I suppose we’re a bit too far into January to wish you all a happy new year, but never the less I hope January is off to a good start for you and you haven’t quite given up on the new year diet just yet!
A new year is a chance to reflect on the year just gone and look forward to the year ahead. 2014 was a busy and interesting year for us here at interconnect/it. January saw our Office Manager, Laurie, go on maternity leave and the first two of our new staff members join us. Myself, Mim, was employed to take over Laurie’s duties while she was away on maternity and we decided to employ an Apprentice, Andrew, for the first time. Andrew has now progressed to the role of trainee developer.
As the year progressed, we were steadily approached by more clients, with interesting and diverse requirements. As a relatively small company, it is always challenging to ensure we don’t overstretch ourselves and take on too many projects at once. In June we decided it was time to help Dave with his ever-growing work-load and employed Chris as Project Manager, where he joined us from his own firm of CM2 Creative. Chris comes from the design field, where he has worked as a graphic designer for over twenty years.
In July and August, we recruited again, taking on two new experienced WordPress Developers, Steve and Damian. Steve joined us from the Edge Hill University web team and Damian from MC2 as Senior Web Developer. Both immediately got stuck in as valuable members of the team.
We also welcomed our summer intern, Clara, who helped us with translating many of our plugins to German and French.
As well as new staff members, were exciting new projects; Project Babb for the Telegraph, Catholic Herald and Marketing Week, to name just three new sites we built. We launched new products; My Eyes are up Here and the WP Performance Profiler and myself and Andrew worked on our first proper project – re-developing the Weather Widget with both a fresh new design and new code to connect to an alternative API from the now-defunct Google Weather service.
WordPress talks and conferences were attended, we gave away three nice prizes at WordCamp Bournemouth to our Code Challenge winners, had many a staff lunch out and played lots of table football – all in all a productive and happy year!
So here we are in 2015. We’re in the process of recruiting again and have a year’s worth of bookings already in the bag, with a lot more lined up if we can just find the right people. We would like to take this opportunity to thank our clients for being a joy to work with and here’s to another great year together!
