Drupal Partners

BACKGROUND

Could you describe your organization?

The name of our company is the Professional Training Institute, Inc. We provide safety- and medical-related training to businesses and individuals. We have two divisions. One division has classrooms where we provide in-person training with instructors as well as going out to business locations, and we provide live training. The second division we have is online training; several of our courses qualify to be provided online to our clients. We’ve been in business since 2001.

What is your position?

I’m the president.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

Could you describe the business challenges that you were attempting to address when you first approached Drupal Partners?

Our business model is growth like any other business, and a lot of our industry is providing a lot of training based on online marketing as well as an online presence. Having a company that we can work with to help address the robust needs that we have with our websites is very critical. Marketing is a huge component of any business, ours included, but you also have to have programmers and developers that can work on the front end and back-end of your websites. To have any kind of success on the Internet, it’s key to have a company you can rely on to do programming and development.

SOLUTION

Could you describe the scope of their involvement?

They performed design work, back-end development, and then they also did some database integration and maintenance. A lot of their tasks were technical in nature, but they did some basic designs for us, too.

How did you select Drupal Partners as your preferred service provider?

We’ve had a relationship with a company in California that has been doing some of the design and development of one of our primary websites. They also host a couple of our sites. We made the contract through them. They got us in touch with Drupal Partners. It was basically a referral.

Could you provide a general cost estimate for this engagement?

It cost around $15,000.

When was this project completed?

We just completed the project about a week ago [December of 2014].

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

In terms of results, could you share any statistics, metrics or user feedback that would demonstrate the quality of their performance?

We’ve received some very positive feedback thus far. We’ve definitely seen an increase in sales since we’ve launched the new site, but it’s difficult right now to determine if this just an uptick caused by normal market fluctuations, or if it’s directly attributable to the site improvements. We’re also very pleased with their project management. We’ve had a number of relationships with developers and programmers through the years, and Drupal Partners is definitely one of the best that we’ve ever worked with so far.

When working with Drupal Partners, is there anything that you’d consider unique about their strategic approach or development methodology that distinguish them from other vendors?

One thing we felt was an advantageous component of this project was the fact that they used an online support tracking system called Assemble. This system enabled us to monitor their progress. As needs, questions, or changes arose, we had the ability to log in to Assemble, generate support tickets, and correspond back and forth with project developers. It’s been a really nice addition to the overall project, to be able to see the progress and be integral in their progress as well as incorporate our feedback and the developers’ feedback. It was a great tool.

In retrospect, are there areas in which you think they could improve as a service provider?

We’re pretty pleased with them, overall. There have been a few things that might be able to be improved, but that’s kind of the nature of working with developers that work overseas. Sometimes. the timeframes don’t match our work hours, and that was a bit problematic, although I think they addressed it as well as they could. I also think that sometimes the language barrier was a little difficult for us at time. Miscommunication delays progress. These were reasonably minor when considering the grand scheme of things, but they still occurred.