The Four Kitchens Web Chefs have plenty of experience with WordPress. We’re fans of this content management system’s straightforward functionality, flexible scalability, and extensive plug-in and customization options. Now, we’re stepping up our game and partnering with WordPress VIP.

Scalability, security, and flexibility

As a WordPress VIP Agency Partner, Four Kitchens can help our clients implement enterprise-level features to deliver even greater performance and security, without giving up the flexibility and simplicity they already love. WordPress VIP provides a fully managed cloud platform for clients that need even greater scalability, security, and flexibility. Whether you need single-sign-on, self-contained WordPress instances, a stronger defense profile, or next-level performance, the VIP experience delivers.

The platform is already used by top brands, including Hachette Book Group, USA Today Sports, News Corp Australia, Grupo Abril, and the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, among many others. Want to see why these companies love WordPress VIP? You can find case studies and more on the VIP site.

Drupal to WordPress VIP: Best of both worlds

If you’re interested in exploring the VIP experience but are currently using Drupal, don’t worry. We have a wealth of expertise with both platforms, and we specialize in large-scale, complex migrations. We’re happy to discuss the best approach for your unique situation.

We’ll also be attending upcoming WordPress VIP events in the new year. We can’t wait to connect with you there. Watch for more details here on the Four Kitchens blog.

Read all about it! Recently, Four Kitchens showcased our service offerings in The Midway at the Online News Association’s (ONA) annual conference. While we were there, we had the opportunity to share our areas of expertise with professionals in the journalism and digital media space and learn more about their concerns and trends from their industry as well. Here are some of the things we learned in a “just the facts, Ma’am” format.

Delivering content to across multiple platforms

Journalists know that audiences are better when they are engaged across multiple platforms.
Newsrooms need insight into what content performs best on which platforms.
Content managers need to optimize workflows to distribute content to multiple platforms.
Vertical video, video that is best viewed vertically on mobile, is here to stay.
Think ahead about platforms that will be emerging next. Platforms are always changing.

Best practices for notifications

Good notifications lead to positive engagement.
Make sure notifications are sensitive to the users’ time zone.
Utilize copy editors to assure that notifications are correct in content and spelling.

Data informed, not data led

Analytics

Is “reach” as a metric dead? Should digital journalists focus on engagement and loyalty?
Journalists are interested in reporting the news (as they should be), not driving ad impressions.
They aim to be data-informed, not data led.
Good content/journalism is the best driver of metrics.
Analytics must be actionable.
Metrics that lead to conversion are returning page views and total engaged minutes.

Responding to sensitive topics

Digital journalists must navigate the fine line between reporting and “grief tourism”.
Know boundaries and respect those who are directly affected by the stories that are being reported.
Would you want to answer the questions you’re asking people?
For some victims, media coverage becomes a “second trauma.”

Journalism and social media

Users now more likely to visit news properties directly than via social media properties like Facebook. This shift has occurred in the past 18 months.
We’ve spent so much time figuring out how to get audiences to read stories on FB and Twitter, but now we’re in “a post-social world.”

Immersive storytelling

It’s important digital media producers learn this new storytelling tool.
Challenges for AR: 1) How to do high-quality AR content in fast news cycle. 2) Resources needed, so how to form collaborations. 3) How to figure it out and experiment. 4) How to distribute it to a wider audience when the tech is still in development.
Prices are coming down for immersive storytelling equipment. Don’t force it. On some stories, there may not be an AR or VR component. Be sensitive about the value you’re bringing to that story.
360 gives context, AR gives you detail on an object.
Visual editors need to start asking themselves “Why is this a photo and not a 360 shot?”

Audience engagement

Desktop traffic has gone steadily down (-20%) the past 20 months. Mobile audience, on the other hand, has steadily increased.
Mobile users have different consumption habits, but challenge still the same: Reach right audience, make sure they read content, and ensure they come back for more regularly.
Mobile visitors scroll to view 25% of a page compared to 34% for desktop on homepages. Yet they engage with the page longer and are more likely to click and read.

