Additionally, we believe that by sharing these insights, you learn more about us. Whether you’re researching WebDevStudios (WDS) because you’re considering hiring our website agency to build your next big project or you’re interested in joining our team, the more you know about us, the better.

We all know 2022 was an eventful year for everyone. For WDS, it was a year that included many changes and required strong adjustments. WDS made modifications, rearranged, and fine-tuned as needed and where needed. And, we did so gracefully. That’s something we’re especially proud of.

Please join us as we review our 2022. We hope it gives you a deeper understanding of our website design and development company, how we grow, and how we sustain our ability to make your dreams a reality.

Remember, your success is our mission. Here’s how we accomplished that this year.

Organizational Changes

Since 2008, WebDevStudios has built robust solutions for our clients. We have experimented with different organizational setups, workflows, and methodologies for project delivery depending on available technology, staff, and types of projects.

However, as our client base and team expanded, we identified the need for changes and advancements. We go over this more in our WebDevStudios 2022 year-in-review, while also touching on upcoming transformations.

Team Restructuring

2022 brought many changes to how our teams are structured, which required necessary changes to our communications. Up until the summer of 2022, WebDevStudios had been structured in a hierarchical format with our CEO/COO at the top, followed by directors for each department, then managers, and so on.

This format served us well for many years as we were growing and placed reliable processes and policies in place to ensure serviced our clients in the best ways. Growth brought the need for improved communication and transparency. We found that the hierarchical structure, even in a small company like ours, created a layer of bureaucracy that stifled innovation and siloed communications.

After a lot of thought and research into the type of structure that would serve our teams and clients, we found the best solution was a team-based structure that focused on problem-solving, cooperation, and gave employees more control of their day-to-day. This helped us increase productivity, performance, and transparency. It also fitted well with our team scrum format and agile goals.

We eliminated the director-level roles and opted for team managers in the areas of account, delivery, and engineering management-level roles that collaborate with project teams. Additionally, we adopted a pod structure for project teams where each pod has its own sales, strategy, design, development, project management, and QA talent.

This allows each pod to operate independently and is responsible for certain aspects of the product. They own all tasks involved, from sales to launch, and also provide a good deal of redundancy around tasks and projects.

The results were near immediate! Communication at all levels became much more transparent, visible, and collaborative, more so than ever before. Teams and their members are working toward common goals and it is allowing us to move towards a much more agile delivery.

Scrum Masters, All

In the year 2023, our company has committed to investing in the professional development of our delivery managers and project managers. By the end of Q3, all of them will have obtained their Scrum Master Certification (CSM).

The purpose of this investment is to enhance their knowledge and understanding of scrum and agile methodologies. This, in turn, will improve their ability to lead scrum teams. The ultimate goal is to improve overall team performance as our scrum masters become more effective leaders, resulting in better performance and outcomes.

Strategy and Design Growth

In late 2022, we added positions to our strategy and design teams to account for the increase in client work we’ve had the good fortune to take on moving into 2023. In the pod structure, mentioned above, each pod has a UX strategist and UX designer who work together with our delivery manager during the strategy phase of a project in gathering requirements, defining goals, and producing solutions for client projects.

Maintainn Acquired by SiteCare

In 2014 WebDevStudios acquired Maintainn, a WordPress Support and Maintenance company. Bringing Maintainn under the WDS banner of brands and services was a perfect match to enhance the ongoing support of our clients.

As the projects at WebDevStudios became more complex, so did the support requirements for those projects. As such, the Maintainn level of support and service no longer fits what many of our clients required.

Earlier this year we decided to sell our support and maintenance company Maintainn. We needed to find a buyer that would fully support our Maintainn clients and give them the level of service and support they expect.

Enter SiteCare, who was the perfect fit for Maintainn. SiteCare offers WordPress maintenance and support services very in line with the Maintainn offerings. We knew Maintainn would be a great fit at SiteCare and the rest is history!

Pluginize Makes a Comeback

WordPress plugins and products have always been a passion project for WDS. Our most popular plugin, Custom Post Type UI (CPTUI), has over 1 million active users and over 13 million lifetime downloads!

We also continue to expand the features on our WP Search with Algolia plugin and have grown that user base to over 5,000 active installs and 80,000 downloads. While you might be familiar with CPTUI and WP Search with Algolia, many people are not familiar with our product brand Pluginize.

One of our goals for 2023 is to revamp and recharge our commitment to products through Pluginize. We are actively working on a new premium plugin with hopes of releasing it in Q1 2023.

