fjorge

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

Lawrence & Schiller is a full-service marketing agency based in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. We handle everything from graphic design, media strategy, and digital, which is my focus. I’m the senior digital strategist and marketing technologist.  I lead all of the agency’s web projects, mobile apps, and more.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with fjorge?

We had a previous hosting partner who handled our AWS environment, managing, hosting, and maintaining between 30–40 client websites. We were transitioning away from our old partner and were seeking a new cloud hosting management partner, as well as somebody that we could call upon to create new web site design and development that would live in the same environment.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

It’s an incredibly complicated project. There’s a lot of technical infrastructures involved, requiring architects, programmers, developers, and more. It’s wide-ranging. There were five main pillars of the project.

First, we had to migrate our cloud hosting environment and virtual datasets to move over without any downtime with our clients’ sites. We needed to successfully transition who are network administrators are and transition all of our virtual hardware, such as operating systems, applications, and all the other technical stuff. They transitioned all the day to day management. Finally, they managed and deployed any code for the development versions of the sites, as well as their production sites.

What is the team composition?

There were probably close to ten members on the team between the sales team, who we worked with first, to the development team, who we worked with digging into all the data during the virtual migrations.

How did you come to work with fjorge?

We put out an official RFP. We recently launched a second office in Minneapolis, Minnesota, so we were looking for partners in that area. We set up a series of meet and greets, created a requirement document, and tried to outline with as much documentation as possible through a series of pitches and meetings.

Fjorge was the winner by far because of a couple of reasons. Their technical knowledge impressed. Fjorge also works specifically with marketing and advertising agencies so they understood our business and how we work. We have end clients, so we needed someone flexible in that manner. That was really appealing. They knew exactly what we wanted before we even had our first conversation with them.

How much have you invested with them?

We reached out to them around November 2019, and picked them in December 2019. They worked until March 2020, when the transition project was completed. Since then, they’ve become our tech company of record. We do steady work with them still, although their heavy lifting finished in March 2020.

What is the status of this engagement?

The one-time transition was around $9,000. They also quoted us at $1,700 a month for maintenance. Our total spent with them is likely north of $25,000 right now. Although that’s several thousand dollars more than we signed on for, it wasn’t an issue at all because we expanded the scope and agreed to all costs.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

The biggest success metric was that there was no downtime of any sites. The transition was so seamless that none of the clients experienced any downtime. Time on site improved, as did our response time to tickets. It used to take weeks, now it takes hours. Our efficiency is through the roof now and our clients have been very happy with the quality of their work. It always feels like we have an expert working on the project.

How did fjorge perform from a project management standpoint?

While we had multiple project managers from their team, the transitions were seamless. We never had a drop off of information or a roadblock — they always supported us. They had more resources available for support than we could take advantage of, which is a great place to be in as a client.

Most of the project was completed with Base Camp. Now, we’re using a ticket management system to communicate with them. Regardless of the platform, they’re communicative.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Their technical knowledge, expertise, and knowledge of our business all are very impressive and rare. They know marketing and advertising agencies. They check the boxes of managing cloud hosting and being network administrators — lots of agencies can do that. But being able to call them constantly at all hours and have them pick up the phone and provide tailored expertise to our business because they understand us and our business — that’s extremely valuable.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I thought the project was going to take much more time and be much more expensive it wound up being. I have no constructive criticism — they exceeded all expectations.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

If you don’t box them in, they’ll come up with unique solutions. If we loosened the parameters a bit and asked for more advice, we might’ve been able to be even more successful.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I own a small design consultancy called BARSUHN. We’re a B2B brand agency that helps smaller, privately-held companies manage their entire user experience. That means putting together their websites, printed materials, interiors, tradeshows, and more. 

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with fjorge?

fjorge is our development partner, handling whatever development projects we need to be done. They create WordPress sites for our clients.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement? 

To date, fjorge has created five WordPress sites for our clients. Our office designs and manages content while fjorge builds the sites based on our specs. 

One of the more notable projects was an interactive website that allowed citizens to tell their legislators where to spend money on infrastructure. Then, there were three websites for a development company and real estate developer. Currently, we’re working on a website for a nonprofit medical research organization.

In each cases, the client wanted to be able to manage their content on their own. That meant that part of the design scope involved building a backend in a way that was relatively easy to use for people who weren’t well-versed on the technical side.

What is the team composition? 

We’ve interacted with 6–8 people, including account managers, developers project managers, and system managers. There’s also a team of people who do follow-up and maintenance work.

How did you come to work with fjorge?

Our offices were in the same building, so I got to know the owner of the company. What made them appealing to me was that our skill sets complemented each other. Before, we would work with development partners who would bill themselves as design partners, which meant that they were essentially a competitor.

fjorge was different. They didn’t have designers or brand consultants on staff, so they acted on any vision that was provided to them. They’d also constantly suggest different ways to think about the solution rather than pushing on creative changes later on in the project.

How much have you invested with them?

Between the five sites, we’ve spent around $63,000–$65,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

Our first project started in 2018, and we’re still working with them now.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

These sites are more about getting the clients’ messaging across, so we measure success by our clients’ feedback. So far, all of them have been pleased that they can manage their sites well and have gotten great feedback from their customers.

