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.

In November, WDS kept busy, focusing on big website projects for big brands, while also giving back to WordPress via Five for the Future. Here are some other activities our teammates were involved with.

WordCamp San José, Costa Rica

WordCamp San José (WCSJ) took place November 5-6, 2022 in Costa Rica. WDS Senior Frontend Engineer, Alfredo Navas, was there. Alfredo presented a talk titled, “Full Site Editing – Temas Badados en Bloques, Patrones Y El Theme.JSON.”

This talk addressed the transition of WordPress development to a no-code solution with block-based themes, pattern creation, and full-site editing. For more on this in-person WordCamp event, read Green Geek’s recap.

WordCamp Asia 2023

Happening in February of next year, WordCamp Asia is sold out! As the first flagship WordCamp in Asia, this event is bringing true value to the community.

WDS Backend Engineer, Lax Mariappan, took time to chat with Go with WP. about the importance of WordCamp Asia and WordPress technology. Watch the video below.

Updates

From plugin versions to event rescheduling, some important announcements were made this month. Here’s what you need to know.

Pluginize Plugins

Did you know WebDevStudios is the developer behind some of the most popular WordPress plugins? We offer our free and premium plugins at our online store Pluginize. The following is the latest news and updates on our products.

Custom Post Type UI (CPTUI) Extended
CPTUI Extended released Version 1.11.1 this month. This update includes a focus on user experience in our Gutenberg block.

WP Search with Algolia
Version 2.3.1 of WP Search with Algolia has been released. This is just a minor update to fix an immediate bug that was introduced in the previous release.

WordPress

At the beginning of the month, WordPress released Version 6.1, aka “Misha.” As such, we updated our WordPress Spotify playlist by adding a song from jazz artist, Mikhail “Misha” Alperin, to it.

Since then, Version 6.1.1 launched. Be sure you’re running the latest version of WordPress.

Events

WordFest Live has rescheduled its event to December 16, 2022. You can read the announcement of this change on the blog for Big Orange Heart.

WebDevStudios Is Hiring!

WDS is actively recruiting frontend engineers with all levels of experience, including junior, senior, and lead. If you’re interested in ending your year with a new job (and, who can blame you?), please view the job description for the position and apply online today.

The post Company News – November appeared first on WebDevStudios.

Job Title: Support Engineer

Years at WebDevStudios: 8

My move into working for WebDevStudios (WDS) was a very swift transition in September 2012. If memory serves me right, on a Saturday or maybe Sunday, I was tipped off that WDS was hiring by a then-employee and he encouraged me to apply.

The next day, I sent in my resume. I believe Monday I had an interview with our CEO, Brad Williams, over Skype, and by Tuesday I had the job offer. It was something close to that, for sure, and I was happy to leave freelancing in favor of steadier work. I’ve been here ever since.

As I sit here reflecting about the past eight years, I’m realizing that I’ve had a finger firmly on the pulse of support for WebDevStudios, almost from the start. By “support,” I mean a different type than what a typical agency provides a client. That support is most definitely important, especially for maintaining long-working relationships. The support I’ve been involved in, though, has been a mix of long-term relationships along with one-offs or momentary needs.

Plugin Support

WebDevStudios had developed some plugins during the early years. Most notable is Custom Post Type UI (CPTUI), with Brad having good foresight that user-registered custom post types and custom taxonomies were going to be BIG for the WordPress community. He jumped on that pretty early on, and CPTUI emerged as a forerunner in opening up those possibilities.

WDS also developed various other plugins that were also published on WordPress.org over time. However, there’s only so much time in the day, and running a business takes up a lot of that time. This limited Brad, and whomever else may have been asked, to handle incoming support requests for those published plugins.

I was actually fairly active in the official WordPress Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel, which is an available avenue for general WordPress support even in 2020. It was in there that I believe Brad saw a natural knack I had for helping others. He also knew that public perception was incredibly important, and on the plugin front we weren’t doing so hot. By the spring of 2013, I was dubbed the “plugin czar.” Not only did I take on the responsibility of handling all of the incoming support requests for ALL of our free plugins, but I also took on the continued development of them.

