dear digital

With dear digital we want to help e-commerce companies grow in Europe by being the best possible partner for them. We offer both digital marketing and development services.

As a Technical Lead I focus on creating the best performing websites for our e-commerce clients.

Co-Founder

Jaswig

*Aquired by fully*

- Starting a company from scratch
- Building supply chain
- Building website with e-commerce capabilities
- Setting up connected ERP system
- Successful crowdfunding campaign launch
- Building sales partnerships
- Sales pipeline and sales management
- Brand building
- Selling Jaswig to large US based ecommerce company, Fully

An ergonomic furniture startup changing the way we learn, educate and work. We make standing desks that help you and your kids create a more healthy and active lifestyle.
We stand up for our future.

Co Founder

Fully

Fully is a B Corp. For us, B Corp certification means an opportunity to grow and learn with a community of like-minded businesses; companies that not only take responsibility for our own social and environmental impact, but also seek out suppliers and manufacturers who do the same.

Member of Fully's B Corp Committee

- Launch, set up, maintenance and growth  of fully customised multi currency Shopify Plus store
- Launch, set up, maintenance and growth of fully customised international and multi currency Magento 2 store
- Set up and maintenance and customisation of Netsuite ERP system
- International SEO
- Connecting ERP and e-commerce platforms for automated invoicing in multi country VAT setup
- Implementation of fraud detection tools
- Front end and back end project management
- Localisation of website in different language

The idea behind Fully is simple: Movement is good. When you move, when you are fully in your body, you feel more present, engaged, and alive. More of you shows up to work, to relationships, to life. This is where to find desks, chairs and things that help us move, work and live more fully.

Systems Coordinator

Le Signal de La Grave

Le Signal de La Grave is a non profit that wants to drive sustainable development in the 12th century village of La Grave, France. We launched a crowd fund campaign to build some momentum and will now support sustainable grass roots initiatives.

Stays.green

The most beautiful silk flower bouquets and curated artificial plants. 

Fast shipping, right to your door. One time purchases or subscriptions.

Sticker Pet

Sticker Pet makes custom products of your pet.
1% of the turnover goes to charity.
Check it out on stickerpet.com.

Bombay Studio

*Merged with dear digital*

Help shape, launch & scale ecommerce brands internationally. We also invest.

We can guide you from idea to a beautiful site, scale you from a local to an international business and let your systems work together seamlessly.

Generation T 2015

Generation T is a Belgian initiative powered by sustainability network The Shift and youth organisation Act4Change, aiming to build a community of youngsters with a heart for sustainability. Share your ideas, take action with us and show us the role you play in the transition to a more sustainable society.

Member of Generation T

Ghent University

PhD research on scour around offshore monopiles at Coastal Engineering, Bridges and Roads.

PhD student

Bubble Post

*Aquired by bpost* 

Environmentally friendly last mile delivery in European city centers. Making use of warehoused at the edges of cities and developing custom logistics software to optimize delivery routes and schedules.

Sam is the Co-Founder and the Shopify enthousiast at dear digital - a leading Belgian agency specialising in scaling European e-commerce businesses.

With a strong background in engineering and e-commerce, Sam is a trusted partner for growing online brands and organizations.  His weapons of choice: Shopify and Odoo that merge data-driven analytics with innovative approaches. The result is a scalable set up that generates tangible growth and greater brand recognition.

Starting his career as an entrepreneur after a little detour in academia during his pursuit of a PhD in Civil Engineering, Sam played on his passion for innovation and automation. He rocketed his way through a variety of successful businesses, like:

🚲 Co-founding Bubble Post, a logistics company later acquired by bpost
👩🏼‍🚀 Co-founding Jaswig, later acquired by Fully, which landed him two prestigious awards and put him on the European e-commerce map
🛒 Co-founding dear digital - a leading Belgian e-commerce agencies
💙 Co-founding a couple of e-commerce brands and a project to take over a ski area in France

He quickly distinguished himself by delivering exceptional results for clients across various industries, generating an impressive portfolio of completed projects.

