Internal day: February 2021

February being a short month, our second ‘internal day’ of the year rolled around fast! Once again, the ClarityDX team paused work on client projects and focused on innovation and finding efficiencies in our own internal processes. In the long run helping to boost quality and save our clients time and money.

The teams kicked-off the day by first touching base within their departments to agree on key priorities for the day, before joining everyone else on a call and sharing these with the wider ClarityDX team. Once everyone touched base again at 4.30, it certainly sounded like the day was super productive for the whole team.

Here’s what the ClarityDX team got up to: 

Developers

Ahmad used the day to work on a blog post around two factor authentication, and how this helps to protect B2B websites. Once done, Ahmad carried on working on the bookmark plugin, which although already has a working version, needed a couple more improvements to get it polished. 

With the Google Core Vitals update coming in May, our Senior Front End Developer Andrew decided to write a second part to his “Core Web Vitals & CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift): how to avoid common pitfalls” article, this time focusing on “Core Web Vitals: tips to optimise LCP (Largest Contentful Paint)”.

Alongside lead developer Matt and Founder Alex, Andrew also joined WP Engine Founder Jason Cohen on a call to learn about their new headless WordPress solution called Atlas – lots of exciting developments coming up in this space!  

Similarly to Ahmad and Andrew, Ibon focused on writing a blogpost, choosing to cover WordPress multisites. Particularly, as we have a number of multisite projects, the post should provide guidance for those about to embark on a web design and development project, but unsure as to whether multisites are the right way to go.

Jafar had a super busy day – first, an article written on “How to protect your website from cyber attacks?” done! Then, carved out time for internal updates on the ClarityDX site. Lastly, Jafar built an automated accessibility test suite which will highlight the good and not so good, accessibility features on a website. This test suite will also produce a written test file which the ClarityDX internal team will be able to share with clients & highlight if there are any issues on the WordPress site.

Our Lead Developer Matt also wrote a blog post on “How we approach security on our own, ClarityDX site?” This should serve as a broad overview of how we approach security at ClarityDX for our current, and future clients. Matt also managed to do a couple of internal amends over at FINITE.community, and worked further on the new start theme Luna.  

Mujeeb, used the day to write an article diving into cacheing, what is it, when its effective and when it’s not! Keep an eye out for this over the coming months. Mujeeb also used the time to work on user acceptance testing, looking at what you need to test from a more functional angle before launching a website.

Vic explored “How we integrate WordPress with Salesforce” looking at our past projects and best practices in an article. Once complete, Vic then spent time finishing the ‘terra’ tool he has been building, allowing users to filter and search posts. This is a newer version of a tool we are already using, which has the same functionality, but with additional features. We should be able to deploy this on client projects soon! At the end of the day, Vic gave the whole of the ClarityDX team a short demo – it’s looking really great! 🙌

Designers 

The Design Team and our Senior Digital Account Director James focused on refining our remote affinity diagramming practices. Broadly, an affinity diagram is a tool used to organise individual ideas and pieces of data into groups of natural relationships for further review and analysis. It is particularly helpful to provide clarity when dealing with unstructured qualitative research. 

The idea was to look at the process from different angles to see where it could be advanced further. Particularly via the use of our new (ish!) software tool Miro which enables teams of professionals and stakeholders to work together on this remotely. Charlie was also able to bring a different angle, through insights he was able to draw out of the Professional Diploma in UX Design from the UX Design Institute he recently completed.

Digital Strategy 

Dan B. used the day to focus on SEO for the ClarityDX site, exploring new schema markup and doing keyword research and keyword maps for our service pages. Dan also looked to get a head start for his blog article for the March internal day. After completing keyword research around this, Dan B decided that the blog post he is keen to write will be around gated content – “to gate or not to gate?” We shall find out next month! 

Since joining us just before Christmas in 2020, it was the first proper internal day for our PPC Strategist Dan M – welcome to the team! Similarly to Darren, Dan used the day to write a “Best practice guide for LinkedIn campaign creation” explaining in more detail what a LinkedIn campaign involves, what the different settings mean and why they are important, all to ensure the success of the LinkedIn campaign. Dan also did some research around partner status both for Google Ads and LinkedIn – more on this in the coming weeks. 

Our Digital Strategist Darren used the day to finish his in-depth guide on “SEO vs. PPC: A guide for B2B tech marketing” – a super interesting read!

Our Marketing Assistant Jodi focused on content for an article on ABM, particularly, looking at some of the key tools in this space and assessing their pros and cons. We also have a pub quiz coming up in March, so Jodi also spent time devising curious questions for the team. 🤓

Project Managers 

Ellie decided to take the day to look at our UAT and QA scripts. By the end, alongside vital input from the all ClarityDX Project Managers, we had a master script created that can be used as a template in the future, with space for project specific features to be added or removed.

In the long run this should save the team time when it comes to UAT and QA, bringing further clarity to the process.

Alongside help with UAT and QA scripts, Our Project Director Graham, Project Managers Roz and Hollie, also focused on writing exciting blog posts that will be shared on the ClarityDX site in March and April. Graham wrote on: “Project Management v Core Web Vitals and performance” while Roz looked at content in web design & development projects and Hollie did a creative outline of the different features that are included in a Maintenance and Support WordPress retainer. The team also got ready for a file spring clean during the next internal day in March.