It’s been a whole year since I first joined the web development team here at Wibble Web Design! *Must not mention how time flies or disbelief of the year being here already LOL*
I joined the team unsure of what to expect, bringing with me a strong web development background in Magento and Drupal, a sprinkle of imposter syndrome, and a genuine curiosity and willingness to learn. Twelve months later, I’m still here – so I must be doing something right, right?
Before coming to Wibble Web Design Belfast, I spent 5+ years working in Magento and Drupal development. Following a redundancy in 2023, I was on the hunt for a new job role. There wasn’t a lot of opportunity locally to continue my development in either CMS, and I had known for a while I wanted to shift my focus to WordPress development after having some exposure to it in a previous job. Given that WordPress is still the most widely used CMS globally, it seemed like a smart transition that would bring job opportunities and the job security that I wanted. On my daily perusal of LinkedIn at that time, I discovered Wibble Web Design celebrating its 10th birthday. At that time, I was working with a former employee of Wibble (and let’s be honest, Belfast is such a small place that if a company isn’t great, you’ll hear about it pretty quickly). He had nothing but positive things to say about Paudie and the team, and since I was also keen to work for a local agency, it seemed like a no-brainer. I reached out, and the rest, as they say, is history.
In this post, I plan to share a quick reflection of my time here, some projects I’ve worked on, the skills I’ve developed and the memorable moments too.
I’m often asked as a member of the web design team for feedback and ideas on how we can improve our web design and web development processes here at Wibble. It almost doesn’t sound genuine, but I can easily say that I’ve never worked somewhere that allows me to just do what I’m here to do without the frustration of local dev environments not playing ball (composer I’m looking at you), deployment processes being overly complicated or varying from project to project, or the pain of working with outdated technologies and old versioning.
At Wibble, I confidently set up a connection to our Dev site without crossing my fingers and praying it works, it just does. I walked in on my first day and was handed up to date documentation and processes that were easy to follow, the onboarding process wasn’t me just sitting idly with nothing to do, in fact I began developing my first site pretty much as soon as I sat down.
This was all such a breath of fresh air for me and a very welcome one. I feel it’s often the smaller areas such as documentation, handovers, and improvement of processes, that work for the development team that are often things that just don’t get don,e but make such an improvement to the work life of a developer. So, a big thanks to the original Wibblers who felt these pains and improved upon them. It’s a focus here at Wibble to keep pushing to improve how we do things and it’s almost still a bit of a shock to me how quickly these ideas are implemented.
Working with a smaller web design team has also been a really positive experience for me. Everyone here is very approachable and I feel fine not knowing something and having to go to a member of the team for advice or help, or just to pick other Developers brains on how they would approach something. This for me has played a major part in my own development. The nature of the small team means I’m also getting exposure to other areas outside of development that help paint the wider picture and only deepen my understanding. Whether it’s picking Tony’s brain on all things web hosting and server setup, Aisling and Dean on how to understand Figma better or helping Dervla with web support tasks, I’m seeing both sides of the coin and feeling more confident in my abilities to step up when needed.
During the year, I’ve worked on a huge variety of projects ranging from legal websites such as Askews Solicitors and Babbé Legal. These gave me great exposure to Tailwind and were the first two sites I worked on. The websites involved custom WordPress theme development, which consisted of various customisable blocks with varying background/text colours as well as customisable placement of text/media and full responsiveness on mobile. They also featured some cool custom block layouts and plugins such as Gravity Forms, Facet and JS Libraries such as Swiper.
Following the web design projects above, I worked on a website for Metro Office. A local business that provides memberships for office and meeting room rentals. I was able to further develop my skillset with this website by delving into animations and transitions further. We worked with a third-party web designer for this project allowing us to further show our ability to deliver custom web development projects from our award-winning Belfast web design agency.
Germinal was a more recent project I worked on and spans across a few different websites / WordPress multisites based on location. This again further developed my skillset in more complex nav menu functionality, hover effect styling, custom map locator styling, SVG absolute placements and further customisation of blocks to give clients more control over choosing colours, positioning and optional ACF fields.
At the moment, I’m working on a new website for an Architectural business (I think it’s been my favourite site to work on so far) and I can’t wait for that launch to share with you all.
All websites built at Wibble have a large focus on website accessibility, SEO and speed performance so it’s been really useful to also up-skill myself further in these areas. Because of the processes we have in place alongside communication between developers and shared projects it’s also made it very seamless to switch between projects, or pick up something if another member is off on annual leave. We have been working on a lot of improvements to our custom base theme recently too, which only brings more accessibility and ease for our clients and end users.
In terms of development, I came previously from a backend developer role, so there was certainly a lot of new skills to pick up. I’m really proud of what I’ve accomplished in the last year, relearning frontend technologies such as CSS and JavaScript, but also new frameworks entirely, as we predominantly use Tailwind here at Wibble. The odd project does come through, especially with our Wibble Rescue Package, which requires me to learn as I go, gaining a deeper understanding of other frameworks such as Bootstrap or Vanilla CSS as well as template engines such as Twig.
I’ve also played a key part of setting up Linux servers, configuring Apache, WordPress, SSL Certs, MySQL, PHP and preparing servers for development. In the case of these projects they stand separate to our usual setup and processes here at Wibble but it’s been a learning experience to adapt and ultimately build a website to suit our clients’ needs. Something I am pleased to now have more experience and understanding of.
With SEO and Accessibility, as mentioned earlier being a main focus at Wibble, it’s another area I’ve gained a better understanding of. Being able to run a Google Insights check and feel confident that it’s been built correctly in terms of HTML semantics, will be visible and rank highly in search engines, is quick to load, and ranks well in performance is something to be proud of as a web developer. I also feel Accessibility is something that can easily be forgotten or not appreciated as a user who doesn’t require aids such as screen readers, so for me it’s important to develop a website that is inclusive of all end users and has their experience in mind when developing.
Blog post writing – Obviously lol.
Even though I had only recently joined when Wibble won an award for ‘The Best Place to Work’ in 2024, I absolutely will still take credit for being a part of it all. It was nice to get dolled up and wined and dined for the evening with the rest of the team in the Titanic Museum, too.
This one speaks for itself. Free breakfast on the last Friday of every month? Eh, yes, please.
As someone who did come from a backend development background, seeing a website launch that I built entirely myself felt pretty class.
In general, I’m really pleased with how my first year at Wibble has gone, I feel proud of the websites I’ve developed and the new skills I’ve learnt so far, and I’m really looking forward to seeing what comes next.
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