April 2022 – What We’ve Been Up To

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!

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!

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.

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.