Internal day: October 2020

With our internal training and innovation days resuming as normal, it looks like the ever growing ClarityDX team have been productive as ever. Improving internal processes, creating plugins, doing work on our own website and writing really great content pieces. Below is a brief summary of what the different teams got up to, while working together, from home.

Development

Content migrations are a big part of what we do in most projects and it’s something that Vic has been personally involved in a lot. So it made sense for Vic to write an article on “How we approach content migration”.

To save clients time in the future and simplify the process of content migration, Vic began developing a plugin which would allow the ClarityDX dev. team to export and import content with little development time, and hopefully will (eventually!) mean that even our very own project managers will be able to do this.

Vic also wanted to continue work on ‘Terra’ to get it “production ready” as it’s something he’s been invested in for a while, and would be great to make use of it on the next project. Terra allows users to add a feed into a page which displays filtered archive feed of posts with minimal effort. 

The end result? Article written, Terra has been tested in several scenarios, (there are still a few tweaks to make) but Vic believes its production ready so will be implementing it for the next project that he is working on! 👏Success! 

Vic also managed to successfully test the migration plugin with a specific JSON file format. The test allowed Vic to upload a data file from an exported site, map the fields using a drag and drop interface into a new site and import the posts – a super productive and busy day for Vic all around. 

Ahmad continued work on the bookmarking feature with the goal of turning it into a plugin. The reason behind this is to separate the feature from the theme and enable the use of it without the theme. This would create a reusable plugin which in turn would reduce time needed to implement the feature in future client websites.

Ahmad also decided to perform WordPress security tests and study the results. This allowed him to advance his security knowledge further, and improve the security of the ClarityDX site.

By the end of the day, the feature was transformed into a plugin, with a few ‘ease of use’ features to be added in the future, and Ahmad tested security features that will be implemented soon on the ClarityDX site. 

As WebFlow has been getting popular due to their “No code movement”  Mujeeb set himself a goal of writing an article looking at the features of Webflow in comparison to those of WordPress. This involved exploring aspects of Webflow such as how their code gets generated, how their UI works, how flexible it is etc.

Mujeeb is generally interested in code based automations. Time and again Webflow platform has been compared to WordPress and as a WordPress developer he was interested in seeing how true those comparisons are. 

We have had clients who have shown interest in Visual page builders. So in virtue of writing the article, it allowed Mujeeb to gain perspective on WordPress and where it stands relative to Webflow. It also helped Mujeeb to gauge if there is anything outdated about our approaches, and to see whether there is anything that we can do better to create an experience similar to platforms like WebFlow should there be a desire for it from our clients. 

The end result? It may be a little biased coming from us, but Mujeeb concluded that WebFlow is a design tool and the comparison to WordPress was not justified. Webflow is definitely a good system when it comes to designing but their approaches cannot be used in complex scenarios, particularly for B2B websites. 

Jafar set out to first, create a button with cool animations as we have a project coming down the line which will need this, and it’ll mean that we will be able to use the code. The second objective was to create a resources hub on ClarityDX site, as we are producing more content for our users and potential clients, and want to make it easy for you to find. By the end of the day, both goals were achieved!

Design

Our Head of UX & Design Nicola spent the internal day finishing an article looking at ‘The importance of brand guidelines for a website’, and taking a step back to analyse the overall approach to our UI design output and practices. 

Nicola is currently in the process of evaluating our designs at the ‘high fidelity’ stage – considering our conceptual approach, and identifying how best to coordinate multiple parties and work streams in such a way as to create the strongest, most cohesive finished product

Although we’re always making incremental improvements in everything we do, stepping back and taking the time to look at an area of work in its entirety can bring new insights. It’s also important to present a clear case to others in the company if you want to suggest a new way of doing things and keep everyone aiming in the same direction.

The end result for Nicola incorporated an article focused on an in depth discussion on “How brand guidelines help deliver website projects”, alongside the beginnings of a slide deck that will be presented internally at a later date to share her findings. 

