April 2022 - What We've Been Up To

Take a look at what our web development and digital marketing guys have been up to in April.

Jake

Bank holidays have their perks...they just don't help my current account balance!

Over the Easter weekend, I took my Dad down to watch Tottenham play for his birthday – football fan or not, it’s hard to deny that their stadium is something else. The performance on the other hand…well it left a little to be desired for. Like most of the guys in the office, I also managed a few days away in April, getting up to Edinburgh with some friends towards the end of the month where we decided a morning’s clay pigeon shooting was a fantastic idea after an evening sampling the ample nightlife!

Clay pigeon shooting in edinburgh

Site health has been the order of the month during April, running client’s websites through a few programmes alongside physically combing through them in order to look for any improvements which can be made – and there always are. We always find changes to make, from SEO, to technical issues right through to creating a smooth user experience (UX). Tasks like these rarely throw up huge issues, but highlights little tweaks here and there which, when actioned, all make small differences that help optimise the website. It’s a light version of what is known as conversion rate optimisation – we want to remove all barriers to conversion on a site as possible. How may times have you been on a side, only to become frustrated with it and left to find what you were looking for elsewhere? This is exactly what we’re trying to avoid!

Wayne

Carnage in the living room, the start of bank holiday season and a few trips...

Work was a welcome distraction from home during April, where our living room has been upside down for two months due to building work. Bank holiday season has started and the year is progressing rapidly. A busy month in and out of the office saw me and the wife embark on a trip to Edinburgh to see Foals – just the two years late (due to that which shall not be mentioned), and the final weekend was spent in the Lakes, a great place to unwind for a couple of days.

Lake windermere with boats pushed up onto the shore

Back to work and we’ve been having serious discussions about developing business websites as single page applications (SPA) where possible, and are currently looking at the pros and cons to doing this, such as; can Google Analytics read an SPA in the same way it reads a normal website, are they scalable and will we have the same level of security. We strive to be towards the front of the pack in terms of using the latest technology and feel it’s about time we explored what we can do to make our websites stand out further from a speed and performance perspective, so watch this space…

You can read more about SPAs here.

In the mean time we are looking for new developers, designers and marketers to join our team. Please check out our Careers page for current opportunities.

Matt

An adventurous month, saw me scrambling over boulders, getting stuck into the great outdoors and test my developer skillset.

I had a few adventures in April, one being a beginners bouldering class at The Climbing Lab in Leeds. This was a lot of fun and I will definitely be going back to test myself on some more of the easier routes. I also visited the Western Lakes for a couple of days, hiking and camping (not with Wayne). It was a great way to get exercise carrying our camping equipment up into the mountains, and its always relaxing setting up camp in the wilderness!

Away from the great outdoors, learning Vue.js has been one of my goals over the past couple of months. I’m currently in the process of building Single Page Application using Vue as the front end JS framework, and Laravel as a backend API. I’ve found this challenging but enjoyable, learning new techniques and methods to increase productivity.

I’ve also been working on designs for websites for a couple of new clients, so it has been nice to balance this design creativity with the more technical App development.

A single page application built with Vue

Andrew

A brilliant month of learning on the job. Things are going great...toffee anyone?

My apprenticeship is now in full swing and I have been performing a lot of maintenance this month to keep everything up to date and functioning. The Mailchimp application I had developed in the previous month is now functioning and sending reward points emails to customers who have made a purchase in the last month.

My focus for April was rebuilding an old website (Johnson’s Toffees), allowing it to be updated to the newest PHP versions without causing issues. It is important that we get our websites to the latest versions as this maintains security and performance.

A website with a photo of fudge and chocolate. It was developed using open cart and features the latest PHP version

This project was my first time developing with OpenCart. I think this was a good opportunity for learning because I could use the old site for reference, but I also couldn’t just copy all the code over because much of it needed modernising. Additionally this was a great time to add new features requested by the client such as the “Hampers” category.