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23 Jan 2012

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We are hiring! Full time Office Manager.

by Tom H.

We are a fast-paced and energetic company with big ambitions, great ideas and a focus on building great web based products.

As we grow we need a hard working person full time to ensure the smooth running of the office.

You will be working in a great location (Bristol, harbourside) in a fantastic office with a friendly team.

Administration

To ensure office procedure / practices are maintained up to date and adhered to
To review and maintain administration procedures within the office
Provide PA support to the Directors (eg: taking minutes of meetings; overseeing report production)
Ensure that any new or updated system procedures are communicated to staff and adhered to
Ensure all project information is collected and recorded in respect to contracts
Assist in managing the directors’ resource diary, ensuring it is accurate, modifications are made, financial elements are correct, etc

Financial

Ensure the invoicing is up to date and complete to agreed timescales.
Ensure that all payments received are banked at the earliest opportunity.
Ensure staff are paid and pension payments made on time
Ensure regulatory payment dates are met and payments made (eg VAT/PAYE/NI)
Record and update financial information in internal financial management system

Staff Management

Manage office staff, including monitoring performance, workload and ensuring appraisals procedure takes place
Assist with recruitment and induction and training of new office staff
Ensure all office staff stay abreast of changes in company policies and procedures

Human Resources

Accurately record and monitor all holiday allocation
Track and monitor employee sickness
Maintain up to date HR records & contracts of employment
Keep abreast of HR regulatory environment

Health and Safety

Maintain a safe office environment and ensure staff are aware of their responsibilities and the H & S procedures
Maintain and up date H & S policy and regulation

Facilities

Ensure the office and office equipment are maintained and authorise repairs when necessary
Keep office supplied with all sundry supplies, including stationery and domestic suppplies

Sales

Deal with all customers enquires or forward to appropriate person for attention
Assist managers in written communication via social media

Person Specification

Experience of Word processing and spreadsheets. Apple Mac experience preferable.
Experience of similar role, involving managing a busy office, managing a team, reviewing administration practices / procedures, implementing changes, training staff, etc.
Understanding of HR procedures (e.g. interviewing, basic employment law, etc) would be beneficial
Excellent attention to detail
Excellent organisational skills and ability to meet deadlines
Ability to work under pressure
Excellent interpersonal and communication skills
Friendly, enthusiastic and professional manner.

Remuneration:

16 – 18k per annum based on experience.
Pension scheme.

To apply, please send us a cover letter/email with a bit about yourself and a concise CV outlining your experience to info@simpleweb.co.uk

13 Jan 2012

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We are hiring! Ruby/Rails Developer

by Tom H.

We are looking for another skilled web developer to join our talented and enthusiastic team.

We are a fast-paced and energetic company with big ambitions, great ideas and a focus on building awesome web based products. We have an agile approach to development and are looking for a skilled and enthusiastic developer to join us on our journey.

We currently have two exciting SaaS based products (Rusic and ContactZilla) that we are looking to accelerate the development of and take to a wide market. You will play an active role in their development and be an integral part of the companies success.

The tech we are using for our products includes Ruby/Rails, PHP (Zend), JS/CoffeeScript, Node.js, MySQL, Mongo, Redis, Chef/Vagrant and cloud based services and more! So, you will need to be looking for a position that is challenging where you want to stay at the cutting edge and not shy away from a challenge!

We also undertake some more traditional application and website development work for our clients. Solutions involve WordPress, Drupal, Magento and custom builds but we try to spread work out throughout the team and rotate projects to keep the mind fresh!

We work normal office hours but it’s quite common for the team to be hacking away on something cool gone home time… you will need to be of the same developer mentality. Whilst we all work hard, we like to rewards ourselves when we hit our targets, this is normally in the form of some random fun activity out of the office.

We’re looking for a unique web application developer that understands the importance of good engineering solutions above all else, takes pride in what they deliver and enjoys being an active part of a hard working and smart team.

