I’m sat here, writing this at The Guild on the last day before Voltronik takes a short break for the holidays. It has been a fantastic year and one, I feel, worthy of a quick review.
Possibly the biggest item of note was the move to Bath in July and moving into our first permanent office space at The Guild – Bath’s newest (and best) co-working space. I wanted to follow up on our previous post, letting you all know how well it has gone but with client work being the priority this has slipped. I’m pleased to say that the move couldn’t have gone better. Everything went smoothly and The Guild opened the week I moved in – excellent timing. After taking a tour of the space, I signed-up almost immediately. I felt it was a perfect place for Voltronik to flourish, to feel more creative and to be part of a community of like-minded businesses, entrepreneurs and freelancers.
In May we achieved ‘Recommended Agency Status’ and placed on the Recommended Agency register awarded by RAR under the Web Design category.
In the Summer, we worked with one of our biggest clients to date: we re-designed Pocket Tactics – the world’s fastest growing news and reviews site for iOS & Android games with over half a million visits every month and launched Red Door Blue Key – their sister site and journal about PC games and other liberal arts. Both projects were incredibly fun to work on and have received huge amounts of publicity both for their content and their designs. There’s some great things in the pipeline with them too.
In October, I hosted my first event – a WordPress ‘Ask Me Anything’, where business owners and others that run WordPress websites could come along and literally, ask me anything about WordPress. The turn-out was great, the questions were thoughtful and it’s led The Guild and I to plan a series of WordPress related events with a variety of formats for the new year – stay tuned for more on that soon.
November saw us attending Handheld: a conference all about mobile devices and the challenges we face as an industry in providing fast, responsive websites that work on a huge range of devices. The talks were incredibly insightful, spoken by some of the leaders in the web industry and prompted us to make some key changes to the way in which we produce work for our clients. All have been implemented and are working with great success, adding value and reducing time.
Of course, it goes without saying that our focus and experience of WordPress has increased exponentially. We’ve seen some great updates from the WordPress.org team this year with a clear focus on managing content, improving the user interface and moving further towards a web application platform – something we used it for with great success when building a bespoke project management system for one of our clients in January. This improved knowledge has helped us to produce vastly easier to manage WordPress websites for our clients too.
Soon into the new year, we’ll be launching two new websites, both of which have been our most technically challenging to design and build. We also have some great projects lined-up for the first quarter of next year and I can’t wait to show you our latest work!
Naturally, we’ll be closed over the Christmas holidays for a bit (or a lot) of food, drink and rest. Today (Friday 20th December) is our last full day of work this year but we’ll be back on 6th January 2014.
Here’s to our clients whom we would not be here without and to a great 2013! May good things come next year too.
Cheers!
– The Voltronik Team