By William Bott. WordPress Support. 300% WordPress support increase in a year. The race is now on. In the summer last year we had been running our dedicated WordPress Support function for less than a year, but it was starting to pick up and in July 2013 we dealt with 50 support tickets. Fast forward […]
Open Technology. Open source and standards is the current and important initiative in organisations but how many are actually living the dream. More and more, if GOV.uk is to be believed. Recently the UK Government has dropped using proprietary file formats and moved completely to open standards. You probably recognise the problems of trying to […]
The Future. In a world where content is king, content has become ubiquitous. And that requires different thinking. We call this DIGITAL FIRST, rather than pigeon-holing into device-specific containers in the way MOBILE FIRST does. Well-structured content is at the heart of good design, and how the content adapts to different media types (web sites, […]
Productivity. In the 20th century the office existed solely because it was the only place to get work done. You went there to access information, technology and colleagues. Not anymore. You can access all of that from pretty much any location in the world. So stop going to the office. Why? An office is some […]
WordPress Platform. “It’s brilliant is WordPress you can make it do anything just by adding plugins” Except this really isn’t good practice. By adding endless plugins it’s quite easy to create a monster that becomes too big to control. The core WordPress platform is tightly curated by WordPress.org whilst plugins can be written by anyone, […]
Read More… from WordPress Plugins: Methodology, maintenance and when to say no
Content Planning. One of the great things about running the WordPress platform is that you can easily become a content publisher. Except having a content platform doth not a interesting publisher make. The challenge in a content-rich world is to stand out from the crowd. No-one really cares, or believes sweeping statements about high-quality you […]
Hiring talent. Generation X just doesn’t understand Y. The bosses and the workers are further apart than ever before If you are a Gen X (born 1960s to the early 1980s) then your working ethos was driven by the baby boomers demands to change the world. It created a what some describe as a “very […]
Agile Operations. It’s often thought that Agile, Scrums and Sprints were something a WordPress agency would only use in development – but that’s wrong and really misses the point about agile, which is grounded in sharing and delivering stuff And it’s not just us – in the agency world, agile is gaining in momentum. Big […]
WordPress Platform. Released yesterday, WordPress 4.0 is not the giant leap that the 4.0 moniker might infer – more of a regular update. So here’s a photo from last weekend’s Goodwood Festival of Speed. We’re an agency of Pistonheads really. Development on WordPress 4.0 only officially started on April 30th, led by Helen Hou-Sandi. We’ve […]
Business Process Re-engineering The explosion of “as-a-service” providers is giving a lot of traditional organisations huge headaches, and big opportunities in equal measure. Is it the ticket to a simple life? Can every business tasks be bought as-a-service? An emerging band of companies, including ourselves, think this is not only possible, but preferable. The new […]
WordPress Agency News. Since 2008 we’ve majored on WordPress development and all new websites and digital assets for the last 3 years have been created using WordPress. So why the great love of WordPress, and why eschew all other web platforms? What about Drupal, Joomla, Sharepoint, Django, or all the Ruby, Java and .Net solutions? […]
Google and search engines. May saw the latest incarnation of Google’s Panda release. Designed to rid the search engines of poor quality content it’s hit the PR-web type services very hard indeed. Google have, for some time, been moving away for what it calls “thin-quality” sites. This specifically catches aggregators and publishers out due to […]
Read More… from Panda 4.0 might kill off the paid-for PR world
Learning to blog by Penny Driscoll. “Write, and they will come” couldn’t be any further from the truth and does not take into account real engagement. Folks often write posts just to sound off, or rant, or share a random opinion. Those can be any length as no-one reads them. If you want you post […]
Google & search. The never ending merry-go-ground of playing catchup with Google takes another pointless turn. Or a major step forward to change how information on the web is indexed, sorted and displayed. Google + never worked as a social network, not really (it might have secretly been a fab data-gathering tool instead). As a […]
WordPress Support. Scaling support for an ever-growing number of WordPress installations has been the major push in the last quarter. During the period we’ve seen the number of support tickets climb over 50%. The combination of a number of a new WordPress support contracts and the end of the recession has seen the number of […]
Content Planning. WordPress is a fabulously flexible platform on which to base your content strategy. But the content cannot be drivel or PR/marketing speak. Ever. Quality is the watchword here, and that means no spam, link baiting or over-optimised pages designed for computers and not people. The worst offenders are corporates and PR machines who, […]
Social platforms. Used only by the SEO agencies, Google’s feeble attempt to usurp Facebook was loaded with bribes to drive agencies, developers and organisations onto the new platform. And it failed. On the way, they did succeed in gathering a lot of data, and now a huge percentage of searches are now done from “logged-in” […]
UI and UX (UCD and ISO 9241) Designing modern digital services on the WordPress platform is more about the user experience than ever before. Gone are the days where the creative director rules the roost with opinion and experience. As a modern digital agency, design is all-inclusive and about meeting the needs of the users. […]
Singers. The 1960s. Namesakes. by Jimmy Hughes. Quite why my loving parents named me after a black singer from the 1960s is totally beyond me. More likely, they didn’t know that Jimmy Hughes and picked my name from a “baby book” in 1979. That’s the nature of the Internet, though. It seems that common names, […]
Mobile first By Martin Dower. Amazon launch a new smartphone today, adding yet another proprietary eco-system to a world that needs them like a hole in the head. In fact, no one really wants to be tied to single eco-system. Some folks like the idea of a curated environment such as Google’s Play or Apple’s […]
