Member spotlight on Piers Tincknell
What’s your name
Piers Tincknell
What do you do with WordPress
My studio Atomic Smash are an Enterprise WordPress / WooCommerce studio based in Bristol. We do everything with WordPress, we love it. Our projects involve strategy, UX, Design & Development and we focus on WordPress as the technology platform so all of our project thinking stems around that. What does WordPress do out of the box, what extra functions do we need to build / extend, how can we deliver the best possible WordPress site for this client within their time / budget available. I focus on the strategy / planning side of things, having used WordPress on many projects and supporting a number of large WordPress sites I am able to think practically about how WordPress can provide the best solution to solve the clients problems.
What’s your involvement with Bristol WordPress People?
I have been involved for just over a year now, I am part of the organising group alongside the other super awesome team members. After being a long standing attendee I jumped at the opportunity to be more involved and I am keen to help make the WP groud the best it can be. My favourite bit is meeting new people at the events and understanding the different ways people use WordPress, it’s fascinating.
Atomic Smash has been a sponsor of Bristol WordPress People for over a year now. I take my turn at presenting and project managing the events. In the near future I will be stepping up to assist with the finances side of things.
What’s your job
Managing Director at Atomic Smash, my role is to make sure clients are happy, staff are happy and that we have a full pipeline of work to ensure everyone is nice and busy but not too busy. It’s quite a fine balancing act but I am lucky to have an awesome team who help make everything possible!
How have you been long using WP
We have been using WP for 9 years now, it’s come such a long way it’s been amazing to see how it’s grown and how the community are still driving to make it better and better. We made a conscious decision to focus on WordPress because we knew it was going to be popular, it had all the key ingredients for success. Good UX / UI back then compared to many other CMS solutions, good customer base as it was already being adopted quickly back in 2011 and also it had a really strong developer community behind it.
Any sites you’ve built that you’d like to share?
Yes! We have been super lucky to work on some lovely WordPress sites. I am a big fan of this one,
For many reasons,
- Their content is really really interesting and especially in these times everyone needs some good news in their lives.
- The project was very complicated with a large membership migration piece, we have also heavily customised WooCommerce to work with Positive News’ magazine distribution house. The project took around 8 months from start to finish.
Another site I love that we have built is
We did this site partly as a donation to the festival and it’s one of my favourite sites. I love the design and some of the interactive elements really make it stand out.
How long have you been attending the Bristol meetup
More than 3 years now!
Why do you attend
To try and meet as many new people as possible. If you see me at the next one (whenever that is) please do say hello!
Favourite WordPress feature / plugin
- My favourite feature at the moment is the WooCommerce subscriptions plug-in because it’s been having such a big impact for a number of our clients allowing them to take recurring revenue easily.
- We are also loving Gutenberg now and are very excited about how we can make our clients site editing experiences the best they can be going forwards!
- My favourite other favourite WordPress plug-in is Metorik, it really is a must have for anyone running WooCommerce as it makes the customer information much easier to digest and run reports on. It also allows you to experiment with automation / upselling and cross selling of products online. All very cool stuff!
Anything you’d like to see in WordPress?
I am really excited to see how we can bring more machine learning into WordPress, using the power of AI / ML to make our sites as smart as possible. There are so many opportunities from automatic content suggesting, auto image captions for accessibility as well as the chance to build a more personalised experience for everyone.
Tell us something that people might not know about you
I once drove from Goodwood Racetrack to Ulaanbaatar in Mongolia for charity in a Suzuki Carry 1.3, it took us 4 weeks and we covered 9,000 km