In 2022, we retired our older plugins, updated our current plugins, relaunched the Pluginize blog, and rebuilt Pluginize to be a block-based theme with more modern technologies. All of this work sets the stage to supercharge Pluginize in 2023 and beyond.

WebDevStudios 2022 Year-in-Review by the Numbers

Data is impressive, isn’t it? Here is how our achievements measured out in 2022.

1,350+ Hours Contributed to  Five for the Future

We talk about it a lot, but there are still many who don’t know about Five for the Future. An open-source technology designed to democratize publishing, WordPress fuels more than one-third of the web. As such, WordPress needs all of us to contribute.

Five for the Future is an initiative that allows the WordPress community to contribute to the platform’s growth. WebDevStudios actively participates in this effort by dedicating the last Friday of every month to giving back to WordPress in a myriad of ways. Overall, our team proudly contributed more than 1,350 hours to the initiative in 2022.

Looking forward to my first #5FTF day with @webdevstudios and #WordPress pic.twitter.com/pxFB3jJ2Tv

— Matt Ryan (@MattRyanCo) October 28, 2022

38 Active Clients

From education to media, eCommerce to consumer packaged goods, our 2022 was jam-packed with some amazingly interesting projects for big brands. Our roster of clients includes some impressive brands and names, such as Campbell’s, George School, Monster, Wall Street Journal, and Care.

One of our newest clients kept us especially busy with the launch of five separate websites under the brand and an ongoing retainer. That client is the NBA.

27 New Hires

We were no strangers to the Great Resignation this year. Some people left WDS that had been here a very long time; others only a few years or less.

At the beginning of the year, it was challenging to replace people quickly, making sure we hired the right people for the team. Thankfully, our culture, authority in the WordPress community, and genuinely supportive teammates were the key selling points for us to get such good talent.

“I’m pretty proud of the people we added to the team this year,” says Julie Sarnik, Employee Experience Coordinator. “Our diversity is up, which was a big goal for us. We have an impressive amount of female engineers and our team has expanded globally. It’s amazing to be able to work with people all over the world and learn from them!”

13 Lunch & Learns

It was a baker’s dozen of lessons and internal webinars for our team this year. Topics ranged from personal interests to technology and development, such as “DIY LEDs,” “Remix vs NextJS,” and a panel discussion on accessibility for all.

“WDS Lunch & Learns are a great way for people to share their expertise in a work-related area or just something fun,” says Justin Foell, Engineering Manager. Justin coordinates, schedules, and promotes every single Lunch & Learn event. “It helps the team level up and connect with each other at the same time.”

23 WordPress Talks, Podcasts, Webinars, Interviews, and Media Mentions

Face it. WebDevStudios is everywhere. When WordCamps and WordPress meetups call for speakers, our team submits their ideas.

When WordPress and tech media publications need experts on hand, we volunteer. WDS team members love to lend a hand and share their expertise. Then, we like to brag about it via our Company News blog posts.

26,197 Tacos Given

This WebDevStudios 2022 review wouldn’t be complete without talking about tacos. We use a variety of methods to keep our remote work company culture engaging. One of our favorites is HeyTaco rewards.

HeyTaco is our internal reward system that allows coworkers to thank and recognize fellow teammates. It’s our way of saying, “Hey, I appreciate you. Here’s a taco.” Collected tacos are redeemed for gift cards and PTO.

Take a look at our top taco givers and recipients.

Coming Up

Looking forward to 2023, our commitment hasn’t changed: Your Success is Our Mission! As always, we are committed to learning new technologies, building amazing building experiences for our clients, and continuing to give back via our various open-source contributions. Our team is laser-focused on helping our clients meet and exceed their online goals in 2023 and beyond.

The post WebDevStudios 2022 Year-in-Review appeared first on WebDevStudios.

Because of a hard launch date, this project had a super short timeline and we decided a smaller team would keep us agile. Jaimie would be our Project Manager, Simon would handle the designs/PSD, Damon would deal with the front-end development, and I oversaw the back-end development, as well as serving as a lead for the project as a whole.

I’d like to share our teams experience through building a new website for a pretty well known client.

Designs

Part of the scope, was a custom design, which featured five different templates. Skype wanted something similar to their current production site, but freshened up a bit for the new product launch. Simon also had brand guidelines and some direction from our point of contact at Skype. I spoke with Simon who told me, “All design research starts with listening. One of the issues Skype had was [that] Skype TX was buried.”

Simon took some time to research the product and find the business value within brand guidelines. This process is called “business proposition.” During the design phase, Simon also had to make the case for a few features.

