Full Stack Developer [CLOSED]

Our business builds, acquires and operates content publishing websites. Over the next 12 months we are planning for large growth and need a highly skilled developer to help us on this journey.

We need a team member who is committed, highly organised and strives for attention to detail, to work on improving, creating and maintaining our new and existing websites.

This fully remote role is a great opportunity for you to develop your skills and take ownership of how our websites operate from a technical point of view. Note that at this time all of our sites run on WordPress.

We have some great things in the pipeline - we’ll be acquiring and building many new sites in the coming years. There is plenty of room to grow in responsibility as our business grows.

Integration and automation is very helpful to us, so while your immediate focus will be on our website front-ends, we’ll be looking to challenge you with opportunities to automate these sites and our internal processes.

We use Trello and Slack, and need clear and open communication from our team.

Requirements - What We Need From You

• Clear, written communication in English - You will be working with others from different countries in Trello and Slack on websites written in English. Your clear communication is essential.

• Custom WordPress theme creation - Using supplied designs, you will be creating new WordPress themes either from scratch or as a child theme. Calling custom fields dynamically within the theme is easy for you.

• Using Custom Fields/Custom Post Types - You understand the need for simplicity and will avoid adding plugins to keep our sites clean and fast.

• Creation of custom plugins when no alternatives, or only bloated alternatives exist - When an effective, well supported plugin does exactly what we need, you’ll use it. But when it doesn’t exist, you will build the perfect plugin for our needs from scratch.

• Ruthless attention to code for SEO - You will look for opportunities to improve heading structure, schema, structured data, alt tags and so on. Mixed content and accessibility will be something you check for. As standards change, you will update our sites.

• A passion for performance - You know how important page speed is for our websites and will seek out ways to make them faster.

• Experience with local, staging and live sites - You understand that our live sites must be online at all times, and we cannot afford pushing experimental code to them. Using our Flywheel hosting environment you will work on a local copy, test on staging, then when proven push these changes to live.

• Experience with Google Search Console - You will monitor Search Console for SEO issues that need to be addressed.

• An understanding of page redirects - You know the importance of redirecting pages for SEO purposes. Rather than waiting to see a 404 notification from Google Search Console, you will set up a 301 redirect before it is an issue.

• Experience with Google Analytics & Tag Manager - You will install Google Analytics and Tag Manager on our sites, and can set up custom events and goals for us to track.

• Experience with integration and automation - We use many third party systems for data which is displayed on our sites, then use other systems for marketing. You might pull data from API or automate a CSV to download and import into a Custom Post Type. Or push subscribers from WordPress to Facebook or Mailchimp. We encourage you to look for ways to improve our systems.

Some Examples of What You Will Be Doing Immediately

• Developing a new theme

  • Two of our sites use a very similar structure, these sites need a complete overhaul so the underlying infrastructure is identical, while the brand and content on top is different.

  • This requires choosing or possibly coding a parent theme, then creating 2 child themes (designs will be supplied to you).

• Simplifying an existing site

  • Taking a site that runs WooCommerce and importing this content into a custom post type which you will create.

  • Finding a way to keep the user experience the same (or better), while removing as many plugins as possible.

  • Striving to make the page load as quickly as possible.

• Finding a solution to parse CSV files, and mapping them to custom fields

  • We will download a CSV file daily with a number of columns.

  • These columns will need to be mapped to custom fields.

  • CSVs will be uploaded daily, but the same data may be imported day after day, you will need to ensure there are no duplicate entries.

  • We want to automate this process as much as possible.

  • It will be your responsibility to find a plugin that suits our needs or building a custom plugin for these purposes.

• Adding an event to Google Analytics using Google Tag Manager

  • Tracking click to a certain domain name.

  • Tracking scroll depth.

• Performing Technical SEO Improvements

  • Reviewing Google Search Console for 404 errors.

  • Reviewing themes to ensure they are correctly using heading structure/hierarchy.

  • Creating 301 redirects from these pages and redirecting them to other relevant pages.

  • Reviewing sitemaps, removing and noindexing post types that do not offer value (for example, authors).

  • Adding schema markup to post types when it adds value.

Benefits / Details

• You’ll work directly for the Director of the business with plenty of opportunity to suggest your own ideas, make improvements and learn new skills.

• Right now we’re looking for someone for 20 hours a week however when you demonstrate your awesome skills, and make a significant difference to our business, we’d like to bring you on full-time (if that suits you).

• Budget: We’re looking for a developer who is looking to really deliver and gain great experience. We are most likely looking for a junior developer with great skills and attention to detail, but are open to all options.

• Specific rate is negotiable, it’s your attitude, standard of work, approach to learning and willingness to make things happen that makes the difference.

• Holidays - 2 paid weeks every six months

• Want to try new technologies? Great! Bring your ideas and the benefits to the table and we’ll give it a try.

• 100% remote work. So long as you have a good internet connection you can work anywhere in the world.

• Flexible hours - so long as you are contactable for 2 hours per day between 0900-1600 GMT+1 Monday to Friday, we’re happy!

• Feel you meet all the requirements and have something else important to you that’s key for you to do a great job? Apply and tell us what that is.

How to Apply

If this role interests you and you meet all the criteria then fill out this form: https://goo.gl/forms/lDx86Ng9UQbZitwy2