You can expect a tailored and results-driven approach when working with Sam and his team at dear digital. This ensures you stay ahead of the competition and achieve your business objectives. As Technical Lead, he makes sure the right tools are integrated in the most efficient and profitable way. He's a big advocate of the MACH-architecture. Sam's expertise and his team's dedication to delivering exceptional outcomes make them invaluable partners.

If you are looking for a visionary tech expert with considerable resources to help scale your business and drive your success in the e-commerce world, connect with Sam and book a call with his team. Click here to schedule a call: https://calendly.com/john-galeyn/meet-dear-digital

Samuel Rieder

RUMvision

Investigating and implementing new features, metrics and dimensions for monitoring users to agencies and merchants to get the most out of RUM.

Lead Developer and consultant

ErwinHofman.com

5G welcoming for your website's loading time / pagespeed? Obviously! Although, do note:
👉 outside of the cities or during travelling, users will still experience 4G, 3G or (for example in Germany) even 2G, while user expectations increases. 
👉 while you have the newest phone and 5G, it is just you moving away from the real (average+median) user experience. Luckily, you can now view real user experience within PageSpeed Insights report or Google Search Console, totally for free!

📷 Instagram is claiming that the use of JavaScript (parsing and executing) becomes the limiting factor, rather than the network download time. Don't forget resource competition as well, where users might have a slow experience, although your site or shop is within a testing environment (Lighthouse).

I help e-commerce/digital companies (platform builders as well as agencies), public/governmental organisations and other businesses with accessibility and pagespeed/performance issues, with:
👉 video Proof of Concepts, immediately applicable;
👉 Improving UX by reducing user frustration (layout shifts / CLS);
👉 Translating a webshop's Lighthouse report into case-specific recommendations;
👉 Addressing out-of-the-box best practices and introducing code implementations;
👉 Delivering equal pagespeed experience, no matter the user's real internet speed.

From time to time, I also do talks on pagespeed/UX topics from a technical perspective.

Beside being a specialist/consultant, I also developed a CMS used by several agencies (amongst them Blue 2 Blond), obeying to these values.
SEO sitespeed specialist 🚀 a11y ♿ sustainability 🌍 webprivacy 🔒 -security 🛡️ consultant

Technical UX/CRO consultant/speaker; focus on Lighthouse / Web Vitals / sitespeed and accessibility

Blue 2 Blond

👉 As CMS supplier towards Blue 2 Blond, I am responsible for (pagespeed/accessibility/technical SEO) R&D;
👉 I am also tightly involved as lead developer and in-house developer training towards Blue 2 Blond (and other agencies as well);
👉 Also conducting audits on new website and finalizing specific customer requests.

Blue 2 Blond is developing accessible, sustainable, search engine optimized and performance optimal B2B websites, obeying to security requirements and privacy regulations and policies and reducing CO2-emission at the same time.

Websites built by Blue 2 Blond keep working when JS can't be downloaded or has been disabled by the user (for example, for privacy/security reasons). By listening to user preferences (contrasting, motion, internetspeed and saveData/liteMode settings), websites will adapt to real user preferences or environment to guarantee equal user experience and improve engagement and conversion.

CMS R&D + Lead developer

AVG Cloud Register B.V.

Research and development & project manager of new features for a SaaS platform helping companies with the European privacy law (GDRP), while conforming to security/OWASP requirements & privacy/PII regulation & policies.

Features are as following:
https://www.avgcloudregister.nl/avg-features/

Lead developer

Nuon

For the SalesForce department, we developed an internal authorized web application for managers, team leaders and other employees in which one can keep track of kilometers, working days/hours, sales and bonusses, creating and sending PDF summaries to all employees on approval of filled in data. Also exports can be made for administrative purposes, such as employment agencies but also for own administrative purposes.

We've also built their website, eventually becoming part of Vattenfall. After doing a rebrand of the website, we achieved optimal results.