“Behind good design, there’s a reason for everything. Form follows function since we’re designing not only for the client, but the client’s client…” (AKA the user!)

Thanks to software like Invision, communication between the Simon and the client went smoothly and after a few revisions, both Damon and I had PSDs to work with.

Choosing the theme and plugins

Almost all of our projects include our starter theme, wd_s. This build was no exception! Wd_s enables developers to spin-up a starter themes quickly and develop with modern build tools like Sass and Gulp. We didn’t install too many plugins; we used a select few to manage content via point-and-click, ensure everything had a featured image, rearranging page order, and more. We also used a few custom plugins as well.

The Hero

By far the most complicated part of this build was the Hero.

Take a look at the requirements:

• Every post and page must have a hero
• Use post title, excerpt, and featured image as the content, but can add additional content can be added in a control panel
• By adding additional images/content, the hero turns into carousel
• Each carousel slide can have a modal
• Modal must support oEmbeds
• Customizable headline
• Customizable paragraph
• Support for two different buttons, one of which opens a modal

If your head is spinning, don’t worry. So was mine! After speaking with Chris for a bit, we put together a development roadmap and I got to work. Because this hero had to be on every post and page, we decided to use CMB2 to create repeatable group metaboxes. These would serve as the optional “control panel.”

I also used Slick to power the carousel and custom Javascript and CSS to power the modal.

In the end, I really like how the Hero turned out. Some of the functionality developed here, will make its way into our Hero Widget plugin on Github.

The Footer

While it may not appear to be complicated, the footer was indeed difficult. Microsoft requires footers on all their web properties to be visually similar. We were instructed to “copy” the footer assets, markup, and functionality from production.

This proved to be a bit of a struggle as Damon describes, “They had some toggling in footer that worked on desktop, but didn’t have a great mobile experience. So we updated the code by rewriting the Javascript around the toggling altogether…”

In the end, Damon did a fantastic job creating a footer that works beautifully at any viewport.

Accessibility

Microsoft takes accessibility very seriously, and this was part of scope from the beginning (as well as a general practice here at WebDevStudios). We had to design and develop to meet WCAG 2.0AA standards. As you can imagine, since Microsoft is such a large company, failure to meet these standards could cost them tens of thousands of dollars in fines. Fines aside, making websites accessible for everyone is just the right thing to do.

We put this site through some rigorous testing to ensure things like, the color contrast and HTML markup passed 2.0AA specs using both Total Validator and ContrastChecker.

Data Migration

Ah yes, the final part of this project was moving the content from their proprietary CMS into WordPress. Normally, this would be handled by our migration team using our custom migration plugin. However given that the site only had about fifty posts, and the time necessary to interface our plugin into that CMS, we instead opted to migrate the data by hand. This process went fairly quickly, and in no time we had all of their content in place.

Hosting

We’ve been working with Microsoft and their WordPress properties for a couple years, so we’re familiar with the unique challenges and benefits of running WordPress on Azure.

We introduced Microsoft to WPEngine and provided the technical guidance to get Skype in Media on WPE! It’s pretty cool that this project will be the first web property owned by Microsoft on WPEngine!

Conclusion

Even though this was a custom built site for an enterprise level client, we had a short timeline and a few development hurdles. In the end, it was a fun project. I believe we were able to successfully help rebrand Skype TX, and hopefully this will help them sell a few more pieces of hardware–which at the end of the day, is why we’re here.

The post How We Built Skype in Media on WordPress appeared first on WebDevStudios.

Shopify is an e-commerce software that provides a hassle-free platform for shop owners to run their own online store and get a piece of the internet sales pie. We built them an extremely flexible e-commerce plugin that makes it easy for WordPress.org site owners to download the plugin and use immediately.

The Shopify eCommerce Plugin allows WordPress users to employ the Shopify “Buy Button” to sell existing products in their Shopify store with ease. WordPress users can embed products in their site, including pictures, product descriptions, and price, with just a few clicks! For store owners that have an extensive inventory, there is also a straightforward search function that allows them to track down exactly which product they would like to embed without hassle. Both individual products and product collections can be embedded as well.

When Shopify reached out to us, they knew they wanted to build a custom plugin that makes Shopify even easier to use than before. They had a some criteria in mind when they were searching for the right folks to build this plugin, which is as follows:

1. They wanted experienced developers with a proven track record of building high-quality WordPress products
2. They wanted the right partner for releasing the product to WordPress–folks who are proficient with the process of releasing open source products to the public.
3. They wanted to be sure that the end result was highly extendable and accessible to other developers.

