Human Made

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m a publicist at a Fortune 100 media and entertainment company. I work on a series of websites from which news media can get assets from, like photos, videos, and press releases.

What challenge were you trying to address with Human Made?

With the media being our primary audience, we want to deliver the best user experience possible. We brought on Human Made to ensure we remain at the cutting edge of technology, so that the media can get access to our assets in a timely manner.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Human Made develops six of our websites using WordPress VIP. They work on the front and backends. The team also designs the sites, as each one has a customized theme. They maintain the themes and make any design changes that we request.

Human Made developed a shopping cart feature, which we call the media folder. This is where we put photos, videos, and other assets. They also created a light room feature. When we wanted to switch video hosting vendors, Human Made did a substantial amount of research and ultimately recommended a vendor.

In terms of content, my team often articulates what we’re hoping to achieve, and Human Made comes back to us with some starting point ideas.

What is the team composition?

My team works with Jen (Senior Project Manager, Human Made). We primarily work with three developers, including Kevin and Chris (Senior WordPress Engineers, Human Made), although we rotate developers and designers based on what projects they’re allocated to. Our account managers are Lonnie and Sam (Directors of Client Services, Americas, Human Made).

How did you come to work with Human Made?

Jen was our project manager at a previous vendor we worked with, and she was one of the primary reasons we moved to Human Made. As a big company, we needed to do an RFP and assess a couple of vendors. Human Made let us do a trial period, during which we met everyone, ran through our projects, and discussed where we were and what we wanted to do in the future. This was a helpful opportunity that you don’t get with a lot of companies. The other two vendors we considered didn’t offer the value or quality people that Human Made did. They also had the latest tools to help us remain technologically advanced.

How much have you invested with them?

My company spends about $100,000 each year.

What is the status of this engagement?

We began working with them in May 2018, and the work is ongoing.

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

In the news industry, speed is key, and Human Made is critical in enabling us to deliver assets much more quickly to the media that we service. Switching from our last vendor to Human Made has incurred at least 30% cost savings. Although it didn’t impact them, their work researching video hosting vendors saved my team a lot of time. They went above and beyond to help us get through those changes. Also, the switch to the vendor that they recommended saved 60% on our annual spend.

We constantly receive positive feedback from users regarding the media folder. It’s user-friendly and more efficient; internally, it makes pulling together multiple assets at once much easier. Also, the light room feature, which is helpful for our photo assets, has a fresh design that fits into the news industry.

How did Human Made perform from a project management standpoint?

We’re constantly innovating, and we meet with Human Made biweekly to discuss new ideas and go through our backlogged tasks. We mostly communicate via Slack, email, and Zoom, which allows us to have face-to-face meetings even though we’re not close to each other. Human Made is always available on Slack. We work in scrum using GitHub.  

Jen is so talented and has a positive outlook. She’s able to stay organized and get everything done, which is fantastic, since this is one of many projects that I manage. Lonnie and Sam been phenomenal through some challenging legal and contract processes.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They add a human element to our partnership. Human Made cares about their team and ours. They’re extremely talented, particularly in WordPress, and their work is consistently excellent. If my team goes to them with a problem, an opportunity to do something, or something that needs to be turned around quickly, we don’t have to worry about anything, because they’re always there to help. Money can’t buy the peace of mind that we get from working with them. They make the whole process easy.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, I don’t think I have anything.

Any advice for potential customers?

They can take you from an okay to a great project. If you’re hesitant to work on something or think it’s too big of a challenge for them, they will take on anything, big or small.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the VP of a popular fact-checking website that sees about 25 million visitors each month.

What challenge were you trying to address with Human Made?

We had to find a new vendor for our hosting and infrastructure who would be technically capable of both migrating our site and customizing our product as much as we needed.

What was the scope of their involvement?

We initially hired them to help us with site migration, but over time Human Made’s become our CTO-in-a-box. They handle all of our code review, making sure that everything we write and push into production is both secure and performant. They also answer any questions throughout our product development journey. On the backend, they maintain our website in a scalable, cloud-hosted configuration.

In terms of WordPress development, they’ve helped us improve and implement better code standards, establish good DevOps procedures, and help us improve our site security. In addition, they handle all of our posting and we even pull them in periodically to supplement our in-house development efforts through SRWs.

What is the team composition?

Our main point of contact has varied throughout the length of the project. We have a rep who handles our contracts and resource allocations. Day to day, I work with one of the systems engineers, but we also consult regularly with their co-founder and CTO.

How did you come to work with Human Made?

We needed to replace our existing contractor and we were considering several options, including using WordPres.com VIP, as well as hiring additional developers and trying to handle the work in-house. During our search, we reached out to people who’d worked with some of the open-source tools we used for our codebase. A member of our current Human Made team contacted us and said they’d been referred through the Roots.io development community.

Right away, they stood out because they not only offered to help us meet our goals but also recommended several other firms to us, rather than trying to sell us on their business straight away. After evaluating several other leads, we ended up speaking to Joe, the co-founder of Human Made. We were impressed by their personal touch and WordPress expertise. They said they could handle the scale of our project and also offered an affordable price.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started discussing the project in the summer of 2017 and officially migrated the website in October 2017. They now provide ongoing hosting and development.

