Frontend
In the Frontend team, Rosie and Cerys have been working on Premier Marinas and enjoying their teamwork’s productiveness. Rosie also mentioned there has been lots of interaction with BE and PM too, so feels more collaborative than usual.
Sam enjoyed getting to start EEMUA, it’s been the first project he’s done of that size, so it has been interesting for him to take a new approach to build it. Meanwhile, Don is now getting cracking with Spindogs projects, so has had the lengthy and sometimes challenging process of getting everything set up.
Tegan has been working on Platfform trying to get funky borders to line up in browsers, with varying degrees of success…
Frontend Baseline update:
- The team have officially begun their scheduled slots on Baseline, Tegan and Rosie have had theirs so far and Sam has his on Monday. They have been able to roll out version 2.4 already and you should have all received the release notes in your emails! For those of you that haven’t read it, Tegan gives us a quick run down – “we have reviewed Steph’s Baseline overhaul design, updated accordions to only have one open at a time, added a reset button to our default form, added support for aspect ratio, swapped out slick for an accessible version so errors should stop coming back on our accessibility reports!”
WordPress
Over in the WordPress team, Davey has been working on the Oldwalls Collection site – a website to showcase their wedding venues and luxury cottages, love stories, events and news! The timeline was to deliver the Oldwalls website before Christmas (as this is their busiest time of year). Sian asked Davey if he could do this project out of hours so that we could meet the deadline and he took on the challenge and absolutely smashed it!! Their upcoming couples corner site will allow couples to tailor the plan to their big day.
Ellis has been working on Eakin surgical – a website to help users find specific surgical products such as surgical tubes used in general surgeries or more specific patient experiences, and to prompt users to enquire about those products to generate sales. Ellis has also been working on Platfform – A Mental Health charity trying to create a platform that drives connection, transformation and social change for sustainable wellbeing. The site has lists of counsellors, which users can choose from and this takes them to an external site to enquire about them.
The WordPress team have made an update to their ACF plugin to make the “Flexible Content” UI better, which should help when building these sort of layouts for our clients.
.Net
Meanwhile, in the .Net team, James has been working on the EEUMA site, which uses Kentico 12 and has been upgraded to Kentico 13. Originally we believed it wasn’t possible to do this upgrade because the versions use different versions of .Net. But using some custom tools and a migration plan in place, it has been possible and the site is now in a state where the new design can be applied!
Nigel, Owain and Dom have been working on Premier Marinas’ new Umbraco site – The website offers news, events and details of all their marinas. The boat owners can get quotes for berthing and boatyard services or sign up for/login into an account that allows booking of services, topping up of electricity meters and other account management such as online renewals of their account/contract.
Umbraco 11.1 has been released and all new features are also being included in version 10 (>=10.4). This includes the block grid editor which was previously only in v11. We also have these additional features to note:
- Drag & Drop support for the media picker – so users can drag files into the browser for upload
- A Maintenance page during upgrades – to hide the upgrade page from the end user
.Net Baseline Update:
- Basic access restricted pages added along with member login
- Removal of unused languages settings – US
- Blocklist Preview updates that were fixed in new projects and are now backported to the baseline
- Fix OG images – backported from new projects
- Add Civic Cookie rules to CSP
- General code tidy ups
Bespoke Solutions
The Bespoke Solutions team will be saying goodbye to Clint in February, but before he goes he’s going to be giving the team a run-through on all things Balanced Scorecard!
The team are on the hunt for a new Laravel/PHP Developer, if you know anyone that may be interested in the position?
Laravel 10 is released on February 7th! And the team will be looking forward to using that on our next new project (Estyn)
BST are also in talks with some clients to start upgrading their sites to newer versions of Laravel
And last but by no means least, HREP – HMNL is now “live live!”, and HAOS will be complete shortly – These are the last HREP legacy projects we have!
Digital Marketing
Over in our Digital Marketing team, Public Health Wales has signed up for another campaign “Help me Quit”
Chris has been working on some great improvements to our SEO tools. Changes include, speed, extra features and look and feel.
