Replacing Jenkins with GitHub Actions

By:Nick Stewart on 8/14/2023

GitHub Actions are basically workflows that are trigged by Git actions and live inside GitHub. For example, you want to build and deploy to production when a branch is merged into main.

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Interactions with SharpSpring

By:Nick Stewart on 3/29/2023

Integrating SharpSpring into a website is fairly simple with the SharpSpring API, which offers many methods/endpoints with a standard REST API. Learn more from VIA's Senior Developer.

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Migrating from FreshBooks to Stripe for invoicing

By:Nick Stewart on 3/28/2023

The Jefferson County PVA previously used FreshBooks for invoicing subscriptions to users. Find our how numerous bouts of API downtime and a confusing API migration led VIA to explore other solutions.

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Your Website's Performance Could Be Costing Time and Money

By:Alec Robertson on 8/5/2022

A poor-performing website can impact your customer’s experience with your brand. It can reduce conversion rates, affect the perception of your brand, and even cost your customers time and money. Learn how to ensure your website is performing to its full potential, the benefits of a performant website for your business and customers, and a case study illustrating the effectiveness of this work.

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Custom Dev
Dynamic Select Fields with Advanced Custom Fields
Dynamic Select Fields with Advanced Custom Fields

By:Nick Stewart on 12/8/2021

How to make Select fields in Advanced Custom Fields dynamic and use external content to populate and save.

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Email
Email @ 50: Retrospective + The Future of Email
Email @ 50: Retrospective + The Future of Email

By:Nick Wunderlin on 11/19/2021

Welcome to the final installment of our Email @ 50 series. In this last article, Email @ 50 contributors review what they learned from writing this series and look ahead to the future of email.

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Development Solutions for Foxhollow.com

By:Nick Stewart on 8/24/2021

Between merging the data of two product databases, implementing a new POS system, and other considerations, we had to find backend solutions to make the frontend possible. See how we did it!

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Email
Email @ 50: Email Development
Email @ 50: Email Development

By:Nick Stewart on 8/6/2021

Email development has always been the bane of a web developer's existence. You have to use outdated methods and don't have access to the full modern web to create a nice looking email that thousands of people will see. It's like asking a Nascar mechanic to create a car using only tools from the 90s - it can be done but its more than a pain.

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Developing the New via.studio

By:Alec Robertson on 6/14/2021

A deep dive into creating a fast, user-focused experience on the latest web technology stack for the new via.studio website.

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Dive into the Sanity Structure Builder

By: Mark Biek on 6/13/2021

Sanity is the super fast, super customizable CMS that we're using as the backend for the new via.studio website. One of the more powerful concepts that Sanity is the ​Structure Builder which gives you the ability to customize how content is presented in t...

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What's the JAMstack?

By:Alec Robertson on 6/13/2021

An exploration of the latest trend in web development.

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Wordpress to Sanity Data Script

By:Nick Stewart on 3/11/2021

One of the biggest challenges of moving from one CMS to another is getting your existing data to the new platform. In our case, we were moving our existing WordPress platform, which had been around for years, over to the Sanity.io platform. At a high level...

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Building a Wordpress Theme with Timber

By:Alec Robertson on 10/6/2020

Timber is a plugin that allows Wordpress to render files written with Twig, a PHP template engine. We built a recent project with it and found that it greatly simplified the theme-building experience. Let's dig into why Timber is so useful for building Wordpress sites and how you can get started with it.

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Custom Dev
Pitfalls of Custom Development
Pitfalls of Custom Development

By: Mark Biek on 7/28/2020

There is a very well known concept in development circles called Not invented here syndrome or NIH. It describes a developer’s tendency to write something from scratch when there is an existing solution they could use instead. This is definitely something...

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WooCommerce Tips

By:Nick Stewart on 7/8/2020

Here at VIA, we have many clients that use WooCommerce, which is also our preferred eCommerce solution. Over the years, we’ve found a few helpful tips and tricks that make developing for WooCommerce a little bit easier. Use Hooks over Template Overrides ...

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My (Current) Favorite QA Tools

By: Alexandra Ponce on 6/23/2020

Quality assurance testing is a crucial step in building and launching a website. It ensures an experience that is accessible, intuitive, and functional. It requires great attention to detail and can be time-consuming depending on the complexity of the webs...

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A custom ecommerce experience with Shopify

By: Mark Biek on 6/15/2020

Why Shopify? Shopify is one of our favorite hosted ecommerce platforms. It does a great job of making it easy to manage products, product variants, coupons, refunds, etc etc etc. It also has a pretty decent theme system so you can customize your online st...

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Introducing VIA Studio's WordPress Plugins

By:Nick Wunderlin on 6/8/2020

Over the past year, the VIA Studio development team has carefully crafted and published five different WordPress plugins to help developers and webmasters get the most out of their sites and other commonly used services. Check out VIA Studio’s Plugin Libr...

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Organizing Web Styling

By:Alec Robertson on 5/26/2020

An overview of different approaches to organizing CSS.

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A Brief Overview of WCAG 2.1

By: Alexandra Ponce on 5/6/2020

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 are a series of guidelines published by the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) for making web content more accessible on desktops, laptops, tablets, and mobile devices. ...

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How To Adapt Your Business During the Coronavirus Pandemic

By:Nick Wunderlin on 4/28/2020

Coronavirus/COVID-19 is currently impacting just about every aspect of daily life. There is no clear timeframe for when we can go back to normal and it might take a long time. Nonetheless, life and business will need to continue and adapt to this new norma...

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Using React and Redux to build the Kentucky Performing Arts ticketing experience

By: Mark Biek on 1/14/2020

When planning the KPA ticketing app, the first big decision was deciding which technology stack to use _______ Given the complex and highly-interactive design, we needed something that was going to be developer-friendly while letting us build an appl...

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User Experience
The Dramatic Uptick in Shopping on Mobile is all about Comfort
The Dramatic Uptick in Shopping on Mobile is all about Comfort

By:Ben Wilson on 11/25/2019

The rise of mobile purchasing has changed the game for the long haul.

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Nativescript with Vue.js

By:Nick Stewart on 11/22/2019

At VIA, we’ve been experimenting with the many different solutions to creating mobile applications with web technologies. We’ve done simple applications that wrap a webview (FacePaint Peggy) to more advanced hybrid applications using libraries such as Cord...

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Handy Features of PHP 7.x

By: Mark Biek on 9/20/2019

New and interesting PHP features

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