How did fjorge perform from a project management standpoint?

Project management is their strong suit. They use Basecamp, which is a task tracking software that both I and my clients can log into to check on the project status. There are records of all of our communications, and it’s easy to find files shared on the solution. That helps me an awful lot because I don’t need to take as many notes on what’s being done. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

I’m most impressed with their attention to detail followed by their reasonable prices.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, I don’t have any criticisms. I would hire them again for the next project we get.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Rely on their expertise because they know what they’re doing. I’ve worked with a lot of their peers in the office at different times, and they’re dead-set on being team players. They’ll listen to everyone’s advice while still giving great input. I really think that fjorge brings a lot to the table. They generally make any project better.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm the Digital Marketing Manager of a B2B platform where companies can find on-site IT technicians to contract.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire fjorge, and what were your goals?

Since we're a software company, we previously had web development for our marketing site in-house. This worked for several years, but internally it became difficult to prioritize our marketing site versus our (much more complex) software.

Not to mention, most of our internal developers create large complex tools– they don't have much expertise when it comes to a (comparatively simple) WordPress site. We needed a party, be it an agency or freelancer, to be able to keep our WordPress site up-to-date and also work on new development projects.

Although our site is configured through WordPress, our previous in-house developer created a custom drag-and-drop site builder for our site using custom fields. So, compared to the needs of most WordPress marketing sites, we needed strong technical expertise.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

I reached out to an area networking group, and several people highly recommended fjorge for web development. In addition, I interviewed two other agencies and one freelancer. Our criteria were as follows- Development Capabilities- Based on their portfolio, can this resource develop custom WordPress modules and complex tools?

Maintenance Capabilities- Will this resource be able to maintain our site with security enhancements, plugin updates, and emergency response? Price- Is this vendor priced competitively based on the level of service they provide? Fjorge won by a landslide.

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

Fjorge first started with a site audit and provided recommendations to improve performance (site speed, primarily) and technical SEO.

We're currently on a month-to-month plan with 12 development hours per month, however we will likely increase this plan dramatically. We realized several months in that continuing to host the site ourselves was not going to work for a myriad of reasons, so we moved the site over to fjorge servers.

The process was a little lengthy (as a software company, our own hosting was over-engineered IMHO) but we have had no performance issues since migrating to fjorge servers. For the last several months, fjorge has been working on relatively small tickets I submit and prioritize on a monthly basis.

Projects have included modifying the colors on the site, and modifications to a hard-coded section of our careers page.

How many people from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

We've primarily worked with ~4 engineers/developers, a project manager, and the director of managed services.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

We've only been working on the front-end of our site for about 2 months since we recently completed the server migration and before that the site audit. No outcomes to report yet!

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timeliness.

Fjorge uses JIRA, which I selfishly love since that's what my company uses internally too. All communications are reflected within the tickets I submit for development. Fjorge has a tool for tracking CMS time (it's fjorge branded, so I'm unsure what it is) which I appreciate for transparency.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

The level of communication is really impressive, especially from engineers.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

Based on my understanding, fjorge has been overwhelmed with the volume of work they've been getting as a result of the pandemic (it turns out most companies need websites!). A few recent tickets haven't been completed on time, but the team has been great about keeping us in-the-loop.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the VP of channel strategy for an Apple device management software company.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with fjorge?

We needed help with website redesign.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

First, they helped us select a new WordPress CMS, with Pantheon hosting and a HubSpot integration. The team also implemented WooCommerce Checkout for our online courses, with YouTube embedded videos. They created the entire template, with content organization and strategy. Finally, the team helped us migrate our old content to the new platform.

What is the team composition?

We worked with six people from their team.

How did you come to work with fjorge?

Their reputation was a big factor in choosing to work with them. I had also worked with them in a previous project.

How much have you invested with them?

For the website redesign, we spend around $50,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in March 2019, and we wrapped up in June 2019.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement? 

The team consistently delivers extremely high quality. I’ve gone back to them several times over the last five years because there isn’t anything that they haven’t been able to tackle.

How did fjorge perform from a project management standpoint?

Everything was very well organized. The team used Basecamp to manage the project itself and communicate with the different stakeholders. Our deadlines were all met and the communication was very streamlined. Overall, it was incredibly professional.

What did you find most impressive about them?

The fact that they’ll work on any project is a huge bonus. The team is absolutely willing to work with you on any type of technology. It’s great that we don’t have to bring in other agencies to get other elements added.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, it was a great project.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Because they know so many platforms and so many different technologies, it’s important to let them guide you through what may be best for your project.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m a senior vice president at Fusion92, a digital product agency that focuses mostly on the financial technology (fintech) space. We also do manufacturing and consumer packaged goods (CPG).

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with fjorge?

We needed a tech partner to work with our internal team to provide web product dev support.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

fjorge worked on every aspect of our project, from planning to requirements gathering to product deployment. They documented the project and worked on the technical architecture, building a product that would have a secure and consistent market.

