Some of us went to Glastonbury - you might be able to tell.
Wayne
Big projects and big weekends.June has mostly been spent interviewing candidates for a front-end developer position and sifting through CVs as we look to recruit a technical minded digital marketing apprentice. I’m pleased to say the former position has been filled, but the latter is proving more difficult, as new digital marketers are swayed towards social media specialisms and away from the more challenging SEO & PPC skills. Despite that minor frustration, the search continues, and I’m confident we’ll have someone in place before the next academic year begins.
From a project perspective, I’ve been working hard on a website for a large e-commerce electrical wholesaler, who are soon to celebrate their 25th year in business. 25 years is a huge milestone. It’s been an honour to be trusted with such an important project which I hope to share with you in our next monthly update.
Away from work, I’m still making my way through a backlog of gigs that were booked pre-pandemic, all of which seem to have been re-arranged within weeks of each other. The weekends have been coming in hard and fast! In June we got to see the Killers supported Blossoms at Emirates Old Trafford Cricket Ground – a fantastic outdoor venue. This was by what I can now confirm is the best place on earth for music lovers; Glastonbury…
Wow! What a place. There really is no way of putting it into words, so I’m not going to try. All I’ll say is, if you’re 50/50, just go, and I guarantee you’ll go again! Over the weekend I saw System 7, Marshall Jefferson, Sasha, Franky Wah, Blossoms, First Aid Kit, Sam Fender, Foals, Carl Cox, Noel Gallagher, Beans On Toast, Diana Ross, Elbow, Pet Shop Boys, and my favourites of the weekend and must-see-again; Confidence Man.
I was so busy having a good time that I didn’t take a single photo or video. Luckily, my wife managed to take a whopping 12…
Andrew
Well on my way to becoming an OpenCart wizard!This month I have gotten even more experience in setting up servers and DNS services which is a major addition to my knowledge. Learning this has helped me greatly in understanding how IP addresses and routing works, very useful!
The progress I am making on OpenCart development is becoming clear and I really feel like I know my way around the backend code, I am becoming very comfortable in using the e-commerce platform. As I have a good feel for Open Cart, future projects can be more complex and ambitious. It’s exciting as I think we could achieve some interesting things with bespoke OpenCart mods.
Finally, I’ve also had time to re-work a mod that syncs Mailchimp and OpenCart. This is now more efficient and much faster. It has gone from spending 8 hours to complete to 10 minutes which is a great stride forward. In this instance, the mod is used to send out monthly loyalty points updates to customers of a greetings card company, the idea being that customers are reminded of savings they can make and are therefore far more likely to return. It’s a great example of e-commerce marketing and web development working together.
