So you’ve made the decision to start working with agile. Great choice! You’ve decided to use Scrum to get yourself and your team into peak performance mode, and now you are really rolling. But wait a minute — you start doing your homework, and you read in Jeff and J.J. Sutherland’s Scrum book that this framework was created “as a faster, more reliable, more effective way to create software.” If you are like me, your next thought is, “Uh oh, I’m not a developer. I guess this isn’t for me…”. However, don’t put down that Scrum book just yet.

We’re creating an Alexa voice skill that will simulate exploring an exhibition at the Cooper Hewitt museum in-person.

At Alley, working as a distributed team while solving complex challenges for large-scale digital publishers has required us to scale our company practices accordingly — and embrace the opportunities created for continual positive change.

In mid-September, the Alley team headed to Austin, Texas, for the annual conference of the Online News Association. More than 2,700 publishers, editors, journalists, and technologists took over the JW Marriott Austin downtown, and we were glad to be a part of it.

What I like most about managing projects with Jira is the level of organization and filtering I can achieve by tagging stories. As someone who used to keep his CD collection in alphabetical order by artist (with secondary ordering by year), I am deeply satisfied by how the tagging options help me structure projects. I am a Jira nerd and proud of it!

Journalists, developers, and many others who use WordPress to manage publications gathered in Chicago from August 8 through 10 for the second annual WordCamp for Publishers. We were able to share knowledge about the ways WordPress has fueled success in the publishing industry and discuss its future. We were pleased to be part of this conference in many ways — organizing, sponsoring, and speaking.

This year we had the pleasure of attending AAM Annual Meeting & MuseumExpo in Phoenix, Arizona. With the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery’s Chief Digital Officer Courtney OCallaghan, we had the opportunity to present on the advancements Alley Interactive has been working on with the Freer|Sackler in creating their Alexa Skill and bringing their TMS collection online with WordPress and Elasticsearch.

Years ago, I didn’t understand what designing websites for accessibility really meant. I thought that accessibility guidelines would only benefit a few users, that they would introduce unsatisfying design limitations, and that following them would take more time and money.

You want to refresh the look of your site. You have the approval from your stakeholders, the budget and resources, and goals for the new design. But how do you actually kick off a design project?

Last year was a wonderful one for Alley. We accomplished a lot—so much so that we had to take a month or two to bring it all together for this post! Here are some of the highlights.