How to tell global/multilingual stories for a local audience

Managing multilingual content is becoming an essential journalistic project.
Providing multilingual journalism is key in many markets, like Reno and Chicago, where 25% (and growing) of the audience speaks a language other than English. These communities are not being served without multi-lingual coverage.
Translating a story to another language may change the inflection, tone, or intention of the story.
Report with bilingual communities, not about them or for them.

All in all, we’re excited to have spent three days sharing with and learning from those in the digital media and journalism space and we’re looking forward to participating in the ONA Conference in some capacity in the future.

Did you miss Lead Solution Strategist Alex Hicks speaking with other industry experts on Remixing Content: Refining Your Workflow to Make Your Work Flow? You can check out the audio recording here.

Four Kitchens keeps growing, and The Austin Business Journal just reported that we’re now the second largest web development firm headquartered in Austin!

We’re especially pleased to know that our strategy of developing true partnerships with clients to develop and grow their sites—tackling every aspect of a project from Discovery to Launch—and leading the way in new technologies—like Drupal 8 migration and WebVR development—has helped to keep us on top of the game.

While this may seem like an odd distinction for a fully distributed organization, Four Kitchens was founded eleven years ago in Austin, and our base of operations is still here. From Austin’s Silicon Hills to California’s Silicon Valley, from the Gulf Coast to the Third Coast and everywhere in between, Four Kitchens is proud of its distributed team.

Congrats to everyone for making 2016 great!

See the full list of companies on the ABJ website.

We’re very excited to announce some big changes at Four Kitchens!

Team empowerment is more than providing an open vacation policy or giving everyone a professional development budget. It’s about letting your team—the team you’re happy to be a member of—do the best work they can, confident in their abilities and in the support of everyone around them. With that in mind, I’m pleased to announce some big changes at Four Kitchens—positive changes that will allow us to grow, take on even bigger and more exciting projects, and provide more leadership opportunities for our team.

We’re closing our office to become an entirely distributed team.

Though more than half of the Web Chefs live in Austin, Texas, we’re letting go of our physical office space in favor of a “virtual” workplace built around collaborative tools like Slack and Zoom. This is about more than saving money on rent, it’s about creating a consistent experience across our team and allowing the Web Chefs the freedom to choose where they live. (In fact, we’re not saving money. We’re reallocating the more than $100,000 we spend each year on an office to pay for more in-person retreats and a monthly tech stipend for every Web Chef.) No one at Four Kitchens is more or less authentic a team member. If you want to find out how we’re keeping our unique company culture alive without an office, tune in to our next Sharp Ideas podcast!

We’re in the middle of the largest growth phase in our ten-year history.

In the past three months, we’ve been joined by six talented Web Chefs:

We’re also hiring new Web Chefs for five roles:

Drupal Backend Developers
Drupal Frontend Developers
UX Designers
Technical Project Manager
Operations Assistant

There are plenty of seats at the kitchen table. If you want to make big websites, join the Web Chefs today!

We’ve defined new roles for our leadership team.

Caris Hurd is now our Director of User Experience, focusing on growing our design and UX team, expanding our services, and improving our design process. Elia Albarran has taken over our Director of Operations position, keeping our Web Chefs on track and making sure our internal business runs smoothly. Co-Founder Aaron Stanush is now President, and I am stepping into the role of CEO. As President, Aaron will be focused on the “Three Ps”: presence, partnerships, and products. I will focus on setting long-term vision and strategy, as well as driving overall growth in services, revenue streams, and business development.

The language we use to talk about our team is important. Each and every one of us, every Web Chef, has part to play in the success and stewardship of Four Kitchens, and these changes reflect that.

Welcome to the new Four Kitchens. How can we share our expertise with you?

Four Kitchens is pleased to announce the launch of the Forcepoint website. Headquartered in 4K’s own Austin, TX, Forcepoint, a joint venture between Raytheon and Vista Equity Partners, is the result of a merger between cybersecurity firms Raytheon Cyber, Websense, and StoneSoft. Forcepoint is set to become an industry leader in online security solutions, allowing both businesses and governments to protect themselves from cybercrime — safeguarding against both insider threats and external attacks.

