0 adds full support for WordPress network (multisite) installations. Network administrators can enforce restriction rules across the entire network, or set default restriction rules that are applied as new sites are added. If you have a network of private blogs or internal sites, or need time to configure new sites in your network before taking them live, this is the update you’ve been waiting for.