Personal traits:

Sense of humor
Passionate about your work
Strong communication skills
Smart and humble
Equal willingness to learn and teach

Responsibilities:

Participate in the planning, analysis, design, development and deployment of products, features and enhancements
Build high-performance, scalable applications and APIs
Create clean, maintainable and well tested code

Requirements:

Excellent debugging and problem solving skills
Proficient in at least two of the following languages/platforms (and an eagerness to learn new languages!): Ruby (Rails), PHP (Zend Framework), Node.js, Javascript/CoffeeScript, Objective C
A strong command of HTML, Javascript and CSS, familiarity with Less would be good
Experience with MVC development frameworks, test driven development and agile development processes
An understanding of database theory with experience of MySQL. Any experience of NoSQL alternatives is a bonus!
Good understanding of the entire development process, including testing, build, deploy and maintenance
Strong communication skills

Remuneration:

Salary negotiable based on experience.
Company share options.
Pension scheme.

To apply, please send us a cover letter/email with a bit about yourself and a concise CV outlining your experience to info@simpleweb.co.uk

3 Jan 2012

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WordPress Custom Post Types – Changing Slug

by Tom H.

It’s surely too early in the New Year for WordPress to be causing grief? Apparently not :)

We just had a simple request from a client, “Can we change the URLs for our custom post type pages” – no problem I thought!

However, this one has taken me longer than expected. It should have been a simple case of changing the Slug parameter when registering a custom post type.

So:

    $args = array(
        'labels' => $labels,
        'public' => true,
        'publicly_queryable' => true,
        'show_ui' => true,
        'query_var' => true,
        'menu_icon' => get_template_directory_uri() . '/images/iconbacourse.png',
        'rewrite' => array('slug' => 'old-slug'),
        'capability_type' => 'post',
        'hierarchical' => false,
        'menu_position' => null,
        'supports' => array('title','editor','thumbnail')
      );

    register_post_type( 'myposttype' , $args );

Becomes:

    $args = array(
        'labels' => $labels,
        'public' => true,
        'publicly_queryable' => true,
        'show_ui' => true,
        'query_var' => true,
        'menu_icon' => get_template_directory_uri() . '/images/iconbacourse.png',
        'rewrite' => array('slug' => 'new-slug'),
        'capability_type' => 'post',
        'hierarchical' => false,
        'menu_position' => null,
        'supports' => array('title','editor','thumbnail')
      );

    register_post_type( 'myposttype' , $args );

This should mean posts that were at /old-slug/page-name are now at /new-slug/page-name

Doing this, meant the old Urls were redirecting to the correct location, but I was getting a 404! The solution was upsettingly simple, go in to WP Admin, Settings, Permalinks and re-save your permalink structure.

Hope this might help someone, and happy WordPressing in 2012 ;)

22 Sep 2011

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WordPress Versions – Staying up to date!

by Tom H.

Anyone that has run a copy of WordPress for any period of time will appreciate the need to keep it up to date with the latest version.

It’s a fantastic product but is always being improved and hasn’t historically had the best track record for security.

To help us out with this problem, we’ve just built a widget for the fantasitc http://geckoboard.com/ that will allow us to see, at a glance, which of the WordPress sites we manage that need updating.

Check it out:

It shows us each of our sites, the current version of WordPress and the website URL.

Using the SVN tags from the WordPress source control, we also grab the current release version number of WordPress so we can compare it to the version each site is running to colour the output. Versions that are behind get output in red so we can’t miss them!

The plan, when we plug in a few other key bits of info from around the company, will be to have this mounted permanently in the office on a nice big telly.

12 Jul 2011

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Things to consider when putting a website live!

by Tom H.

There’s no shortage of help out on the web for building websites, but, what about once you’ve built your site? It has to be made live and published for the world to see.

We’ve deployed quite a few hundred sites in our time and I thought I’d share a few hints and tips to ease the process and make it more streamlined.

Firstly, there are two main types of deployment:

1. Brand new website

2. Update to an existing website.

The second of these is generally far more difficult to deal with, normally DNS and email will already be setup.

Step 1 – Get your DNS in Order

Don’t underestimate how long this might take, often it will involve your customer digging out information they have filed away years ago.

You need to find the following:

Registrar – which company is managing the domain? You can find out by doing a WHOIS on the domain. We use DNS Stuff for this. See example.

If the domain hasn’t been registered, it’s easier to do this yourself with your preferred company. We use http://www.ukreg.com/ normally, and, their system isn’t bad.
If the domain has been registered, you will need the login details to make amendments. Some times, customers might be reluctant to give you this, so you’ll have to do everything via them.

