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News & Announcements

June 2021 Announcements

June agency updates. A Day of Action, a new app, and more.

At Modern Tribe, we make a big effort to bring on folks who are helpful and accountable by nature. The reason is simple: Our work and our company culture are elevated by their care and conscientiousness. For proof, have a look at a few things our team has been up to in June.

Day of Action

Last year, in response to the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, we held a company-wide Day of Action. We closed the office and encouraged our team to use the day to learn, educate, volunteer, petition for change, or rest and recover. We held our second annual Day of Action on June 14, and we’ll be using feedback to help us improve it going forward.

Project Launches

Inclusify

On this year’s Day of Action, our CEO, Shane, and two of our engineers, Antonio and Jorge, worked to remedy a pain point our Ops team spotted a few months ago. To help HR remove any lingering bias in our hiring process, the trio created a prototype that automates the removal of gender, name, and location from job applications—a task we currently do manually. We’re super psyched about this simple but effective new app. See Inclusify for yourself here.

Microsoft

On the Microsoft News platform, we’re implementing some cool new MS tools, such as Clarity (for user site interaction tracking) and Immersive Reader (a digital learning tool). There’s a lot of value in these tools for any site, as they can elevate your digital platforms and provide more value to your community–though they often fall off your radar. We highlighted some of the thinking behind tools like this here.

Steelcase

To reduce Steelcase.com page load times and boost performance, our team automated file quality and format on Cloudinary using a dynamic feature that assesses a screen’s pixel density and delivers image resolution and quality in the smallest file possible. As a result, image-heavy pages that weighed as much as 11 MB saw their data footprint drop to as little as 900K. This improvement has the potential to dramatically increase the quality of the user experience and, therefore, exceed business goals.

BigCommerce

BigCommerce held its first quarterly webinar for the WordPress community to discuss what Modern Tribe’s been cooking up over the last three months and what we’ll be working on in the near future. A couple large features and products are in the pipeline, including multi storefront support—which is expected to be available for a general audience release—and a BigCommerce for WordPress theme specifically crafted to showcase the abilities and power of the headless BigCommerce platform. Both are roadmapped for availability in Q4 of this year.

Client Achievement

Boise State University’s website, BoiseState.edu, ranks in the top .05% for web accessibility out of 1 million homepages surveyed by WebAIM. The university is committed to making the information and resources on their site accessible to all users, and we’re thrilled we could help them do that. Learn more about our work on their site here.

New Team Members

We welcomed five new people to the team (three of them on the same day!): frontend developers Aykan and Brett; Mark, a frontend engineer; and QA analysts Jonathan and Sylvia.

Modern Tribe Miscellany

Last month, we shared our Ops team’s meeting playlist. It turns out they’re not the only Modern Tribe team that jams together! Here’s what our DevOps engineers listen to when they’re fixing your servers.

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