As 2023 draws to a close, I’m coming up to four years at the agency. I joined in 2020, during Covid, so my introduction to the job happened remotely. It was an unusual way to start: joining a team and getting involved in its work while the normal idea of going to the office was on hold.
A lot has changed since then. I now spend three days a week at Brightwell Barns in Suffolk, with the rest of my working time at home. The work has grown too. I’ve built websites for businesses in very different parts of the world, spent plenty of time solving problems on my own, and started helping another developer find his way into the work.
From remote work to the office
Starting remotely meant that getting to know the agency and getting to know the work happened together. In 2020, I was adapting to an ACF-led WordPress workflow as Gutenberg changed the way people edited sites. Advanced Custom Fields gave me a way to model the content around each design. The challenge was making that structure flexible enough for the build while keeping it straightforward for the people who would update it.
The three office days give the week a different shape now. Brightwell Barns is the place where I see the people behind the requests and designs, rather than only the work arriving on a screen. I still have time working remotely, but the office is part of the job in a way it couldn’t be when I joined.
That change is one of the clearest ways I can see how long I’ve been here. The work began in a very specific moment in 2020. It has gradually become a routine, with people I know and projects I’ve followed from the first designs through to a working website.
One developer, quite a few different worlds
For much of that time, I’ve been the sole developer. The requests arrive from different directions, and the variety can be considerable. A hotel in Japan, another in Vietnam, an American landscape architecture practice and a travel company can all have very different expectations of a website.
Working across those time zones adds another consideration. The person who needs an answer may be starting or finishing their day at a different point from me. It makes the work feel international even when I’m sitting in Suffolk. There are different businesses, different audiences and different people behind the content I’m building.
The common thread is turning a design and a set of requirements into something that works. WordPress provides the base for much of it, with custom development filling in the parts that need to behave differently. A page can look straightforward in a design, then become much more involved once it needs to accept real content and work across the rest of a site.
Being the developer responsible for those requests has given me a lot of room to grow. It also means there isn’t always someone else to take over the difficult part. I enjoy getting far enough into a problem to understand it and finding a way through. That has become a large part of what I like about agency work.
The American landscape architecture website was a project I particularly enjoyed. It was demanding: detailed project galleries, international office information and longer articles all had to fit the supplied design. I built flexible templates and a content structure the team could update themselves. Working through those different requirements was challenging, but satisfying. It gave me the chance to spend time on both the finer visual details and the structure underneath them.
Helping someone else get started
Working with Claudiu has added something different to the job. I’ve helped train him as a junior developer, and he has really excelled, moving into building with both WordPress and React. After spending so much time as the person doing the development, it has been good to share that work and see him become capable of taking it on himself.
Explaining something makes me pay attention to parts of the process that I might otherwise take for granted. Knowing how I would approach a piece of work and being able to explain that approach are related skills, but they aren’t quite the same. I’m learning from that part of the job as well.
I’ve enjoyed seeing his progress. Development involves a lot of unfamiliar terms and behaviours when you first meet them, and it takes time for those pieces to connect. Being involved in someone else’s growth has been a rewarding change from focusing only on the next thing I need to build myself.
Making the movement between pages feel better
A lot of my interest in the frontend has been around custom JavaScript and performance. I built the agency website and its custom JavaScript framework on top of WordPress. It allows navigation between pages without a full browser reload, giving me control over how one page gives way to another instead of treating each click as an entirely separate start.
I like that work because it sits close to both design and development. The movement has to suit the website, but the underlying behaviour still has to make sense. A transition is only one part of it. The visitor is trying to reach another page, and the technical work should help them do that without getting in the way.
That interest in performance also leads me in the other direction: looking at what can be removed. Custom behaviour has a cost, just as images and page markup do. Making a website feel good sometimes means adding a carefully considered interaction, and sometimes means sending less to the browser.
An experiment in using less
For that same agency website, I also built a custom eco-mode variant. It used black-and-white images and kept the HTML and JavaScript to a minimum. The aim was to keep a useful version of the site while reducing how much it needed to load.
I remember getting the eco-mode pages under 30kB and being pleased with how quickly that lighter version loaded. What interested me was how far I could reduce a page while still making it feel considered. It made the difference between the main site and the eco mode something I could see and feel as I worked on them.
It was satisfying to work on both ends of that problem: building custom interactions, then questioning how much of that behaviour a lighter version actually needed. I’m still interested in the balance. There is a lot I want to keep learning, but I can see how much these years have changed the way I approach a website. I’m enjoying the work, the people and the chance to keep getting better at it.