.NET
Owain was featured in Skrift Magazine this month and has generally been releasing blog posts more frequently to help with his own learning and others. Skrift magazine is always looking for authors and is open to all people with an interest in Umbraco.
JB attended a pitch at Sir Robert McAlpine in London yesterday with Andy, we’ll hear how we got on this week, so fingers crossed!
Umbraco Spark is on the 10th of March in Bristol – they have actually sold out of tickets in record time this year
Code Cabin applications are open – Code Cabin is an invite-only, 3-night Umbraco Developer Unconference where you can code, learn and network with others in the community. Sian would encourage anyone in the .Net or Frontend teams to apply
Owain is waiting to hear if his talk has been accepted for CodeGarden, which is the official Umbraco Conference held in Denmark in June! Fingers crossed!
Umbraco baseline update:
- JB has been working on getting our Umbraco Baseline to an environment for the wider business to refer to
- Dom has been working on integrating our Umbraco Baseline with the Frontend Baseline site
Umbraco 11.2 was released with mainly dependency updates. Any large updates are being backported into Umbraco 10 which is the current Long Term Supported version and the version we are building on for our clients.
Why aren’t we building on the latest version of Umbraco?
We’re not moving to v11 yet because v11 and v12 won’t be supported for as long as v10. V10 is a Long Term Support (LTS) version of Umbraco whereas v11 and v12 are short-term versions which will bridge the gap between v10 (LTS) and v13 (LTS). Putting one of our clients on v11 or v12 would mean that their site wouldn’t last as long as v10 without needing an upgrade.
WordPress
Rob has now been with us for 3 full weeks. He’s had the opportunity to shadow support and last week, he got stuck into his first project for Thomas Carroll. Rob has already commented on how helpful the team have been and how great the UX is in CMSs that he has been having a poke around in for inspiration.
Luxury Chalet Bookings – This has been a team effort and Jake demoed to the client last week who said they were really impressed with the site!
Elmhurst support tickets are no longer blocked after Davey and Ellis did some work to tidy up the branches, which was appreciated by the client!
Ellis and I had a call with Rhi H and Christ T about our recommended plugins for WordPress sites and how we can put a process in place to ensure that the plugins are documented and are added to the release scripts to prevent deployment issues
Bespoke Solutions
Unfortunately, we said farewell to Callum Donovan on the day of the team meeting.
Senior Developer Nash, will be joining the team on the 28th of March. We also have outsourced resources with RedBerry, who have been working with us for a year now and this is proving to be a huge success for us.
There’s been a real emphasis on cross-knowledge site sharing and documenting.
New guides have been created (Azure Pipelines, Local Working)
Laravel 10 was launched!
- We have already started on our first Laravel 10 site, with another 2 in the pipelines.
- Updated SpinForms (v3) to work with Laravel 10
- Started the first Upgrade to Laravel 10 with IBOS
Frontend
FE have been breaking silos – getting together with different departments and having virtual socials. Keep your eyes peeled in your inbox, if you’ve not been part of our happy hour yet…
Don has been building Caerbont, which he says he’s enjoyed working with an interesting design and figuring out how to implement it into Baseline.
Rosie has been working on BECT, and says she’s enjoyed being able to use an improved version of Baseline following our recent updates.
Sam has been finishing up on EEMUA, where he’s had the chance to experience building a large website, and facing/learning about the challenges associated with that.
Tegan has been reskinning Traveline to bring the branding into line with TFW. She’s been using the client’s designs on Figma, instead of InVision, which has it’s own set of challenges and quirks.
Digital Marketing
Hari passed her first LinkedIn advertising exam.
Chris has been working on our Keyword research dashboards.
We’ve got our Bing Certified badge for another year thanks to the team passing their Bing certifications.
DTW’s Bing success
- 32% increase in conversions Jan vs Feb
- 17% increase in revenue Jan to feb
- AND it was also cheaper, with the average cpc dropping by 16% and the overall ad spend dropping by 6.53%.
Project Management
Go lives including
- Platfform Wellbeing, Elmhurst Energy, MPA, and these are just a few!
We also learned that Jake likes to eat his fingers when hungry!
Business Partner
A lot has gone live this month including:
- 5 x Harley Davidson launches including Swiss Currency, Market Operations, Reporting Tables, Home Page and Motorcycle tracking admin pages.