While I haven’t called myself the plugin czar much since, the role is still very much a part of my workday. I primarily make sure that the support threads are responded to and helped in as timely of a manner as I can. If serious bugs or security issues arise, I address and release fixes as quick as possible. As time and schedule permit, I also try to work on new features, but that is usually not as actively handled daily. Sometimes, a solid, stable plugin that does its job well is better than a constantly moving plugin.

Regardless, every day I’m checking both RSS feeds and email notification for the support forums that I’m tasked with monitoring. These two methods help me make sure I am keeping an eye on new activity for each plugin. On top of that, I also manage and monitor any communication provided through GitHub, where we publicly host all of the source code for our free plugins. A majority of the open issues are probably created by me to help track ideas from both myself, as well as users suggestions, but users are able to contribute their own, and I respond there, as well.

Maintainn

WebDevStudios realized that they wanted to take an active role in not only helping clients release awesome websites but also maintain longer-term relationships with them well after project completion. The idea of, “Hello, get the work done, goodbye!” was not enough. Why not move a client internally to a different part of WDS to keep that relationship going?

Enter Maintainn, a WordPress support company that was started by Shayne Sanderson to provide ongoing and routine support for various sized clients, who wanted help keeping their sites updated, backed up, secured, and have custom development managed. WDS acquired Maintainn to not only continue helping those smaller website owners, but also provide a branch of the company that the agency-level clients could also rely on, after the initial project build is finished.

Once again, Brad approached me with the idea of moving me away from the agency side of WebDevStudios and put me on the Maintainn team. I agreed to the move. At the start, I was also helping out with AppPresser support when WebDevStudios still had a hand in that product, and I began splitting my time essentially three ways: plugins support, AppPresser support, and now Maintainn support.

Did I mention I can do support?

With Maintainn, I’ve done practically everything at one point or another. Whether it be the small quick-ish requests from clients, to larger feature requests for major functionality, to the grunt work of applying available updates each week, checking on security scans or reported vulnerabilities, and making sure backups are running like expected.

Today, though, my primary focus is less on the routine maintenance tasks, and more on the support requests. On a given day, I will be reviewing new requests to evaluate what is being asked for, what needs to be done to achieve that, and how much time I think it’s going to take. Some tasks are going to be pretty quick and require less than 30 minutes. Sometimes, the requests are considerably large and could range in the 20-30 hour range. It really depends on what is being requested.

I would easily say that a good portion of my Maintainn day is communication, both internally and with the clients. I’m checking my email for notifications from our various tools used by Maintainn, communicating internally with our project managers and my fellow developers, and communicating with the clients about their requests. Once estimates have received official approval, I then go heads-down on the task to begin fulfilling the request and hopefully making a happy client. I wrote a behind-the-scenes look at my role at Maintainn on our blog. Take a peek.

Pluginize

Pluginize definitely scratches the itch I have for being part of a product team. I love the idea of being able to develop the tools that help the web developers help their clients. Pluginize is also an extension of the plugin support role that I’ve had for years, but on the premium product level. As you may have guessed by now, I am also tapped to be the primary support person there. My day-to-day dealings with Pluginize include handling support tickets that come in through our ticketing system, whether it be a pre-sale question about one of the products, technical support for an issue someone is having, or if they just aren’t happy with the product and want a refund.

I also get to help continue evolving the premium products, develop new features, handle any bugs or security issues in the code, and manage new releases. Between the free plugins support and Pluginize, if you’ve ever reached out to WDSs for questions about our plugins or products, chances are you’ve had at least some feedback come from me, which I think is pretty awesome.

Constant Contact

The last proverbial hoodie I wear at WebDevStudios is the role I play with our ongoing relationship with Constant Contact. You can read more about at Success Story: Constant Contact Forms Plugin for WordPress.

This product/project has evolved and changed over time, but one thing that has managed to stay pretty consistent is my involvement with it. With that, I have a lot of contextual knowledge about how things were and are now with these plugins. This is also a different type of scratched itch, as it’s also a product, but not one that is owned by WDS.

