Drupal Partners

BACKGROUND

Please describe your organization.

We are a small manufacturer, importer, and distributor of crushable, packable sun hats with ultraviolet protection. We market and distribute to both wholesale and retail markets, around the United States and internationally.

What is your position?

I am the co-founder.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

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

We were trying to correct a website development that had gone awry. We had hired a website developer who had transitioned us from one web platform onto a new one, and had just really botched the job in pretty much every way imaginable. The original site was an ASP.NET and Shopify package. They were trying to transition the site to Drupal. We had gotten to the point where we knew we had to cut our losses and find a new partner to help salvage our partially constructed site.

SOLUTION

Please describe the scope of their involvement in more detail.

With the previous developer, there were a lot of things that were left unfinished, maybe 50 to 60 percent. The site was already live when we engaged Drupal Partners, but they created another sandbox in the development side on the back-end, so they could start making all the changes that we needed. We're still cleaning up some of the mess from before, and on working things that we had asked for earlier but hadn't been done.

Drupal Partners was able to implement a lot of features successfully, such as a retailer locator. One of the big things they did was coordinate and integrate the back-end of Drupal with a program T-HUB, which is run through a company called Atandra. It was a hugely challenging project, and they managed to accomplish it. They stayed on task until they got it done, so that was good. That was huge for our company.

They did custom development, bug fixes, and custom integrations with third-party apps. They also did staff training. We were taught how to use the content, web forms, and all the submissions that came through on the back-end effectively. We learned how to upload things onto the website. They're very responsive when you call. They always respond right away, and they answer their phones right away.

How did you come to work with Drupal Partners?

We conducted some Internet research, talked to people, and called different firms to try and find somebody who looked like they would have the technical and programming expertise to do the project. Then, we got information to Drupal Partners so they got some idea about what our needs were. They were impressive. The first thing they did was go onto the site, and within a couple of hours they already had information about what was going wrong with the site. They had a complete understanding that encompassed of the errors and issues that needed to be resolved.

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

It cost at least $30,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

Our relationship is definitely ongoing. We have a lot of things that we're still trying to incorporate into the site. The original project was just a retail website, and we've since had them create a wholesale site for us, which we're getting close to launching now.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?

I think the increase in sales through the Internet is a clear indicator of their quality. One of the things they encouraged us to do was move off of a shared server and onto an Amazon-hosted server, so that we have a server of our own. We probably wouldn't have considered this previously, but that transition alone has allowed us to increase the volume of orders that we can take significantly, and the system processing time is a lot better.

How did Drupal Partners perform from a project management standpoint?

They assigned us a dedicated project manager, and Drupal Partners is on top of their projects. I like the guy who founded the company. He's very involved. They respond very quickly if you have an issue.

What distinguishes Drupal Partners from other providers?

If you call them, they're available on their cell phones. They're just super available, which is fabulous for me. I think they're doing a good job; I've been impressed.

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

Sometimes, it can be challenging because they've got a team of developers offshore, so the time difference can be challenging. They've done a good job of having their developers available in the middle of the night if we needed to go through something together on a call.