It’s Tuesday…

I’m Simon, I thought I might do this little blog post to show you what a single day is like for me here at 79DESIGN.

It started with some custom coding, adding filters to a new website we are writing for a marketing business in London.  It’s not a website that could be do so easily in WordPress, so we are writing it from scratch with a bespoke system.  The logins processes are all written; this part is about enabling administrators to filter users based on various factors.  So there is some challenge there on how to filter multiple columns… or just one column.

Website Optimisation demonstration

Then we were asked about an existing client’s website that isn’t doing so well.  At the start they didn’t want any image optimisation or image sizing, which was frustrating, but that was their choice.  They have no image optimisation, and the images used in their commerce pages are far larger than those shown.  IE they appear no larger than 190px wide on screen, yet they are actually 600px wide.  In lamens terms, they are wasting about 80% of pixels that are not even being used.  Times that by 10 images, and that’s a lot of KBs wasted.  Plus the images are not being optimised by any WordPress software.  So an image that is 350kb could be down to 80-90kb… but isn’t.  More waste!  So we are working on a ‘demo’ to show them the difference.  Taking them down a better path!

The demo was completed by midday, and handed over to show the difference in performance.  Quite a startling difference, such as a 5mb page down to 5mb, for the same content.

Then it was onto more work for a custom job we are building.  Not a platform that uses WordPress, but a fully bespoke “hand carved’ solution.  Today it was about the ability to add Categories and Retailer names to a system, and to delete them as well.  Plus adding these new links to the admin menu, but highlighting that they form part of another area of the site.

It all sounds straight forward, but you have to consider so many factors in this simplest of process.  It was completed this afternoon though, and works lovely.  The menu took about an hour to create and design correctly, while the other elements took a few hours.

WordPress website meeting

At 2pm we had a meeting with a prospective client called James, who is a Personal Trainer.  He has a newish business, tho clients are already gathering.  So it was to see what pages he would need, to utilize his logo, and create something both stunning, and what Google would find appealing.  All within a budget that meets his criteria.

We are including a few other elements that make his proposition have a USP…. more details if and when this happens.  Don’t want to give all our secrets away!  But he is, to quote him “really excited”, as are we.  Most companies just setup a website and that’s it.  We do more than that.  And this is what makes our service, superior.

After I got back, work recommenced on the Optimisation job from earlier to sign things off, and then back to the bespoke job, where we finished the Category and Retailer part of this new website… at which point it was time to finish for the day.

We often write blogs about particular services, but today I thought I’d do this one about my day.  In between this was tea, coffee, lunch but oddly no walk.  Just too busy for that.  And busy is good.  Very good.

Each day is different.  That’s what makes it brilliant.  Evolving.