Thursday, December 28, 2017

Looking back at Yoast in 2017 (with infographic!)

With 2018 just around the corner, it’s time to look back at yet another amazing year at Yoast. We’ve made some excellent improvements to Yoast SEO and released a bunch of new awesome online SEO courses. Team Yoast has been to lots and lots of conferences. We’ll write separate blog posts to look back at all those things. But as a company, and an employer, Yoast has done a great many things in 2017 as well! Let’s take a look at everything that happened at the Yoast offices in 2017.

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To celebrate, we’re having an end of the year sale. Get all our products at 10%% off!

We made a Yoast infographic!

To give you an idea what Yoast looks like in numbers, we put a lot of them in an overview. The article continues below the infographic:

Yoast 2017 infographic

So many new colleagues

The biggest change in 2017 is the number of colleagues we have. At our office in Wijchen, we are now with 50 colleagues (and already doing interviews to hire more :-)). In 2017, we welcomed over twenty awesome new  people at our Yoast office. On top of that, we hired six new support engineers from all over the planet!  We also decided to sponsor two important WordPress icons –Alain Schlesser and Remkus de Vries-, to make sure they continue their awesome work for WordPress core and the WordPress community.

As our company is growing really fast, we organized lots of events to get to know each other. We have our famous ‘Know your colleague-quiz’, in which we ask all kinds of random questions (what’s your favorite color, what kind of sports did you play when you were a child) about all of the people at Yoast. The colleague that knew most answers (way to go, Ben!) won an amazing price. We also had BBQs, went cycling, bowling, celebrated birthdays, Sinterklaas and Christmas. And on December 27th, we’ll have our annual LEGO building day. We’re planning to build 100.000 bricks of LEGO in one day. That’s teambuilding at Yoast!

yoastcon so many people

Our new office: building #2

As Team Yoast continued to grow, our Wijchen office was getting too crowded. We decided to open a second office (building #2) in Wijchen, just around the corner from building #1. There was a big celebration when we opened our new office. We drank champagne, did a real skippy ball race and a had running contest. It took some getting used to, but we’re now all taking frequent walks between buildings #1 and #2 for meetings, coffee or lunch. And, if construction goes well, in spring 2018, building #3 will be opened. The city center of Wijchen has a lot of Yoasters walking around!

opening yoast building #2

Bring your parents to work day

To many of the activities we undertake at Yoast, we let people bring their partners and children. Most of our colleagues do not have families of their own yet. Some of them even live with their parents. We therefore decided to organize an event, to which everyone could bring their parents: ‘bring your parents to work -day’.

We showed the parents around, told them what we’re working at and explained about our products and the growth of our company. It was great fun to meet everyone’s parents. Next year, we’ll definitely organize another ‘bring your parents to work-day’. We’ll  do a bit rebranding and make it an even more inclusive event: the ‘bring your family to work-day’. Some of the little brothers felt left out ;-).

5 years since Yoast hired first employees

In 2012 Yoast hired the first employees. Most of them still work with us today. That’s so very special to us! Of course Michiel started out as an employee in 2012, but quickly became one of the co-owners at Yoast. Mijke and Erwin were our 3th and 4th employee’s in 2012 and celebrated their 5th anniversary at Yoast this fall. We gave them special editions of Newton’s cradle to put on their desk. These cradles should remind everyone how much we love and value the people that work at Yoast. We hope they’ll all celebrate their 5th anniversary with us!

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