We built the plugin with the features they wanted, the proper way, and included ways so that other developers could extend it; the Shopify eCommerce plugin is extremely flexible and can serve as a base for other developers to build upon. We also created extensive documentation, and rolled it out to both Github and WordPress.org.

The plugin has already gotten some attention; before it was even released on WordPress.org, Shopify made their formal announcement and it showed up on WPTavern.

We’re super excited about this product; as we mentioned at the end of last year, we would be focusing in on products, and this is just the start!

The post WebDevStudios for Shopify: The Shopify eCommerce Plugin appeared first on WebDevStudios.

Your clients don’t suck. You just have a big ego.

Let’s get this out of the way upfront. Complaining about clients is BS. Websites like Clients From Hell are garbage. They offer nothing more than an outlet for whiny people to complain. It’s like when your waiter complains about the people who sat at your table before you. Doesn’t make that employee look very good to you, does it? By the way, those clients are the people essentially responsible for keeping your lights on. Just a reminder.

The main problem isn’t with your client–the deeper issue here is your ego. And believe me, I’ve been there before. You spend all night designing a beautiful comp—tight grids, carefully set typography and a color palette van Gogh himself would be proud of! The next day you excitedly share it with your client. You’re expecting her to pin a medal on you and pop champagne bottles. Instead she utters those oh so familiar words, ”Hmm. This is a good start. Why don’t we try…” and instead of laughter and champagne, you head back to your office for a long night of Photoshop and cheap bourbon. Seems like a healthy lifestyle, right?

Checking your ego

One of my new favorite books is Articulating Design Decisions, by Tom Greever. It may have “design” in the title, but I recommend it for developers, project managers, and anyone else involved in the project. In this book, Tom very aptly describes how our ego often gets in the way of seeing the value in stakeholder input and even hinders our own ability to communicate why exactly our chosen implementations may work better than the client’s suggestion. The moment we distance ourselves emotionally from the project (that goes for the agency and the client), we begin to see more clearly. We can then have conversations that move the project forward instead of getting caught up in little squabbles that get us no where.

Meetings…ugh

Nobody likes meetings. Well, except Project Managers, maybe. But it you want to build a relationship, you have to put time into it. That’s where meetings are really great. You get to know each other and how the other party prefers to work and interact. This can be really beneficial when it comes time to present ideas and discuss them. We don’t want to be holding meetings just to chat over coffee and pastries, though.

Here are some meeting tips I use every day to make sure they’re brief, but productive:

• Always have a kickoff meeting. Try to include all of the stakeholders, whether it’s one or thirty people. This gives you the chance to get to know everybody and get to the root of the problems you’re going to solve.
• Always let the other party say their piece. Everyone likes to talk and be heard, so try not to jump in while the client is still talking. Tom Greever recommends taking notes during meetings and occasionally mentioning things like “That’s an interesting point; I’m going to make a note of that.”
• It’s your job to direct the meeting. If it derails into a tangent or something like “Why is the text in Latin?” you are the one who has to bring it back in. You can do this by letting the client quickly know you’ve made a note of something they brought up, but you’d rather focus on X for this meeting.
• If you’re presenting something major, like a design comp of the homepage or a big feature you’ve been building for two months, try to have a meeting for it. Even if it’s over the phone or video chat. This gives you the chance to discuss it as opposed to the one-way conversation produced by email.

Remember your roles

Clearly defining and adhering to roles will help the project tremendously. The client is the subject matter expert, the agency is the expert on translating the clients message into something users will understand. When the designer says image sliders on the homepage are bad UX, listen to her! On the same token, when the company’s CEO insists that the market simply won’t buy a new feature you’re pitching, you should probably listen up.

When we give mutual respect and quit getting in each other’s way, everyone is much happier. Project budgets and timelines also don’t get inflated.

Next step

Try these tips out on your next (or current) project and let me know how it goes! If you’d like further reading I highly recommend You’re my Favorite Client, by Mike Monteiro and the book I mentioned above, Articulating Design Decisions, by Tom Greever. Both are game changers and cheaper than all of that champagne and cheap bourbon (although we won’t judge you if you multitask…who says reading isn’t a drinking activity too?!).

The post Forming Harmonious Client-Agency Relationships appeared first on WebDevStudios.

Throughout the years, they had added so much information to their website that it was becoming difficult to maneuver.  WebdevStudios worked with members of the CTI Corp. team to restructure their content and streamline the information in an easy to read and clean new WordPress website.

The new website highlights each of the services the company provides right on the home page making it easy to find just what you are looking for in a snap.  The new design also gives the website the professional and clean look that CTI Corp. was looking for.

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