Umbraco 8 Upgrade: Expert Q&A

Join us on Thursday, 12 December, at 10:30 am as our experts Ash and Rich field your questions live in our 'Expert Q&A' session on all things Umbraco 8 Upgrades.

Meet your expert panel:

• Dwight Thomas, Head of Growth
• Ash Hitchcock, Head of Development
• Rich Green, Head of Technical Development

Duration: 1hr

Elements we'll be covering include:

• Upgrading to a supported version
• Is it the right time to upgrade your Umbraco website?
• What are my upgrade options?
• Taking out an extended Long-Term Support (XLTS) agreement with Umbraco to ensure your site stays secure and compliant.
• When I upgrade, will I notice a difference?
• Using the change to rebuild your site to adhere to modern web standards.

Ash Hitchcock, Head of Development

Ash joined Fresh Egg as a senior web designer in 2012. Specialising in front end development, he is responsible for leading the production, modification and maintenance of websites and web application user interfaces. Ash is a full stack developer, with familiarity in each layer of the website development process and a passion for the JAMStack. He has a skillset encompassing HTML, CSS and JavaScript, as well as Gatsby, React, NodeJS, PHP, WordPress, MySQL, and working in a ASP.net environment. While working at Fresh Egg, he has also gained his Google Analytics Individual Qualification along with platform qualifications for Optimizely, Monetate and Qubit. He was promoted to Head of Front End Development in October 2022.

Rich Green, Head of Technical Development

In 2009, Rich began working with Umbraco CMS, becoming a respected member of the Umbraco community. In 2011, he co-founded Umbrella Inc., a successful Umbraco agency with high-profile clients such as Jaguar, Debrett's, and Lazard. A few years later, Rich led the pitch to Carlsberg to build a unified web platform for their global websites. The project provided Carlsberg with a scalable and consistent platform across different markets, earning the "Managing Platforms: Pegasus" award at the Danish Digital Awards. After delivering additional Umbraco projects, including for Engineering UK, Rich and his co-director decided to pursue new challenges, and following a sabbatical, Rich joined Fresh Egg as a web consultant, later advancing to the position of Head of Technical Development.

Dwight Thomas, Head of New Business Growth

Dwight’s experience has seen him occupy a number of senior leadership roles at the world’s largest advertising network, WPP, including Board Director at GroupM global media agency network m/SIX between 2012 - 2016. Here, he worked as Client Services Director on the Virgin Money, Vitality and Prince’s Trust accounts. He was also Head of Development, responsible for learning and training across the agency. Prior to joining m/SIX, Dwight spent 6 years at the UK’s largest media agency, MediaCom in their retail team, working on clients such as Specsavers and Ikea. He then left to join full-service agency Southpaw as Media and Marketing Director, where he worked across a variety of international clients including Suzuki, Cunard, Sharp and Hitachi. Having worked in agencies for over 20 years, Dwight brings extensive client management and new business experience to Fresh Egg and has developed a thorough knowledge of all channels, as well as sponsorship and partnership expertise. He was promoted to Head of New Business Growth in April 2024 with responsibility for our sales and marketing functions.