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Goons, I need help! I've recently found myself in an interim (and hopefully soon to be more permeant) marketing management position, and my #1 priority is to hire a person or company to help us unfuck all the various dev issues we have going on. Right now we have one guy from an agency and, while he's not bad, he's woefully outclassed when it comes to issues vs. time Here are some of the issues we face. I unfortunately can't be too specific in this setting, but hopefully it's enough to get some info. - Website design issues. I can't do poo poo on our site without it looking terrible. We need someone to help us define the CSS for every single page - Website speed issues - API integration between BigCommerce, NetSuite, etc. - Other random website/development stuff as needed - One guy at the company requested someone who knows some SQL too, though that's not as high priority The main three platforms we need help with are Wordpress, BigCommerce, and NetSuite. Anyone who was super comfy with all three of those would be perfect. So my question is: What sort of person or company should I be looking for? While we do need a wide range of platforms and systems worked on, I feel like there's something that sort of combines them all, and I'm hoping there's a word or category for it that I can use to start searching around. I'd also be more than happy to consider recommendations. One other thing: The guy we have now is super vague about what he spends his retainer time doing, which I kinda feel like is bullshit. We need a person or company that doesn't mind documenting their work (even just a little, doesn't have to be a novel!) and being responsive to helping us fix lots of little problems in the short term and then working on bigger projects long term. Tell me what to do please! And if I'm way off base with any of this, please set me straight.
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Jul 22, 2021 14:18
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| # ¿ May 9, 2024 20:21 |
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The Merkinman posted:How did these two get to where they are now? It's all real loose right now. Like I said I inherited this position, only because I was the last person left standing. Through what I would consider a series of miscommunication and management blunders, we now have a one person marketing department and a website that's, like, half-finished at best. From what I remember hearing when the site was being built last summer, there were a lot of disagreements about hosting. So a fancy NYC design company built the website and, at the last minute, our CEO didn't want them to host it, so they packed it up and shipped it to us and we set it up on Pantheon. Problems ever since, and they've gone largely unaddressed. But now that I'm Mr. Big Fancy Manager I'm making a few changes around here But to answer your question, I guess me, with a little oversight every now and then from my boss, the CEO? Like I said, loosey goosey. I'm trying to unfuck ittttt :smithicide e: Speed issues seem to be stemming from load order, based on the audits and my opinion as a longtime front end website guy. But I'm certainly not proficient in this sort of thing
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Jul 22, 2021 14:40
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Thanks for the advice everyone; I think I'm going to start researching mid-sized website development companies, get some quotes and go from there. As a former agency employee I'm fully aware of the nightmare headache some of these problems are, and my hope is that I can help to sort out all the problems, prioritize them, and task them out. In other words, protect the dev from the bullshit and just give them clearly defined projects.Pollyanna posted:That sounds like red flags for the entire company, not just the project/product. You're not entirely wrong there! But I've actually been given a surprising about of budget and freedom to do my bidding, so I'm optimistic I can turn things around a bit. I have to be. If any goons here are looking for an opportunity feel free to DM me; as you can see it's not an ideal situation, but you'd be working with me and I promise not to be a total oval office 
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Jul 22, 2021 17:17
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I'm trying to communicate an issue to my site's web developer, but I guess I haven't found the exact right way to ask for what I actually want yet. Here's a small example of some of our problems: - Our H1 color is white, the same color as our background. - Our H3 tag is much smaller than our H4 tag - Trying to make two columns in the Wordpress page editor literally never works and always leaves us with the text in the 2nd column wrapping down below the first column instead of next to it - Padding/margins are all generally wonky - Padding/margins/captions around images look pretty bad too Another issue is, in the past when we've asked for some of these small changes, the change is made on that specific page (or type of page), but not on others. For example, the blog pages will look better, but the change won't apply to our regular pages. I'm like 99% sure this all amounts to "All elements in our Global CSS template need to be thoroughly defined" but I must be wrong, because I've asked for that and he doesn't understand. I thought I could meet him more than halfway by defining these all for him on my end and then giving him the code so he can just do...whatever needs to be done to apply them in the backend (some sort of magic? idk), but I can't even find a list that's like "here are the 15 things you need to define for every website CSS template". Something like that must exist, right? I'm at my wits end here. What should be my next move in getting our website to not look like poo poo anymore?
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Sep 1, 2021 15:29
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barkbell posted:it sounds like you have multiple issues and just try to work on communicating each one individually with specific examples. im guessing it should be the web devs job to identify where the failure is coming from and fix it I was actually trying to look out for him by bundling all of this up and saying "here ya go, please install that in the code or w/e" instead of saying "Okay, fix our H1 tags. *waits 3 days* "Okay that's done, great job! Now fix our H3 tags. *waits three days*" But if it actually makes more sense to tackle these on a case-by-case basis, I can certainly structure it that way. I assumed they were all kind of related issues, no?
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Sep 1, 2021 19:37
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kedo posted:Get a new theme and/or a new developer. 1000%, you're spot on. The H1 is actually a solved case; I believe in early style guides they were supposed to always appear with a colored banner behind them. At some point somebody didn't like the color of that banner, and now here we are. The developers who made the site are no longer in the picture, so we have to utilize web dev companies to do the work now. I've already bitched about our current web dev up thread but it seems like we're stuck with him for the foreseeable future, so I'm trying to find the clearest way to communicate what I want to him. I guess the approach of just handling each of these issues one at a time as they arise is probably the least complicated way to go. Unfortunately I imagine it will probably also be the slowest and most expensive way to go as well.
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Sep 1, 2021 21:59
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hurr durr, I make all H1s white instead of just this one." The other items all sound similar, someone who doesn't know or care enough to make things look nice is just applying styles hodgepodge to satisfy your (or whoever's) requests, or the needs of the theme, without giving them much thought or testing.
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Boba Pearl posted:What's the easiest way to build a webcounter that tracks hits from hotlinks. I thought it'd be to just pull the files from my apache logs, because I want to track the hits I get from all over the internet (I hotlink my files all over the internet,) I found this tutorial: You sound smarter than me at this, but if I was trying to track a specific action on a website I’d use a Google Tag Manager container.
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Sep 29, 2022 13:59
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| # ¿ May 9, 2024 20:21 |
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On that note... We're in the early stages of doing a website redesign / replacement at my company and I've been asked to research potential partners to head this up. I was hoping I could work with some past contacts from my digital marketing agency days, but it seems like everyone I've worked with previously has moved on to bigger and better things that don't involve web dev (or they're just ignoring my vague LinkedIn post, either is possible) I'd really love to recommend a company that I know I can work with, that's not staffed by grifters or idiots. If that's not a past contact or a friend, maybe it's a goon? PM me for more details on the job, but if you're with a web developer than can handle an ecomm site with about 400 products and a healthy amount of SEO requests, hit me up!
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Apr 23, 2024 21:18
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