Role: Junior Web Developer
Company: HappyKite Ltd
Salary: £20-26k
Location: Remote UK
We are a small but expanding full-service digital agency looking to recruit a Junior Web Developer to assist with our growing client list.
A bit about Us
We design, build and grow eCommerce sites for small to medium sized businesses in a range of industries. Typically our work is split 50 / 50 between one-off project work and ongoing partnerships. All our websites are built using WordPress.
We’re currently a team of 8, working remotely across Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire & Buckinghamshire.
We have made no long term decision about whether we will remain fully remote or not, however we have permanently closed our old office space. Any move back to an office would be a team decision and would, at most, be semi-remote and flexible. Due to this, we are only considering candidates who are within a sensible commutable distance from the Hitchin, Hertfordshire area.
What we’re looking for
We like people who are friendly, caring and genuinely want to help our clients to grow their online business.
We’re less interested in a particular skill-set and more interested in finding someone with a great attitude, a humble approach to their work and an eagerness to learn and develop their abilities. That said, there are some core skills that we would require you to have:
- Solid knowledge of HTML5 / CSS3
- Familiarity with Responsive web design
- Familiarity with WordPress / PHP
- Some knowledge of JavaScript
- Some familiarity with Photoshop / Adobe XD
As we are a small team, you may at times need to roll up your sleeves and help out other team members with tasks outside of your area of expertise such as implementing tools for the marketing team, content population etc. If you’re looking to heavily specialise in one field then we are probably not a good fit.
What the role looks like in the first 3 months
Your role would be split between assisting the Creative Director and Senior Developers in building new websites as well as supporting, maintaining and enhancing the online presence of our existing client base.
Development
Before you can work on any of our websites, you will need to be familiar with Sass & Gulp for front end styling, WordPress templating / basic PHP for mark-up and Git for version control & collaboration with the rest of the team. We do not necessarily expect you to have working knowledge in any of the above but you need to be prepared to learn these technologies from the beginning. Once comfortable, you’ll initially be squashing bugs and doing minor fixes on existing client sites before moving on to adding new page templates and getting stuck into new client projects.
Design
Although this is primarily a development role, it would be useful for you to be comfortable laying out basic web page designs. You will need a great eye for detail to ensure you can accurately translate designs into great looking websites. Depending on your interests, there is opportunity to do more in-depth UI/UX work over time.
Maintenance & Support
A big part of our work is to host, maintain and support our clients’ websites as they grow. You would need to be happy responding to support emails, testing and debugging issues and working with the rest of the team to add new features and fix bugs. You will also be familiarising yourself with our maintenance and updates schedule, ensuring client sites are running smoothly, loading fast and performing well on all devices.
What we expect within 6 months
By the end of the first six months we would hope to see you working entirely independently without too much oversight from the senior developers. You would be building new features, slicing designs into functional WordPress sites and working with the rest of the team building enterprise-level WordPress projects. You will be comfortable working locally and deploying to both staging and production environments.
You will be primarily responsible for the ongoing site updates for our existing clients, this means updating core WordPress and any plugins in staging environments and running a series of tests to ensure no issues before deploying the changes to live websites. You will be the primary person responsible for support emails from our customers, handling issues or passing them on to the best person to deal with them. You will be learning about server architecture to best optimise our clients’ website page speed and working with the digital marketing team to optimise the site design and layout for conversion.
How we work
All our websites are built on WordPress, so any experience with that would be helpful. We use Slack for team chat and Asana for task management. Beyond that, you choose the tools and software to best suit your needs.
Benefits
Flexible remote working
During the first lockdown, we decided as a team that we were collectively happier working remotely and so made the decision to close the office. Our team now work remotely from home with some flexibility around our core hours.
Genuine work / life balance
We believe in productivity over ‘putting the hours in’. Our core hours are 9am to 4pm and we give 38 days holiday (5 weeks + 8 bank holidays + shut down at Christmas).
Other Benefits
- Real chance to shape your role
- Opportunity to learn enterprise development workflows
- Conference and training budget
- Allocated time for continued professional development
- Choice of PC or Mac
- NEST Pension scheme
How to apply
Please send a CV and covering letter to phil@happykite.co.uk, please also include links to any relevant online presence you may have – GitHub, Dribbble, Twitter, LinkedIn, personal website or blog etc.