Taylor Smith led the team at Four Kitchens, which included Patrick Coffey, Jeff Tomlinson, Luke Herrington, Caris Hurd, and Jared Rogers. Four Kitchens handled both frontend design and backend architecture for the new site. Built on Drupal 7, Four Kitchens used Drupal’s Cloudwords integration to assist in the site’s internationalization with a seven-language multilingual interface (in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Simplified Chinese, German, and Italian).

The Forcepoint team also created a localization mechanism for delivering specific content to users according to the region they’re in (e.g., so a user accessing the site in Venezuela will see different features than a user accessing the site in Canada). While brand unification across these three distinct identities (Raytheon Cyber, Websense, and StoneSoft) was a sometimes delicate juggling act, Four Kitchens’ particular emphasis on smart design and our expertise in Drupal allowed Taylor and his team to create a sleek new site with a unified architecture, information design, and mobile navigation that are on the cutting edge, providing a beautiful home for the newly-formed Forcepoint venture.

Fear distracts. It’s time for something new. WE ARE FORCEPOINT.

Read the official press release here.

Acquia has just announced their active support for Drupal 8 on their hosting platform. As Acquia Partners, we’ve been hard at work preparing for the upcoming Drupal 8 release.

Four Kitchens will continue to lead and innovate in the Drupal 8 era. In fact, our work in Drupal 8 has already begun: We are partnering with the World Bank to prepare the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP) to move to Drupal 8, increasing site performance and creating a potential standard of excellence to be used throughout the entire organization.

Meanwhile, we are upgrading our products and modules to Drupal 8. We have developed D8 roadmaps for our products: Saucier, a headless Drupal framework built on Node.js; and Aquifer, a command-line interface that makes it easy to scaffold, build, test, and deploy Drupal websites. In partnership with Google Summer of Code, we upgraded the Site Audit module to work with Drupal 8 and prepare for the next generation of high-performance websites. We’re also porting the development module Generate Errors to Drupal 8 as well. Additionally, we created a Drupal 8 Practice Group at Four Kitchens to train our team, share experience, and develop best practices.

This week, we are presenting several talks at NYC Camp about headless Drupal 8, frontend frameworks, and content-as-a-service: Almost Headless Drupal 8, a session about Drupal 8 and Angular, and Getting Started with Meteor, which will focus on integrating Drupal 8 and Meteor. To see all the talks we have at this year’s NYC Camp check out this post on Fourword.

Some of the things we love about Drupal 8

First-class tools for rapidly creating semantic APIs
Robust, enterprise-ready development framework
Stable, focused, useful toolset out-of-the-box
Architectural changes that improve performance and decrease server load (check out this DrupalCon LA session for an analysis of Drupal 8 caching and practical examples of what’s to come)
Tight integration with widely adopted open-source projects such as Symfony
New source tree structure patterns to increase code portability (PSR4)
Modern version of PHP, which brings many low-level improvements
Twig templating engine allows for easier integrations with the latest frontend technologies and workflows
Confident deployment with integrated config management in code
Incremental release schedule provides institutional stability while allowing for faster release of new features
Ability to leverage modern package management tools to improve modularity, dependency tracking, and package versioning
Well-structured APIs for dealing with entities, routes, and other core parts of Drupal

#4K News this week
– We launched TWiT.tv! Huge kudos to the entire team that worked on this project – the new Headless Drupal TWiT site rocks! And a giant thank you to Leo Laporte for the kindest of words.
– There’s still time left to register for our Intro to Headless Drupal training at Twin Cities Drupal Camp! Come hang out with the team: Todd, Mike, Joe, Jeff, Matt, and Patrick will all be hanging around the Camp all next weekend. Check back next week for more info on Web Chef sessions.

Links around the watercooler

For those of us that travel a bunch TripMode seems like a great addition to the OS X toolbox.
What’s the size of that screen? Fear not, because Device Metrics on Google Design is here.
Cat and kitten library at work? Now that’s how you boost morale!
Looking for a great ReactJS tutorial? Look no further.
Thanks to our friends Forum One for sharing this fun experiment on what can be built in Drupal 8.
One of our favorite equations: Slack + wiki = perfection.