The app they built consumes receipt data, meaning it has an optical character recognition (OCR) component. The receipt information in consumed via the web-based app which has containers for both Android and iOS. From there, it’s tied to technology that unlocks the software by scanning a receipt. The app is white labeled for a current end client, but we’re exploring options to expand the scope beyond the one client.

What is the team composition?

We worked with a project manager, head architect, and four developers who cycled through, depending on the skill set we needed.

How did you come to work with fjorge?

Our head of technology and my old business partner had both worked with them before, so I knew they’d be a good fit.

How much have you invested with them?

We spent about $80,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

The project lasted from October–December 2018.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

We’ve piloted the product at a few different stores and gotten positive results. The app is good quality and scales well, consuming receipt from various stores.

How did fjorge perform from a project management standpoint?

They were organized and attentive, completing tasks on time. We used Jira to manage tasks. For our last project, we gave them four weeks to complete quite a heavy workload, and they were able to deliver.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They were honest and easy to work with. The team worked hard and delivered a good product. Their price was probably slightly higher than average, but I was willing to spend more on a partner I knew I could trust.

Are there any areas they could improve?

We didn’t have any problems, but, as they grow, they need to make sure they scale appropriately.

Do you have any advice for future clients of theirs?

Listen to them because they know what they’re doing.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the Account Manager of an advertising & marketing company

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Marketing and Business Development

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire fjorge to accomplish?

• Website Hosting
• Website Development

SOLUTION

How did you find fjorge?

Online Search

Why did you select fjorge over others?

• High ratings
• Close to my geographic location
• Pricing fit our budget

How many teammates from fjorge were assigned to this project?

2-5 Employees

Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.

We hired Fjorge to help update a website with a new product. This required new website pages as well as updating the existing pages.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

Kelly was great about following up, estimating time and cost, and pushing the project forward.

Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

Yes, The team was proactive in delivering items and responding quickly to any questions I had.

What was your primary form of communication with fjorge?

• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

How quickly the work was done and how good the work was!

Are there any areas for improvement or something fjorge could have done differently?

There was nothing they needed to improve on.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am an executive at Como Friends

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

We are a nonprofit that supports Como Park Zoo & Conservatory

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire fjorge to accomplish?

• Completely revamp and rebrand our website
• Create greater efficiencies and accessibility for our website
• Create better navigation and better engagement to support our mission and strategic plan

SOLUTION

How did you find fjorge?

• Online Search
• Referral

Why did you select fjorge over others?

• High ratings
• Close to my geographic location
• Pricing fit our budget
• Great culture fit
• Company values aligned

How many teammates from fjorge were assigned to this project?

6-10 Employees

Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.

Complete revamp of our website, from a formal audit, to blueprint, to wordpress draft, to training and optimization, to final launch. They also formally manage our services on the backend.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

Absolutely. It created a dramatic upshift in website usage, a huge improvement with navigation in every aspect. I can't even count how many compliments we received.

Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

They were really on top of everything from start to finish.

What was your primary form of communication with fjorge?

Virtual Meeting

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

I think their hands on and thorough approach.

Are there any areas for improvement or something fjorge could have done differently?

I think the training aspect was the one area of improvement. The more complicated aspects of the new design could have been given more time.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the COO of Minnesota Center for Obesity, Metabolism & Endocrinology, PA

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Outpatient independent bariatric endocrinology medical clinic

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire fjorge to accomplish?

• Redo our outdated website

SOLUTION

How did you find fjorge?

Referral

Why did you select fjorge over others?

Referred to me

How many teammates from fjorge were assigned to this project?

2-5 Employees

Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.

designed and implemented new website

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

Functional, attractive, and is generating new patient referrals not done before

Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

Timely and accommodated my schedule

What was your primary form of communication with fjorge?

• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

They listened to my needs, delivered promptly and with great UX

Are there any areas for improvement or something fjorge could have done differently?

none

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am a project manager at a marketing agency.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire fjorge, and what were your goals?

Brand new website build

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

Organized and in-depth discovery process, clear communication with documentation for anything substantial.

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

Web development

How many people from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

A project manager was our main POC, providing organized timelines, budget pacing and scope conversations when appropriate.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

The client was happy!

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timeliness.

We used Basecamp & email to coordinate.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

Organization and professionalism.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

n/a

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm a project/production manager at an advertising agency.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire fjorge, and what were your goals?

We brought Fjorge in to do a complete website redo for one of our clients. We had worked with another partner on the UX work and went to Fjorge for development.

SOLUTION

How did you select fjorge and what were the deciding factors?

Fjorge is incredibly responsive. They are always willing to jump right on my projects and are quick to communicate. Budget was a huge factor as well and Fjorge was able to come in at a much more reasonable budget than what was estimated by another developer.

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

Fjorge did all of the development on the site after our UX phase with another partner. This was a total revamp of the client's old site. Fjorge used Craft and completely redid and reorganized the site.

How many people from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

5-7

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

Our client was very satisfied and their site is so much more user-friendly.

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timelines.

Fjorge uses basecamp for communications plus email.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

They are completely responsive and budget-friendly. They are open to new ways of doing things and are a great partner.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

Maybe just increased communication at times