The team has also been using trialing Surfer SEO to make suggestions on improvements to key pages on our clients’ websites. The tool gives you an indicator of how the changes made on the pages can affect overall page optimisation.
They have been asked to get some proposals together for some pretty exciting projects in the DM team, which a lot of the guys have been helping with including:
- USW – student acquisition campaign for Undergrad & Postgrad students potentially worth 1.2 mil
- HIYA – A Rental service which allows you to rent appliances such as TVs at a low cost. Potentially worth £650k
Project Management
The Project Management team have been busy getting projects out the door!
Projects such as:
- REAMS
- Bryn Meadows
- Guys & St Thomas
Business Partners
There have been big INDUSTRY NEWS for our Business Partner team as The Dawn of a New ‘Hee-un-day’ comes to fruition, don’t forget there is going to be a ‘swear’ jar for those who pronounce Hyundai the old way!
Our Hyundai Aftersale Tracker went live and Harley Davidson, Neovia Logistics Bike Tracking launch!
The team have met with some of our clients, including:
- Burns Dog Food
- Triumph and uncovered large projects
- Harley Davidson and uncovered future projects
Will also met his doppelgänger in the office, when him and Andy turned up in the exact same outfit! Maybe we spend too much time with each other…
Support
The Support team have been busy working through over 1774 emails in the past month.
The team has a Customer Happiness rating of 92%, which is great!
This is off the back of lots of lovely feedback, including one in particular from The Woman’s Council.
Thank you so much Jessica for your prompt and kind help. You have been very professional and most efficient in helping with our website update. Furthermore, you followed up today to see how you could help with a video upload. This is very much appreciated. “
-The Women’s Council
The team have launched Subscriptions to our clients and our onboarded United Studios clients.
Priya showcase our customer portal to 7 H-Rep Markets, whilst Lauren took on her first small project for Acorn!
Business Development
Meanwhile, our Business Development team have been busy sending (a lot) proposals and submitting tender responses.
The team pitched to Penningtons Manches Cooper, who is a top 50 law firm in London and also attended an in-person pitch to Affinity Trust, which is a charity with a current £50m annual turnover.
The team have won a large NHS tender for building GP websites, which Liam mentioned during the company-wide team meeting yesterday. This is a fantastic opportunity for Spindogs!
BD are in talks with 3 new housing associations, Monmouthshire, Rykneld and Bromford.
Anna has just celebrated her 1st year anniversary at Spindogs, whilst Andy and Dan have their first wins.
Spindogs Marketing
This month the Spindogs Marketing team have continued to reach out to existing clients, via our mailer (34% OR) and our Happy New Year campaign, both of which were well received, and coupled with our Marketing Club event on the 9th Feb, means we have had an opportunity to engage with many clients on an individual basis in a short space of time. The Marketing Club event is our first in-person event of this kind since 2019 and the team can’t wait to host it again, with 12 clients confirmed to listen to Dan have a Q&A with Tom Pike, most recently Design Director at Adidas. Supporting materials for the event have also been on the agenda.
The team have also been working on the Spindogs blog, case studies and our all-important sector pages on the website, our content has also focussed on the areas that we know have specific deadlines this year, to ensure our audience is reminded of the urgency to make a change, both with GA4 and the end of life of Umbraco 7. Further updates and improvements to the website are underway, including our showreel, and the team can’t wait for you all to see it!
They have also been working on our goal of reaching more housing associations that could benefit from our expertise, supported by the 5 interns we have had from USW with us this week. The team are looking forward to their presentations today to find out the results of their projects.
Lastly, the team want to thank Ryan for being the first person to be videoed using our new in-house equipment, the video is great and they’re looking forward to seeing more from our team as the year unfolds.
People & Culture
In the People & Culture team, January was a month focused on meeting with the team and document housekeeping, with many 121’s in the diary and further refinement of our recruitment and onboarding processes. The Q2 wellbeing series is also underway, with some fantastic opportunities in the diary for learning, development and connection, if you are worried you may have missed an invite or would like more details please don’t hesitate to reach out.