Happy Cog

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I am the president and co-founder of Greentech Media, an integrated media company. There are 3 different parts to our business. Our most visible part is a business-to-business technology news site covering renewable energy technologies. That's the face of the company. We also have an in-depth market research firm that sells paid analysis and research subscription services. The third part of the business focuses on conferences and events. For that, we use the audience we built online through the news and the analysis that we have from our research firm. We host about 6 to 8 industry conferences throughout the year.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with the Vector Media Group?

That takes me back to the early days when we started the company. The first thing we needed to get up and running was a functional news website. For that, we needed a good, scalable content management system to publish digital news. We don't have any internal developers, so that was the core project that we asked the Vector Media Group to do.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

The Vector Media Group provides all of our external development needs. That means all the back-end development as well as all the front-end, HTML, and CSS development. In addition to that, they handle all of our server setup, security, and scalability. It started with just building up the basic news site. In time, they've built out our entire research portal that has an e-commerce engine and a subscriber paywall service. They have also handled all of our event pages and registrations. The Vector Media Group has also developed APIs that plug into many of our service providers. We use those so that everything seems to go seamlessly through one website, Greentech Media. They do quite a bit of work for us.

How did you come to work with the Vector Media Group?

That's an interesting story. When we started the company, another firm built a custom content management system for us. We were using it for about a year, and it was buggy. It just wasn't working very well. We had problems scaling, among other things. It was a tough decision, but we realized we want to do things right in the long term. We looked for a more scalable content management system, something more off the shelf. We looked at a number of solutions and settled on ExpressionEngine as our content management technology. Vector Media was one of the few experts on ExpressionEngine. That was the initial impetus for starting to work with them.

How much have you invested with the Vector Media Group?

We have paid more than $200,000 for their services.

What is the status of this engagement?

The company is about 9 1/2 years old, and we've been working with Vector Media for about 8 years [since 2008]. We have a retainer agreement in place with them to this day.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?

I think our success is partly underpinned by the success that we've had with Vector Media. We were a fledgling startup that no one had heard of. During the period that I just discussed, we have grown to more than a million page views per month. That's nearly a half a million unique visitors every month. Some of the largest energy companies in the world are our research subscribers and our readers. We have become the de facto information source for clean energy transition, and our web presence is hugely important to that. Vector Media has been there in lockstep the entire way, helping us develop everything that we need to deliver to our customers. We were acquired by a large firm back in July [2016], so I think that's another testament to our success. A huge part of that is due to the help that we've received from the Vector Media Group.

How did the Vector Media Group perform from a project management standpoint?

In the early days, Vector Media was small, too. They've grown aggressively during the course of our relationship. They were a startup, and we were a startup, and there was a lot of back and forth. It wasn't super structured. During the past few years, they've grown quite a bit, as have we. We've put several processes in place for project management: timelines, requirements, and goals. Vector Media has come into their own along those lines. They have many different tools and processes in place to ensure that they're tracking what we need. Also, we have some project managers here that define their requirements.

What did you find most impressive about the Vector Media Group?

Like I said, we launched the company 9 years ago, and I started working with them 8 years ago. We've probably done 4 to 5 major site redesigns in that time. Vector has led the development of all of those. We've introduced a number of new products and services through our website over time, and they have led the development work on all of that. That's something to highlight.

The thing that I find different about Vector Media is that in addition to us, they have a unique and broad client base. That means they're always out there learning the newest technologies and platforms that we can take advantage of. With Vector Media having that view of the world, we can take advantage of the latest technology as we need it. We don't need to be on top of that ourselves.

I think the other thing that is interesting is that they're extremely detail-oriented. There are many moving parts to our business, and we have to be on top of all the details to make sure that projects go off without a hitch. They've done an excellent job of that for us.

I think the third thing is they're a full-service house. In addition to all types of development – front-end, back-end, mobile, and desktop – they also do graphic design. They can take a project from just an idea all the way to the finish line without needing any external resources. I think that's another differentiator for Vector Media.

Are there any areas the Vector Media Group could improve?

I'm sure there is always something everyone can do to improve but, to be quite frank, I am extremely happy with the work that they do for us. Aside from little things you do a post-mortem on a project, they've done an excellent job in general. Plus, they continue to get better at what they do. It's hard for me to identify something that I feel they could improve. It's just a matter of them continuing to grow, scale, and serve their customers as they've been doing. I think they'll do just fine.