Web Design & Development for Presidential Library
Featured Review- Web Design Web Development
- $200,000 to $999,999
- Mar. 2022 - Ongoing
- Quality
- 5.0
- Schedule
- 5.0
- Cost
- 5.0
- Willing to Refer
- 5.0
“Everything that we've asked Culture Foundry to do, they've completed.”
- Other industries
- Austin, Texas
- Phone Interview
- Verified
Picking up from a previous vendor, Culture Foundry has fixed and completed a website for a presidential library. This involves leading a comprehensive workshop and making the platform simpler and more stable.
Culture Foundry has delivered a fully functional, cost-effective, easy-to-use, scalable, and future-proofed website and flawlessly worked around complex issues to improve the site. The professional, engaged team's client-centric, transparent approach and strong project ownership stand out.
A Clutch analyst personally interviewed this client over the phone. Below is an edited transcript.
BACKGROUND
Introduce your business and what you do there.
I’m the executive of the LBJ Foundation, which supports the mission of the LBJ Presidential Library. We’re a federal presidential library that houses and digitizes the work and products of Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidency.
OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE
What challenge were you trying to address with Culture Foundry?
We needed a company that could salvage a website development project that had been mishandled by a previous development firm. Our main website was developed by another firm, who essentially abandoned us due to a variety of reasons. They stopped working public sector gigs to focus on corporate ones, so the site itself was left barely functioning and in a largely unfinished state.
SOLUTION
What was the scope of their involvement?
The previous firm built a very complex website, which had a Drupal backend and a JavaScript engine frontend that rendered every page in JavaScript as it was served. We initially wanted Culture Foundry to make the platform simpler, more stable, and more usable for a variety of users with 0% to 100% technical skills. This involved subtracting some technologies and fixing existing issues to make it more affordable to run and to make future development easier and more cost-effective.
Translating all the pages through JavaScript was terrible, complicated, and prone to failure, so we wanted Culture Foundry to implement features that hadn’t been implemented by the previous developer to simplify the site for its users, even the non-technical ones. We also wanted to make portions of the site editable and easy to create and upload content so users could create their own content without having to rely on a single choke point.
Culture Foundry also led something called a “Wayfinding Workshop” for us. Members of their team from all over the country came to our facility to help us figure out what we needed for the two projects we started with them. In addition to our main website, we’re simultaneously working with Culture Foundry on digitizing and migrating the contents of a heavily data-driven archival website into another one.
During the workshop, Culture Foundry worked our organization's stakeholders. These people are archivists — they’re very detail-oriented with very specific needs and wants that don’t generally align with the existing technology. Culture Foundry was able to handle a lot of these important details and went the extra mile to understand our people’s needs. The workshop really helped us focus on what we actually wanted and needed from the project.
What is the team composition?
We’ve worked with Laura (Technical Project Manager & DevOps Manager), Hans (CEO), Zach (Software Engineer), and one other technical person. Laura provided DevOps support, and Hans was also our project manager for the initial project.
How did you come to work with Culture Foundry?
We found them through a cold call. Culture Foundry was one of three or four development firms that we interviewed. We first did a nationwide search with four development houses that had some tie to Austin, Texas.
How much have you invested with them?
We’ve spent around $700,000.
What is the status of this engagement?
We started working together in March 2022, and the engagement is ongoing.
RESULTS & FEEDBACK
What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?
We now have a fully functioning main website that is technologically easy to manage and upgrade. The code is upgradable and future-proofed, which means we can reskin the bones that they have built if necessary. Everything is documented and executed correctly. There are many ways to write code, but the right way is to make everything easily understandable, upgradable, and well-documented. That’s what we’ve gotten from Culture Foundry.
We’ve had other successes, too. We had a problem integrating Salesforce and Blackbaud forms into the website because we couldn’t embed the JavaScript code we got from Salesforce. Culture Foundry has found a way to work around all that and make it work. They’ve also made changes so that we can easily manage artifacts on the backend. Everything that we've asked them to do, they've completed.
How did Culture Foundry perform from a project management standpoint?
The Culture Foundry team are all A+ people who quickly provide solutions and answers for all our problems. They’re incredibly professional and affable. They know what they’re doing, are highly engaged, and empathetic towards what we’re going through.
Everything is also documented well and done correctly, and they work collaboratively to help us determine our needs. Every time we have a new task, they provide a full description of the scope and the cost.
We primarily communicate through email.
What did you find most impressive about them?
Everything that we've asked Culture Foundry to do, they've completed. Nothing's been left hanging, and they never over-promise. In the past, we had been sold things that couldn’t be done. We had kept throwing money at a project and ended up with nothing. With Culture Foundry, it has been the opposite. When we work on something with them, they tell us exactly what we’re going to get and always nearly exactly what it’s going to cost.
The previous developer we worked with just kept taking money and promising us the sky for multiple years, but they didn’t even deliver a working site. They overcomplicated everything in order to get us to more service contracts with them. However, Culture Foundry worked with us to determine our concrete needs and undid what the previous developers did.
Aside from that, one of the things I specifically like about them is that from the initial call that I made to them and through every engagement I’ve had with them, they always bring on their entire development team. They don’t just make me talk to one salesperson to try to upsell me. I’ve talked to the actual coders and specialists who are in the project.
Whenever I ask a technical question, they always get back to me immediately, even before we had decided to do business together. This spoke of their professionalism, influenced my decision to choose them, and helped build a collaborative working relationship.
Are there any areas they could improve?
I can't think of anything they could do better.
Do you have any advice for potential customers?
Their Wayfinding Workshop is a valuable tool. It’s important to know what you want and need. It helps you focus on what you want.
RATINGS
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Quality
5.0Service & Deliverables
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Schedule
5.0On time / deadlines
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Cost
5.0Value / within estimates
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Willing to Refer
5.0NPS