Our Digital Designer Charlie did some blog writing, and decided to also take the valuable time to finish revising for an exam for a UX design course. Here’s what Charlie told us about the course: 

Over the last year I have been doing a course in UX design via the UX Design Institute which has been great, if a little stressful at times when work has also been busy. It addresses the basics of UX design and involved projects that will contribute to an overall portfolio piece. Our challenge was to redesign the flight booking process, and for this we were guided through best UX practice which resulted in some really explorative methods of research.

The aim of the course was to improve overall knowledge and experience in the UX design discipline. On the course, Charlie explored a number of different methods, including usability testing, affinity diagramming, and prototyping, to name but a few. So we’re super excited to see how these insights can be brought in to future projects, time and budget permitting!

The end result? Lot’s of revision notes! Charlie has been averaging at 94% for his work on the course so far, so fingers crossed for the exam! 🤓

Project Management 

Our Project Managers went through the task lists for the various different project phases, amending them based on our current processes and made them even more comprehensive.

With an increased number of projects being worked on at any one time, it is easy to forget about the smaller details so the Project Managers want to ensure that they have everything written down somewhere to remind them of the small details. This should ensure that nothing is missed when going through the different project stages and ensure we deliver a more complete product to our clients.

How did the day end for our project managers? Well there was a set of complete checklists ready to be used by the PM, design and development team to make sure every small detail is looked after! 

Digital strategy 

Our in-house SEO expert Dan, had a couple goals for the day. First, to update a voice SEO article he wrote on the last internal day to include comments from marketing experts. Having comments from a range of industry experts helps provide different perspectives to an article giving it more depth and helping to build relationships within the marketing community and beyond. 

Second, was to look further into international SEO, particularly how to optimise multilingual websites using sitemaps (in combination with hreflang attributes.) Researching further into multilingual and multiregional SEO is key at the moment for us, as many of our current clients and an increasing number of new clients operate in multiple countries all over the world. They need to have a website that is optimised for search no matter what language it is in. 

While the principles of SEO are applicable in any language, you need to ensure you are optimising your site for local SEO as well as catering to audiences in different areas and in different languages. Search engines always want to provide the best possible results for any particular search and this includes in the appropriate language of the search user. From hreflang attributes to Google My Business listings to building local links, there are many ways to efficiently optimise a site for international SEO.

The end result? Voice SEO article has been updated with several great quotes from marketing experts. Dan’s knowledge of international SEO has been widened and now includes using sitemaps to present the appropriate language version of a website to a user searching in that language or location! 

Our Digital Strategist Darren focused on writing a blog post on paid strategies for B2B companies. As it’s something that he’s spending a lot of his time doing with our clients at the moment, so while it’s all fresh in his mind it should prove a very interesting read. Check out the finished article here. 

The goal for our marketing intern Jodi was to write a blog post on behalf of ClarityDX for the Digital Agency Network. The blog post is about the importance of a discovery and definition phase of a website project.

The topic chosen was inspired by Alex’s recent post ‘Design & development: the least important parts of your website project.’ In his, Alex gave a great example of how ClarityDX has succeeded in delivering results for a client through definition and discovery. Jodi wanted to emulate this example in her own post and showcase ClarityDX’s capabilities!

In guest posting on the Digital Agency Network, we hope to reach a wide audience and educate them on the importance of aligning marketing strategy with website design through discovery and definition. Marketers should be aware of the impacts a website can have on marketing KPIs like lead generation and conversion. As an agency, we aim to be transparent with our processes and about why we place importance on the early stages of projects. The end result was a shiny, new, explorative guest post for DAN! 

Our Account Director James has been working on our client feedback process. This includes tweaking the interview process to include a net promoter score. A Net Promoter Score is the number out of ten a client selects rating their likelihood to recommend a company, a product, or a service to a person or company in their network. One is very unlikely and ten very Likely. Once you have the score you then interview the client to find the reasoning around the selected number. 

Getting an in-depth understanding of our client’s experience with us over the duration of a project cycle is key to our growth and continual improvement.