Much like our other products and plugins, this is also one that I do a lot of forum and troubleshooting support for, as well as gather user feedback for what we’re doing well, what we’re doing not so well, and ideas to pass along to Constant Contact for how we could make the product better.

This helps Constant Contact with a more robust and solid product which helps them with their customers. I think I also benefit because at least temporarily, I get to put myself into a different pair of shoes where I need to think like a marketer and try to determine things that would be important for someone in that type of role. Because I’m on the frontlines, I am often also participating in the annual meetings with the client to help outline future roadmaps and plan for new releases.

After the work day is over…

2020 is a year that will go down in various levels of infamy, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t have my habits and hobbies away from my work computer, although those were definitely slowed by our pandemic. When I’m not at my work computer, chances are you will see me in one of a few various places.

First up is some local gyms. I recall it vividly, the moments when I decided that enough was enough, and it was time for a change. September 2015, right after WDS Camp 2015 in Wisconsin, I started seeing some event photos, including ones that had myself in them, and I realized what physical state I was in.

Mentally, I thought I was doing alright, even when I looked at myself in the mirror. Somehow, the event photos told me a different, more realistic story. In short, I decided it was high time to start going to the gym, and be serious about it too.

Since that September, I’ve regularly worked with a trainer multiple times a week and eventually participated in group classes, as well. All this time and effort has turned around many aspects of my life. They say it’s not a diet or a brief habit; it’s a significant life change in how you live. I have to agree. Five years later, I’m not quite to where I’d like to be (hi, abs, wherever you are), but I know I’m continually doing much better than I was before.

The second, and slightly more random place you’ll find me when away from my work computer, is one of various coffee shops around town, often with a book in hand. At the tail end of 2017, and the first part of January 2018, I noted that I didn’t do much book reading. Not only that, I wanted to actively change this, as well. It was at that point that my personal weekend reading challenge began.

The challenge is simple. Every weekend, regardless of where I am, I would read at least ONE page from an actual book. I am proud to say that the weekend streak continues to this day, and I have not missed a single weekend, as of the time of this writing. I’m not sure at the moment exactly what my grand total book and/or page count is, but I do recall the book that I started off with—The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien.

Beyond that, I also fill my time with movies, TV, and podcasts. It’s easy to say that time is filled pretty well. And that, my friends and readers, is a pretty good idea about a day in my life with WebDevStudios and Maintainn, as a Support Engineer.

The post WebDevStudios Day in the Life of a Support Engineer appeared first on WebDevStudios.

Last month, we started detailing the 5FTF goodies we finished up, and decided to keep it going! Here’s round two!

This past month, we worked on a few projects during May 5FTF time that we thought you might like to hear about:

WP CLI Random Posts Generator

Jay worked on this super rad WP CLI random post generator.

From the plugin page:

This WP CLI posts generator, unlike the core generator in WP CLI, supports the following:

 

• Terms
• Term Counts
• Taxonomies
• Post Types
• Post Counts
• Post Author
• Featured Images (thanks to lorempixel.com)
• Featured Image Types (thanks to lorempixel.com)
• Image Download sizes
• Multi-site (specify site id if necessary)

And what’s even more awesome: WP CLI Random Posts Generator was added to the official site courtesy of Daniel Bachhuber, the maintainer of WP-CLI.org.

Variable VVV – The Best VVV Site Wizard Version 1.10

Remember Variable VVV? Parbs recently released vv 1.10, which is mostly a collection of bug fixes, along with some nifty new features.

One of the most frustrating bugs that vv has is not always correctly setting the path to your VVV installation. This means some people were never able to use vv to manage their sites. Thankfully, there is now very robust checking and fallbacks so that everyone can have vv working correctly on their system.

Thanks to some great contributions, vv’s Blueprint functionality now allows for configuring menus, network options, and a lot more. You can practically build your entire site using Blueprints now.

Minor bug fixes are the process for halting Vagrant, removing old files, and better system-level integration are now in place as well.

(Special thanks to Parbs for giving us this blurb.)

wdunderscores

Not too long ago, Corey caused a stir by saying SEEYA to hamburger navigation. Well, he finalized it and moved it into wd_s! Huzzah!