Take a snapshot of the DNS. If you change records later, you’ll want to know easily what to revert back to if something goes wrong. We do a DNS Report for every domain using DNS Stuff and save it. You can also take a screenshot of your Registrars name server setup or save the zone file if you have complete control. We write down IP information for our various servers in our Wiki so when we come to do updates we have the information quickly to hand.
Determine what name servers the domain is on. This is normally the ones provided by the registrar but could quite possibly be another company. Again, you can determine this from a WHOIS or DNS Report. We prefer to use our own DNS company, it gives us more flexibility and we know we can do certain things not all providers offer (such as changing TTL – see the right way to move a domain).

Step 2 – Sort out hosting

Ok, I’m not going to say too much about this. But, make sure you leave plenty of time to get hosting setup. If you’re setting a website up on a dedicated server, and it’s not something you do all the time, you probably need to allow 2 days to get it all setup and working. Things to consider:

Do you have any monitoring? If the server grinds to a halt, you’re going to want an idea why. We use Munin
Have you got backups setup? Are they offsite?
Do you have the web server and database server configured and appropriately optimised?
Can the server send email? If there is an SPF record for the domain (there should be) then you’ll need to add the IP of the server. If the server is sending email directly, it should have a reverse dns entry to the server.

Step 3 – Register SSL

If the site is an e-commerce store or has secure parts to it. It will probably need an SSL certificate. Don’t forget about this. We use GoDaddy.com for certs because they are cheap and actually pretty good for getting things setup.

Check to see if the existing site already has a cert. Ask the client if they have the cert details, they probably don’t want to buy another if they can avoid it.
Getting SSLs setup can take a while (not going to go in to how you do this, maybe another day), mainly because of the verification process. You will quite likely need access to the name servers to add verification information in to prove you/your client owns the domain name. Allow a few days for this!

Updating DNS/Name Servers

Ok, so you’re ready to switch off your old site and move to your new site! Exciting…

But, there’s a right way and a wrong way to do it.

Lots of web companies will say this to their clients when they move a site:

“We’ve done the DNS update, we’re just waiting for it to propagate and this will take 24/48 hours”.

WRONG!

This is what a web company tells you when they don’t know what they’re doing. If you do things correctly you can switch things very quickly and minimise the amount of people that end up on the old site. Follow the following:

Do you need to change name servers?

When you need to switch name servers:

Don’t try and update records at the same time!
Setup your new target name servers to be exactly the same as the old ones.
Switch name servers.

Nothing should go wrong, providing you have copied all the records over. Almost all Registrars will tell you name servers take 24/48 hours to update. This is possible, but rare. Normally, in a few hours all will be cool. But, before you do anything further, check the domain is using the new name servers with a WHOIS lookup.

Changing records

When you are ready to switch to the new server you will need to update one or more A records for the domain. This isn’t a full explanation, but it should at least set you on the right path.

Find the TTL (time-to-live) for the records you want to change. You can do this with a DNS Stuff Domain Report or it should be in your DNS configuration.
The TTL is the amount of time the record will be cached.
If the TTL is 1800 (expressed in seconds), this is 30 minutes the record could get cache. It’s typical for this to be about 1 to 6 hours. Reduce the TTL down to something like 60 seconds or 120 seconds. But… you need to wait the original TTL for things to get flushed out before you are ready to update.
Change your record after the original TTL has expired. There should then only be a 60/120 second window when they might get the old record though…. but this isn’t necessarily true! Why? Because you are only changing one name server normally, and the changes need to propagate. Knowing how long this might take is again down to name server setup (partly why we like to use ours) and further TTLs on the actual domain itself.
When everything is a-ok, put the TTL back up (otherwise every lookup will end up going to the main name servers first).

One more cool tool I like, DNS Stuff provide a ISP cached lookup facility. It will scan all the DNS servers of major ISPs to see if there is a cached record for a domain.

In Summary

There’s quite a lot to domains and moving sites. Hopefully this has helped a few people but all I would say is, give this stuff the respect it deserves. DNS runs the web! Just because I can walk in to a plant store and hire a digger, doesn’t mean I should… well, not without at least finding out how to use it properly.

For all your earth moving needs, try Hewden