AlexWalker codes

At our Agency Catch-Up last week I was delighted to be recognised alongside these two stars – Sascha Richards and Rhodri Lloyd – as one of Clicky‘s top performers in Q1 of this year.

It was almost a year to the day since I joined Clicky, which makes it even more pleasing to have been able to make a significant contribution to the business so soon, especially in the exalted company of Sascha and Rhod who have 10+ years combined service with Clicky under their belts!

I recently started jotting down a note every time I picked up a new titbit of development knowledge. It’s easy to focus on big learning goals, like mastering a JavaScript library or an unfamiliar CMS, but actually most of the learning we do is in small increments, so I feel it’s worthwhile to document and reflect on those gains.

Here are some things I’ve learned in the last few weeks (I’ve tried to also note where I picked up the info from):

• HTML has summary and detail elements that can be used to create an accordion UI, such as you might use on an FAQ page (thanks to Bryony Hall for suggesting this on a recent code review).
• position: sticky is now available in CSS and supported by most browsers (another insight from Bryony) so you no longer have to toggle position: fixed for a sticky header.
• One of the things I learned from a Treehouse course on CSS Best Practices was that there is a CSS specificity hierarchy that calculates which rules to apply by giving each selector a score. More info on CSS Specificity.
• Another Treehouse course introduced me to the Set and Map object types in JavaScript; I found an application for Set the very next day.
• Based on a client request, I discovered that there are now very specific types of schema data you can add to a site to help Google index your content properly; you can declare that the page contains a review or a recipe and even provide FAQs that will display in the SERP itself! Find out more.
• Laravel Tinker has a command of ‘wtf’ that shows details of the last error. It also has the commands ‘whereami’ and ‘throw-up’. Check out this post for a full list of commands.

I moved house last month back to my childhood village of Radcliffe-on-Trent. My new place doesn’t have a dedicated office room like my old flat, but I have made the most of this space underneath the stairs to create a cosy workstation…

I also now have a garden so in the summer I’ll be working out there whenever possible!

As well as watching the football, over the last couple of weeks I’ve been working on launching the latest version of the LogoMeUp website.

This update introduces their 2022 rebrand, a new homepage layout and – most importantly – a filter-based navigation system for the product categories that makes it very simple for customers to narrow down their search for the perfect embroidered clothing.

This is a feature we’ve wanted to have for years but it was only made possible this year because their supplier introduced a list of product tags onto their database, allowing us to create filters for garment style, colour groups, product uses, materials and much more.

My first bit of major work for Clicky Media has been live for about a month. Feedback today from the conversions manager: “Quote requests have increased by 57% and conversion rate has increased by 30%.”

Very often as a developer you don’t know what impact your work is having, at least not in a quantifiable way like this. The results-driven approach was one of the things that attracted me to Clicky over other agencies.

A lot of people contributed to this new feature and we spent significant time collaborating on the UX, so it’s fantastic to see the figures justifying the effort.