Comments on: How We Built Skype in Media on WordPress

By: Dre Armeda

Dre Armeda — Fri, 29 Apr 2016 16:20:01 +0000

Great questions, Mike!

Microsoft does a very good job of measuring their website needs. Across their various websites they have specific business requirements. For the Skype project like they have with all the other projects we’ve been fortunate to work with them on, they researched and tested tools to see which best met those requirements. WordPress is what they moved forward with in this case, and I would say it’s a great choice 🙂

In terms of running a lean team versus more hands in the pot, I think that’s a great question. I also think that more is not always better. We review project requirements and we research/review things like timeline, design and dev requirements, and even hosting requirements. We align those requirements with our resources when making decisions around how to build the project team. The goal is to get to the place where we can most accurately and efficiently approach and complete the project for our clients. We have built a very strong set of processes and a great life cycle to lean on. My take is that adding too many resources on smaller projects introduces too much noise and overlap eventually slowing down the build.

In this specific build we went with a lean and very experienced team. The results speak for themselves.

By: Greg Rickaby

Greg Rickaby — Thu, 28 Apr 2016 15:30:16 +0000

In reply to Oleg. Visual Composer was used on the landing pages. This allows Skype to drag-drop the layout/features. Blog posts were migrated manually and don't rely on VC.

By: Greg Rickaby

Greg Rickaby — Thu, 28 Apr 2016 15:29:32 +0000

In reply to Ryan Hellyer.

K.I.S.S.

🙂

By: Oleg

Oleg — Wed, 27 Apr 2016 16:46:19 +0000

You use Visual Composer? I thought, you are creating a page manually)))

By: Mike melson

Mike melson — Tue, 26 Apr 2016 23:20:29 +0000

Awesome job! And well done landing a job with Microsoft. How did you do it?
I doubt Microsoft lacks the software engineering degrees to pull this sort of thing off. What’s more, I would suspect their IT department probably looks down on WordPress (especially compared to their .NET framework and proprietary software).
So can you comment on why they chose WordPress?
Also, you said you guys wanted to do the job quickly, so you elected to have a smaller team work on it. Normal logic says “many hands makes light work” and the more the quicker. I’d like to hear why you’ve found fewer participants actually makes projects go quicker.

By: Ryan Hellyer

Ryan Hellyer — Tue, 26 Apr 2016 15:49:59 +0000

Nice site.

It’s a good use-case for your CMB2 plugin too. I’ve built quite a few sites which used it in a similar fashion. It sure does save your bacon from having to write a gajillion lines of custom code to make things work 🙂

I love that you admitted to copying the pages over by hand 🙂 I’ve had many instances where I had to convince people that moving them by hand was much quicker than writing a complicated migration script.