Frontend (website) and Backend (CRM) Developer

Web to print/PDF

For a new national website of greeting cards, we worked in a team of developers, where visitors could create or edit greeting cards.

My task was to develop the card-saving process, and the process from HTML/SVG to printable PDF documents (using wkhtmltopdf), as well as maintenance to the backend tool/manager.
Before pushing to wkhtmltopdf, filters (sepia, vintage or grayscale) and (trim)boxes had to be added, which were sent to printing companies using FTP and webservices.

Backend developer

EMO bv

For this coal and ore transfer company established in the harbour of Rotterdam, I developed a new authorized and structurized intranet based on their older version, containing modules for automated work schedules and holiday-exceptions, desktop charts based on company data, employees-, telephone- documents- and boatlists, rotating daymenu's and newssection and automated task for importing/updating employees data.

DMM Websolutions BV

Back in Groningen, I was asked to configure and develop new SOAP/REST applications for external webservices for the national vacancy-database InGoedeBanen.nl.

Developer

Stichting Accessibility

In this period, while living in Haarlem, I did my graduation project at the Accessibility Foundation in Utrecht. Accessibility Foundation examins and develops accessible applications, where I was developing an accessible video caption editor, with which one can create captions/subtitles while the video is playing.
http://www.nu.nl/internet/2121368/dienst-maakt-online-video-toegankelijk-blinden.html

Frontend Developer

While working on location at DMM Websolutions BV in Groningen, I created several, mainly vacancy websites using the Typo3 CMS.

Frontend & Backend developer

I'm an independent PageSpeed consult (training & audits), helping agencies & merchants who want to:
- kick-start pagespeed 
- work on pagespeed fundamentally 
- beat SEO competition and improve revenue
- which means I typically end up helping ecommerce 

👉 Platform agnostic:
- Magento / Hyvä
- Shopware 6 + 5
- Lightspeed / Shopify / Laravel
- Salesforce / Adobe Commerce
- Vue, React, Next, Nuxt

👉 Full list
www.erwinhofman.com/reviews-and-pagespeed-work/

👉 Core Web Vitals 
Most product owners, CTO's, UX/SEO specialists and marketers are familiar with PageSpeed/technical UX. 
This really is the achievement of Google, by introducing "PageSpeed Insights" and later on "Core Web Vitals". Most have heard of this by now.

👉 Google Developer Expert (GDE)
Along the way, I became a GDE. This means I'm closer to the fire and upcoming Core Web Vitals changes.
It also inspired me to work closely on Chrome's (pagespeed related) origin trials which often become part of a stable Chrome version.

👉 Real User (pagespeed) Monitoring platform 
Initially for pagespeed clients only, I created RUM that then became a public SaaS. It even has 6 months of pagespeed history per week of your real users (free):
https://www.rumvision.com/tools/core-web-vitals-history/

With RUMvision, we're also participating in Chrome projects.

========

I'm a Dutchman with Aussie relatives and raised close to the German border. Last 2 might explain why I'm invested in PageSpeed/technical UX from the very start 😜
I started developing (PHP) in 2001. By lack of a CMS I started building my own in '02 (not because of being stubborn; that phase came a bit later).

This turned out to be the start of:
👉 a web agency with a team of developers
👉 knowing about web fundaments: a11y & web performance

It felt like cheating on our own agency as I started bringing my knowledge in-house to other agencies, merchants etc.
Via audits & training sessions. Saving them trial & error hours, allowing them to improve their software or conversion at the same time.

I only help organisations that want to be helped though. I'm not a salesman; convincing all stakeholders isn't my cup of tea. 
My knowledge should be used for the forensic part.

========

I've also spoken at public gigs, webinars & podcasts (MageTitans, SEO Amsterdam & Tweakers Developers Summit, Hyvä meetup being a few examples). 
Do invite me for your next event if pagespeed/Core Web Vitals should be a topic!

Do we have something in common? Do connect!
I'll be sharing educational stuff, best practices and sometimes memes regularly!

taplio

The Battle

Samuel Rieder

Erwin Hofman

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