Back in 2006, there were only four of us working out of a cheap apartment in Southeast Austin. Half of us were still in school. We had only a few hundred dollars in the bank, and we were making WordPress and MediaWiki sites for free to build our portfolio. Our first paid gig was a $300 blog that took us two weeks to fully design, build, and deploy.

Today, there are 21 of us in six cities, four timezones, and two countries. We’ve built some of the biggest websites in the world. We’ve directly contributed to — and in many cases, led — the growth of dozens of open-source projects, responsive design principles, agile methodologies, backend and frontend performance standards, and progressive management practices. We punch WAY above our weight, and our reputation for quality, service, style, and a values-driven culture is known worldwide.

Today, we celebrate eight years of kicking serious ass. None of this would have been possible without each and everyone of our wonderful Web Chefs.

Photo credits: foryoudesigns

Jake Strawn of Drupal Dynamics and I are teaming up to propose a Accelerated grid theming using NineSixty session for DrupalCon Paris. (To be fair, he beat me to it and was gracious enough to add me as a co-presenter.)

Our session will cover the following basics of the 960 grid system:

What is 960.gs?
Using the NineSixty theme as your starting point / parent theme
Understanding the grid-x, push-x, pull-x classes
Why a grid-based system can help speed up theme development
How to break the 960-pixel limit

In the last month, I have presented sessions on 960.gs and the NineSixty theme at DrupalCamps in Copenhagen, Helsinki, and Stockholm. Most recently, I co-presented a session at Drupal Design Camp Boston with Nathan Smith, creator of the 960 grid system. You can download the slide decks on our “Presentations” page.

Why should you care about 960.gs and grid-based theming? Easy: It will save you time, money, and frustration. Grid systems contain trim, robust, and reusable CSS that can handle virtually all positioning and cross-browser compatibility. Standardized design grids provide themers and developers a more solid jumping-off point when creating a new layout or design.

Interested? Vote for our session!

Four Kitchens is proud to announce that we are attending and helping sponsor DrupalCon DC. From March 4th through March 7th, the chefs will be in Washington, D.C. to discuss their recipes for scalability, theme development, module development, design, usability, project management, and business strategy. And we promise we don’t use any secret sauce!

If there is a particular topic you would like to see the chefs present a session on, please add a comment to this entry, contact us, or send us a tweet on Twitter.

Photo by Ryan McFarland

Filter By Topic
Being Online
Client Stories
Design and UX
Development
Digital Strategy
Events
Immersive Technology
Industry Report
Office News
Work Life
Filter By Type
Article
Whitepaper
Webinar
Award
Podcast
Project

The Humble Perceptron

by Peter Sieg on June 30, 2020

DIY UX Research Part 3: Top 10 Metrics to Implement in Google Analytics

by Donna Habersaat on June 25, 2020

Building with Emulsify Part 2: Callout Component

by Evan Willhite on June 22, 2020

The Big Relaunch Is No More

by Todd Ross Nienkerk on June 19, 2020

The Future of Content Episode 11: Content from Community, Trust, and Intimacy

by Todd Ross Nienkerk on June 8, 2020

Notes from the Web Chefs

Starting your own design system can understandably seem overwhelming. But I’m here to tell you that a small design system is not only achievable … in many ways it might be the preferable way for plucky teams to start.

Dean Oest

Design Manager

Read the Article:
Design Systems: Start Small, Grow Later

Four Kitchens clients have big websites that include many pages, images, PDFs, videos, and other files. These sites have so much content, in fact, that many of our clients are overwhelmed just thinking about going through it prior to a CMS migration.

Donna Habersaat

User Experience Strategist

Read the Article:
From a Mountain to a Molehill: What to Do When You Have Too Much Content

The Change We Want to See in the World

by Todd Ross Nienkerk on June 1, 2020

Building with Emulsify Drupal Part 1: Storybook

by Evan Willhite on June 1, 2020

Don’t Panic: Drupal 9 Is Coming, but the Transition Is Easier Than You Think

by Chris Martin on May 26, 2020

The Future of Content Episode 10: Content That Speaks to You

by Todd Ross Nienkerk on May 22, 2020

Best Practices for Higher Education Emergency Response Websites

by Emily Sapp on May 21, 2020

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77