Internal day: September 2021

Over summer, the entire ClarityDX team was up to their necks in client work, exceeding expectations and delivering exciting new digital platforms. That’s why for the past two months, we haven’t had the chance to hit pause for our monthly internal training day. 

Last week, we were finally able to take one day off from client work to improve our internal processes, and to make projects more efficient in the long run. Ultimately, the objectives we achieve on our internal training days save new and existing clients’ time and money as we fine tune our strategies and delivery. 

The first thing we did on our September internal day was meet on Zoom for a company-wide update. It was a rather inspirational thanks and encouragement from Alex, ClarityDX Founder & MD. He expressed a tear-jerking gratitude for our hard work over the last year, and he presented proven success with an optimistic outlook for the future of ClarityDX as a leading digital agency. 

Read on to find out what the entire team achieved on our September internal training day.

Designers 

At the moment, our designers are moving on from Sketch as their tool of choice, so their day was centred around the exploration of their new tool, Figma.

They looked at tutorials, potential plugins, wireframe packages and micro animations for buttons and hover states. They discovered a thing called Figmotion which could be great for creating dynamic banners for clients.

It was Frankie’s first internal day, so Charlie talked him through the different stages of client projects so he’d understand the website process as a whole. 

Nicola, our Head of UX and Design, looked over our entire design strategy to make sure we’re meeting client objectives and to provide more clarity internally. 

Project managers

It’s been all about Teamwork today for most of the Project Management team. They explored how we can use more of the inbuilt Teamwork features to make processes more efficient. Hollie and Joss looked at the business case for using Teamwork for time logging. Joss wrote a guide for creating a new project within Teamwork so that the process is consistent between projects. 

Graham did housekeeping to make sure everything on our project management platforms is organised and ready for future work. Roz added more details to our CMS template to ensure consistency across projects.

Developers

Our Development team worked on plugins for custom post types, as well as Gutenberg components in our Lunar theme. They built web streams and updated functional specs.

Our Lead Developer Matt reviewed our security standards to ensure they’re as effective as can be to keep client’s and their websites safe from cyber threats. Mujeeb worked on a new and exciting blog post (coming out soon!) He also made tweaks to export functionality so we can fine tune the data that we export.

Hiten built an app that’s a little clone of Zoom to make calls and have a video chats!

Clarity Performance

Our SEO team, Dan B, Herve and Ronaldo, discovered ways to strengthen SEO processes. Such as implementing external link building, analysing user behaviour and journey metrics, and performing internal linking audits. Dan signed up for lots of external linking tools and explored strategies like outreach emails. He focussed on learning about the best options for B2B tech and SaaS companies in particular.

Our Digital strategists, Ricci and Vini, spent the day looking at the new Google Analytics 4 and putting together a process guide on how to set up Google Analytics properly. He found some stand out things in GA4: A lot of the default reporting only holds 2-14 months of data. It’s a lot easier for event based tracking. Scroll depth tracking are automatically included in GA4 profiles and they’ve released demo accounts you can add to your analytics profile so you can play around and not break anything. 

Finally, our PPC team, Dan M and Luca, updated our PPC discovery and audit documents, and looked at PPC audit recommendations to improve our content gap analysis. They looked at the latest industry news and any changes in Google that may have impacted their best practices. 

Marketing and account management

James, our Senior Digital Account Director, worked on refining our kick off deck template so that future clients are onboarded in the best way possible.

Ollie, our Head of Marketing and New Business, worked on a case study for a recent website project we’ve launched, to show off our skills to potential clients and to gain new exciting website projects.

All in all, it’s safe to say our September internal day was a success! Well done team!