Drupal Partners

BACKGROUND

Please describe your organization.

Richards Industries is the parent company of six industrial valve product lines. We sell to the oil and gas, pharmaceutical, food and beverage, pulp and paper, and water treatment-type industries. We have a sanitary line, and then all the rest are more for oil and gas.

What is your position and responsibilities?

I am the marketing manager, so I'm in charge of all the product lines.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What business challenge were you trying to address with Drupal Partners?

We have seven websites. One for Richards Industries, and all of the other six product lines. Five of our websites were in Drupal 6, so we hired them to upgrade our websites to Drupal 7. The other two were in Adobe Dreamweaver, so they started from scratch and brought those to Drupal 7, too. We don't have the technical skills here to do it ourselves and we wanted to make sure it was done right, so we hired externally.

SOLUTION

Please describe the scope of their involvement.

In addition to the upgrades and migration, they did quite a bit of customization. We didn't know what we were getting into when we first did Drupal 6, so we made many mistakes. When we moved to Drupal 7, they had to make quite a few changes and customizations. We wanted to have more calls to action and forms. We wanted all of our videos to be on the home page and to play. We have more than 300 reps and distributors worldwide, and they reconfigured that area, so it was easier for customers to find their local rep. A lot of work was done on the back-end. They did search engine optimization, changed page titles and so on.

We wanted to have the same look and feel on all of our websites, so that people that went to one of our product lines would associate with our other product lines. One of them was our hex valve line, which is a product line; we had to redo it to make it look like the other product line websites. The Richards Industries, which was the main one, we wanted that to have more of a corporate feel, so that it would have more to do with careers, and what we do to help our local communities, and that kind of thing. They helped us with that.

How did you come to work with Drupal Partners?

We were required to have at least three bids for projects more than $10,000. I think I got five bids for this project. They weren't the cheapest by any means, but what made us decide on them is that when we said, "This is what we want to do," and they came back with, "Here's some ideas on how to make it better," that we hadn't considered. We wanted a partner that had the knowledge and the experience we didn't have, so that they could walk us through best practices and help us refine our site.

Could you provide a sense of the size of this initiative in financial terms?

It was about $50,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We still work with them. Right now, we're developing an e-commerce site for one of our product line websites. They're handling all the back-end and setting everything up to process transactions.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?

I only have a couple of months from our Google Analytics, but two of our best product lines, with the highest sales, have done remarkably well. I don't have the stats on me, but I could look it up. We're still working on SEO [search engine optimization] and whatnot. We just finished the final site a couple months ago. This has been a yearlong project. These sites are a huge improvement over the previous ones.

How did Drupal Partners perform from a project management standpoint?

They have been consistently able to deliver their milestones on time, within budget, and without any major defects. For example, when we decided we were going to have an e-commerce site for our Marwin line, I went to them and said, "This is what we want to do." They came back and said, "This is how many hours we're estimating, and this is the timeline for the project." Usually, if I just have a quick little thing, a tweak, they will just do that right away. If I have a full project, they'll come back with the hours, estimated cost, and the timeline, which is awesome. I like how organized and methodical their approach is.

What distinguishes Drupal Partners from other providers?

Drupal Partners is very quick to respond. If I have an idea, sometimes they'll come back and say, 'Have you thought about doing it this way?' which I always like, because you don't know what you don't know. That's super handy, when they have a better suggestion. They're well suited to working with clients like us, who have an idea of what they want but don't have the functional requirements nailed down.

They really went above and beyond. When we had to move the website to our server, they had to get involved, because our IT [information technology] department didn't really know how to do it. They did go above and beyond by even working with our server.

Is there anything Drupal Partners could have improved or done differently?

I haven't run into anything yet. Everything's going great, and I can be really demanding.