- Balance Scorecard updates
Met with IBOS, Harley Davidson, Triumph and Hyundai leading to more opportunities
Tara celebrated 3 years with Spindogs earlier this month!
Together the BPs and PMs have been…
- Cleaning up Zoho projects including closing past milestones and tasks on completed projects.
- Implemented the 10 business day prior rule with delivery schedules.
- Changed up our meetings including stand-up and TL calls to be more efficient.
- Working on resource sufficiency across the business and ensuring the right team member is on the right project
IT
We’ve added our company branding to our Azure/Office 365 login pages. When you sign into something that using Single Sign-on you’ll now be assured you’re signing into a Spindogs System
We’ve migrated the Spindogs Spam filter over to a cloud-hosted solution. We’ll be sending an email out to all staff on how everyone can log in and manage their own quarantine area
For any IT requests – Can you email these to it@spindogs.com instead of sending a teams message to Charley or Steve so we can prioritise requests and plan the incoming requests
Can’t find the Internal IT name in outlook, we’ve renamed it to Spindogs IT
Support
We’ve started using a Countdown Filter as standard in Desk to ensure that we’re working through the highest priority first.
If any tickets are close to violating the SLA for resolution or response they get Escalated Automatically now.
We’ve made a change to ensure we’re responding within a set amount of time on every response and not just a first response to the client.
In the Month of February, we’ve already increased our adherence to the SLA by 10% compared to January.
“Excellent response times and communication. Thank you”
“Fabulous customer service from Sarah! Thank you so much”
Business Development
The team has been busy progressing opportunities with existing companies such as Capital Law, Ombudsman Wales, Coffee 1, and Optometry Wales. Some very exciting new opportunities with Ford, Sir Robert McAlpine, RoSPA, Cardiff Rugby, Bromford Housing and Penningtons Manches Cooper.
We have had very positive meetings with Bromford Housing and are due to visit Ford and Sir Robert McAlpine this week.
We have won Cardiff Rugby and I believe the contract for Devon ICB (GP Website opportunity) is currently being confirmed.
As a team, we have been working hard to improve our opportunity management specifically around tender submissions and the qualification of tender opportunities. This is important in managing our time as efficiently as possible.
Spindogs Marketing
With our focus on housing this quarter Tash has been reworking the sector page, the sector paper and a new insights doc ready for promotion, we have further updates on the website sector page planned for this month and are in the early stages of planning for the Housing Expo 2023.
This coupled with further website content changes means that the website is still evolving on a monthly basis.
In terms of events, off the back of the Adidas event in February we are now in talks with Hyundai and Levi’s, with the hope of having these scheduled for May and June. We have an ambitious event programme sketched out for Spring/Summer and as soon as more details and dates are confirmed we will be sharing them with you all.
With BARK, we are in the content planning process, with a plan to have the theme of Sustainability for the next issue, we have spent time reviewing previous issues and are confident our plan brings together the successful aspects of many of them, in terms of design, content, length and finish.
Lastly, we are now in the final stages of the 4th client newsletter, and we are pleased to share that engagement remains high, with another 35% open rate on the February mailer. We have some great, fresh content to promote for March and are really pleased with the current momentum.
People & Culture
Mands has been supporting the team with the recruitment of the roles we have available
Claire S will be going through all of the company-wide appraisal feedback as soon as it is collated end of this week to identify areas to continue and improve
The March wellbeing series has been finalised and any invites not sent out will be with you by the end of the week, we are covering a plethora of topics including financial advice, baking, welsh language learning and in-person bookaholics meet up.
A few people have now mentioned to Claire S that they would be keen for us to resume our charity challenges, in the past, we have done 5k and 10k runs, Gung ho assault course, Quizzes, football matches, and are keen to get some ideas on the table. Culture Club are getting their heads together and we are keen to get your feedback
Housekeeping – in terms of wellbeing series, we have seen an increase in drop-offs from the last couple of events. Even though it should be a priority to communicate with the host whether internal or external we need to be mindful and respectful of the time of third parties, we wait for everyone to arrive before we begin each session and so if you have not let us know you won’t be joining we are waiting for you to arrive.
Please ensure your address and ICE person is up to date.