BuddyPress Codex

Ryan cleaned up the Changing Internal Configuration Settings in the BuddyPress codex…it makes sense that he was there, since he’s been working with Pluginize on BuddyExtender, a free plugin that allows you to configure internal BuddyPress settings from the WordPress dashboard.

This is proof that you coding isn’t the only contribution; a little codex copyediting counts as contributing, too.

The Forums

Aubrey, Jay, and Will were all over the forums during their 5FTF time this past month as well.

These are some of the cool things that we worked on during May’s 2016’s 5FTF time! We know a bunch of you out there are contributing back as well–what have you worked on recently?

Tell us! We want to hear about your nifty new projects too.

The post What WDS Did During Five for the Future: May 2016 appeared first on WebDevStudios.

Pluginize was created to share, sell, and educate on the latest products we’re releasing. After realizing how many plugins and extensions we were building for our incredible clients, we realized that, well…we should probably start sharing!

All of the products will be built, maintained, and supported by us, and will be delivering the same high quality you’ve come to expect of us, both in the projects we create and our contributions to the WordPress community, over the years.

Along with this announcement, we’d like to take a moment to tell you a little bit more about our first release, CPTUI Extended. If you’ve been keeping track of our moves over the last year, you already know that Custom Post Type UI is our most popular plugin. In July of last year, it became our first plugin to hit over one million downloads, and has been continuing to serve non-devs and devs alike in their quest to create their own custom post types with ease. At 300,000+ active installs, its utility cannot be ignored!

If you aren’t familiar with CPTUI, here’s a breakdown on what it does from Michael, one of our superstar devs that has worked with this plugin extensively:

In case you are not familiar with what Custom Post Type UI does, it provides a user interface that someone can use to easily provide settings and labels to be used for registering custom post types and custom taxonomies for their install. The plugin then takes those values and does the actual registration, allowing users to start using them right away. Other features as of the 1.1.0 release include import, export, “get code”, and settings listing functionality. The import and export area helps port the plugin’s settings between installs. The “get code” facilitates moving where the post type and taxonomy registration occurs, while the settings listing acts as a quick view of all your settings with our plugin.

It really takes the pain out of having to type out all the necessary code to register post types or taxonomies and helps non-coders to get a start with extending their sites content. It’s the ease of use and aid to which I attribute its success.

While CPTUI helps solve the problem of creating custom post types, displaying the data gleaned from them can be a whole new challenge–which is why we decided to take it one step further and create CPTUI Extended.

We’ve made it simple to add data from your custom post types directly inside your pages and posts by creating a new shortcode builder. This doesn’t just work with post types you create–data from any post type on your site can be displayed using the shortcode builder. For example, you can use the shortcode to display products from popular ecommerce plugins like WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads, making building out your store and advertising your wares super simple.

This is especially great for the non-developers out there (like myself!) who need a little assistance when it comes to setting up their WordPress site the way that they want. This isn’t just for those folks, though; we made sure to build CPTUI Extended in a way that makes it unbelievably easy for developers to create custom templates for individual post types. We’ve even included detailed instructions on how to do it!

Naturally, because we’re us, we didn’t stop there. For those of you running a Multisite Network, we’ve made it simple to create network-wide custom post types and taxonomies. You no longer need to import your post types, one by one, into site after site; all you have to do is create it once and you’re done!

Even CPTUI version 1.3.0 was inspired by the creation of CPTUI Extended: Michael drew from his nearly three years of answering requests on the support forums and used it to create documentation on how to use CPTUI effectively, as well as provide a go-to location to answer all of the questions we frequently receive and  tutorials on how to achieve various modifications and customizations. You can find all of the documentation for both plugins at Pluginize Docs.

Keep an eye on Pluginize for future announcements, updates, and more incredible WebDevStudios products! You can keep track of news by following us @Pluginize and liking Pluginize on Facebook. 

We invite you to check out the new site, try out CPTUI Extended, and tell us what you think!

The post WebDevStudios Products Reach the Next Level with Pluginize.com appeared first on WebDevStudios.