August 2022 – What We’ve Been Up To

Wayne

August was a very busy month with some year highlights!

Kicking off August we launched Cablenet’s new website! Established in 1997, Cablenet manufacture and supply high quality computer and network cabling. Now celebrating 25 years in business, it was an honour for Twilo to be commissioned to deliver a custom e-commerce website and marketing support for their 25th birthday campaign.

The first weekend of August was a scorcher and the perfect setting for Matt’s stag do. A group of us went to see Solomun at Finsbury Park. The stage looked incredible with sun coming through the trees and the picture below really doesn’t do it justice.

I’ve been good friends with Matt for getting on 20 years so I can’t wait to see him and Samira tie the knot in a couple of weeks. Roll on the wedding of the year…

I’ll leave you with this picture, and not one of the many pics I have of Matt in his bride fancy dress!

Another e-commerce website launched in August for Best Party Banners saw a huge upgrade in both their online presence and internal processes. The new website for Best Party Banners allows customers to personalise their own birthday banners, adding an age and name as well as choosing their fonts, colours and theme. This is a truly bespoke product solution which saves our client many hours every day.

Previously our client’s in-house designers would need to create a party banner for each order, individually in Photoshop, based off a customer’s requests. Their new e-commerce website generates a print-ready PDF file based on their customer’s chosen wording and colours, which our client prints after downloading the artwork which is generated automatically.

The capability of our developers to provide such functionality is something I love about Twilo as we deliver more than just a website for our clients. We are always focusing on ways that our websites can save time and improve processes, which allow our clients to run their businesses more efficiently.

August was a busy month on all fronts. I spent an amazing weekend in Rome taking in many of the tourist spots including Vatican City, Trevi Fountain, Villa Borghese, the Spanish Steps and a guided tour of the Colosseum.

Rome is an amazing city with so much to see and do. I highly recommend it to anyone who hasn’t had the chance to visit yet.

Andrew

Expanding my coding knowledge and battling through a huge sitemap...

Many skills have been obtained and developed this month through the performance of varying tasks and study. I’ve developed my knowledge of SQL through my apprenticeship which will provide me with better tools to create even better solutions when working on our web applications. There was a challenging job to create a sitemap on a website that contains much more than 1,000,000 product pages! I’ve also expanded my experience in file handling, sending a zip folder to a user.

Sitemaps are usually straightforward unless the website has many pages. In this case, sitemaps must be broken down. The challenge here was writing code that could do this automatically and efficiently with all the data that was in the database. This is where efficient code was important as you do not want too many database requests or too many loops so that when you are dealing with more than 1,000,000 pages, it doesn’t take unnecessary time.

A sitemap is important as it tells search engines what is on the site, it’s a hugely important factor in SEO.

During my study through my apprenticeship sessions, I have learned new tools such as creating views and using union operators. These are elements of SQL I had previously not used and was not aware of. Views are something I would like to experiment with in the future; it is a clean solution for accessing commonly retrieved data with simpler queries. If you often find you are doing similar JOIN queries throughout the application, views are a good tool to have those joins already created. They are also just handy for giving someone access to a table where you don’t want them to see certain fields or records.