Kevinleary.net

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

We are one of the world’s largest travel sites handling hotel bookings, reviews and a medley of different things. We help people plan their best trip. I work on the brand marketing team on all site messaging, our social media platforms, and our blog.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with kevinleary.net?

We had an outdated blog platform, so we brought Kevin on to help us build a custom, unique website which is specialized for all the different things we wanted to do. We had a simple blog, but we wanted to be able to show our brand voice on a new platform.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of his involvement?

The blog is WordPress-based, but we have a number of specific APIs which bring in information from our main website, such as translations, different geoimages, and data hosted in our databases. For example, if we wanted to talk about France in a blog post, we have the ability to pull in specific hotel data, ratings, reviews and so on, all coming from the APIs of our site. We also have the blog available in six languages currently, and will be rolling out more. 

How did you come to work with kevinleary.net?

I was not a part of this decision. It was made before I started on the project.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with Kevin in July 2015. The collaboration is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We have had an increase in traffic due to the new platform. We’ve increased our ability to share posts on social media because of the way the site is built out and also have the ability to share through different points of sale. Our success metrics for the project were getting out content more quickly and being able to have more design ownership over pieces we were trying to promote. We’ve definitely seen this kind of increase.

How did kevinleary.net perform from a project management standpoint?

Kevin was responsive throughout the project; he’s been available anytime we needed him. Most of the communication was done through email or Trello for managing specific tasks and items which needed to be built. I’d enter tickets for things, and he’d be quick to respond with LOEs, [Levels of Effort] getting started on projects and keeping us up-to-date. We had biweekly phone calls if needed. He was available for either a phone or email conversation to get things completed as quickly as possible.

What did you find most impressive about him?

Our group doesn’t work with outside companies very often, but we do some amount. I would say that Kevin was good at understanding our goals and coming up with ideas for matching them, even if it was something we hadn’t thought of yet. He showed us new tricks and tools to improve our project.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I can’t think of anything.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I am the director of digital marketing for Savings Bank Life Insurance which primarily offers life insurance, whole life insurance, and annuities. I am responsible for all application development, website changes, pay-per-click, digital and banner advertising, remarketing, social media marketing and content marketing.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with kevinleary.net?

Our first priority was to get off the proprietary content management system we were using. We were working with a company named Bridgeline whose product was cumbersome, slow to make changes to the site, and expensive to manage through their team. We wanted to move to WordPress, which was mainly done internally. While transitioning away from the old system, we realized that our company uses various tools and databases so we decided we needed a superior WordPress backend developer.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of his involvement?

The website is customer-facing. We were trying to get people to use it for term life insurance quotes. We needed a whole system for providing accurate quotes, based on a number of variables such as age, gender, state, health class, and so on. In addition to giving a quote, the data is collected, passed into a database and supplied to an agent. The agent can then reach out to these people in order to sell them life insurance.

We’re also in the midst of building a tool called a Coverage Calculator, which asks people a lot of personal questions about their finances, lives,  and children, spitting out a recommendation for how much life insurance they need, and how long they should have that life insurance. This project in itself was complex to build, but we then asked him to integrate it into the quote tool, as a seamless process. The data also needed to be pushed to the CRM system so that the agent would have a huge file containing all the information for a potential customer. At the same time, we knew that people were going through multiple versions of the questionnaire, so we had to have rules built-in, like not duplicating a person’s lead information.

There are many things going on in the background, between the databases and the quotes. We have a front-end designer on our team but needed a backend person who could do a good job with the heavy lifting of applications, tools, and passing of data into the CRM securely. The backend was primarily developed using PHP and Java.

How did you come to work with kevinleary.net?

I made a simple search online for “backend WordPress backend developers”. We started looking through various websites and found some references to Kevin as being a good asset. We looked at some reviews of his, checked his LinkedIn pages, and called his. We talked to Kevin about his capabilities and previous projects, and he shared work which was in the ballpark of what we were looking for. We started off on a trial basis, the project went well, and we kept going.

How much have you invested with him?

We’ve averaged $6,000 to $8,000 per month.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with kevinleary.net in May 2016. We’re still working together.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We’ve had positive feedback on the way the new site looks and how easy it is to replicate pages, add content, and make changes. The internal feedback has been great. I wouldn’t necessarily say there’s any external data which shows a particular increase in impressions. It’s difficult to attribute because the majority of our traffic comes from paid advertising, which fluctuates based on how much we’re willing to spend each month. We don’t have a lot of organic traffic, and when we launched the main website we didn’t do a good job of building SEO content. This is something we’re working on fixing now.

We went from a system which required making phone calls every time we wanted to change the headline on a page, to being able to log in and make changes on-the-fly. We’ve integrated the website with MailChimp, whereas before we had been using a .Net platform, so integrating with anything implied weeks of work and thousands of dollars. Now, we can set up an API and have things running in a day or two.

How did kevinleary.net perform from a project management standpoint?

Primarily, we used simplistic channels like email and conference calls for communication. I sat with my front end developer and designer on the phone with Kevin, hashing out some more complex things, and discussing ideas. Everything else was done through email. If there was anything technical being used, it was GitHub. My designer and frontend developer used this to work without overwriting the code Kevin was working on. Github brought a lot of this best practice to our team, so we don't waste time.

What did you find most impressive about him?

After working with developers as often as I do, you begin to see tiers of people. It was clear, after one to two projects, that Kevin is a smart person and a great developer. He can install just about anything we give him, including some complex things. He solved everything basically on his own, without asking us for too much help or ideas. Once we start building complicated projects, like the coverage calculator, it becomes clear we have a good developer on our hands.

Are there any areas he could improve?

There’s always a push-and-pull when working with a freelancer because everyone wants everything within 30 seconds. When there is an internal team, we can run to someone’s desk and have them switch what they’re doing, but freelancers have multiple clients. Kevin’s quickness to respond to random emails could be improved. We’ve talked about this, but he told me he may have three other clients, so he can’t look at emails during a complex project. It is what it is, but there’ve been times when I wished I could have gotten something done sooner.