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Below is our recent interview with Paul Houston from Opquast:
Q: Could you provide our readers with a brief introduction to your company?
A: Opquast is a training company but it is also a larger collective project and community. Since April 2021, we are an ‘entreprise à mission’ that’s the equivalent to a B-corp style company in USA or a purpose-driven company. Our raison d’être is to make the web better, for everyone.
We have been creating tools and open-source web quality reference materials since being established in 2000 but the training ‘Mastering Web Quality Assurance’ was established in 2016 and the certified members have doubled each year and we have now 12, 000 certified.
Q: Any highlights on your recent announcement?
A: We recently announced that we have translated all of the training materials and website into English and Spanish and are focusing on extending the community to English speaking markets first. We are close to signing our first partner agreements in London and have just begun reaching out to the USA. We have both American and English staff, living in Bordeaux France, who are helping us reach out to clients that can benefit from the training and the open community resources.
Q: Can you give us more insights into your offering?
A: Our training breaks from the traditional ‘disciplinary silo’ approach by teaching foundational multidisciplinary web skills. The training results in more successful projects where the central focus is securing the integrity and trust of the customer within their digital experience.
We base the training on a community consensus repository of 240 best practices that cover essential user requirements and technical skills and knowledge covering: SEO, data privacy, accessibility, design and UX, quality assurance, ecodesign, ecommerce etc.
We regularly hear that this is the most useful and integrated set of best practices in existence; we don’t include all the best practices the community suggests, we vote on the best, most universally implementable and the most useful ones.
Q: What can we expect from your company in next 6 months? What are your plans?
A: We don’t know if the global markets will quickly open up to the idea of accepting a training from France such as ours but we really feel that web quality assurance needed picking up and representation by a community; we have found that all of our 200+ partners in France, Canada, Brussels and some french speaking parts of the world have quickly realised the unique advantages our training offers. We are finding the first English takers of the exam are saying the same things so , so far, so good; we will keep focusing on our missions and take it one step at a time.
Q: What is the best thing about your company that people might not know about?
A: We have six boys and six girls covering six languages: French, Spanish, English, German, Portugese and Bulgarian.