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

Despite our extremely high traffic, we haven’t had any outages. In one case, we had an article go viral in India and our visitor stream shot up from 5,000–6,000 to 27,000 within in a few minutes. Traffic stayed that high for a couple of hours but we had no hiccups or downtime. It’s a testament to the kind of infrastructure and performance tools Human Made has built for us.

From an internal standpoint, they’ve also sped up our production process. We’re able to respond to changing consumer needs, convert ideas into product development, and push code out much more quickly than in the past. Human Made’s created an environment that’s empowered us to set our own pace and it’s allowed us to broaden our vision for future development.

How did Human Made perform from a project management standpoint?

Typically, we’ll hand them pieces of work on a project we’re managing in-house. We have a private Slack channel that we use to communicate with them regarding our product development roadmap; it’s also how we send code for review. They always exceed our expectations, even if we haven’t given the clearest instruction at the outset of a task.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They’re at the cutting edge of WordPress development. Whenever we want answers, solutions, or new build ideas, they know how to provide them. Their team are active participants at WordCamp and they’ve led the charge on helping Automattic roll out their WordPress API. They have the deep technical understanding of the platform that we need in order to keep innovating and elevating our business.

As one example, there was a point when we were kicking around an idea we wanted to implement and we spoke to Joe, their CTO, about whether or not it was possible and how difficult it might be. He emailed me 150 lines of PHP the next day, saying we could use that as a base and that the problem wouldn’t be that hard to solve. Our internal team picked up the code and we eventually pinged one of his developers to finish up the project. We really appreciate how often they over-deliver.

Are there any areas they could improve?

Since we’re so big, they’re actively working on implementing tools for managing our account. These aren’t must-haves or failings. As their business grows and they become more sophisticated, I hope they’ll give us better tools and insights into the performance of our stack, among other things.

Their other issue is learning to balance our expectations with what a typical client needs. There are some really advanced tools and resources we’ve asked for, that they just didn’t have readily available, although they helped us obtain them from elsewhere. I expect that this is on their roadmap and will change as they get additional large enterprise clients.

Do you have any advice for future clients of theirs?

Respect their expertise, but also make an effort to learn more about the WordPress platform and how it’s meant to be used. We found many things that hadn’t been implemented correctly in the past and, while Human Made has fixed some of them, it was too costly upfront to address them all.

Looking back at our own migration, we should’ve been more aware of the information architecture for our existing site, as well as what our future ambitions were. We didn’t communicate that to Human Made as effectively as we could have in advance. Any client migrating their website should make sure to be transparent with Human Made about where they want the information to be migrated and what they want the future of their content management to be. This might avoid our problem of inheriting or carrying over technical debt.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I run a media company’s product and technology team. We focus on startups and technology.

What challenge were you trying to address with Human Made?

We worked with them on a redesign of a third-party website.

What was the scope of their involvement?

The project was WordPress-based and moved to a headless set up with a React frontend. The team only did development as we had another partner that completed the design aspect.

What is the team composition?

We had up to four people working on the project at any given time.

How did you come to work with Human Made?

I talked with other people in the WordPress community and decided that Human Made would be a great partner. They had expertise in WordPress’ rest API and prior experience using that in decoupled solutions.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with them in January 2017 and launched the WordPress site in March 2018. The team continues to work on smaller things with us.

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

Human Made leveraged their considerable expertise in the space to solve numerous tricky problems. We felt fortunate to have a fantastic experience with Human Made. My team learned a lot about React and the WordPress API; we came out stronger. Since we embedded Human Made, the teams grew close and my developers appreciated the project’s collaborative nature.

How did Human Made perform from a project management standpoint?

They were communicative throughout the project.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They solved tough challenges by understanding them and then coming up with effective solutions. The team was also flexible and things changed over the course of the project. We appreciated the ease of working with them.

Are there any areas they could improve?

They were very good at their jobs.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m an IT project manager for an environmental protection company. We have a few offices across multiple countries. I work on site development for our various projects.

What challenge were you trying to address with Human Made?

We lacked the in-house technical leaders who had sufficient experience in PHP development and WordPress. We needed resources who could consult us through certain technical decisions regarding our site and support our internal team on the frontend.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Initially, they provided a set of recommendations for our site including reusing code, installing plugins, and general strategic decisions. Each of our offices will get its own site, so we wanted to maintain a consistent look and feel. Although we wanted to update the site ourselves, we realized we lacked the knowledge to execute our plan.

As a result, they augmented our frontend developers. They built our site with content blocks, which allowed for a uniform yet flexible theme. While the navigation would remain the same, the different offices can choose which blocks to use and where.

What is the team composition?

We first worked with a tech lead who consulted with us. Later, we worked with a team of frontend developers.

How did you come to work with Human Made?

We originally considered seven agencies before one of our offices referred them to us. We requested a quote and decided to hire them.

How much have you invested with them?

I think it was about a $115,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

Work lasted between September–December 2017. Although we currently don’t have a contract with them, we will definitely consider them for future projects.

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

The site has received a lot of positive feedback, which stemmed from our joint efforts. Internally, we were really happy with Human Made’s frontend contributions. They were essential to our project’s success.

How did Human Made perform from a project management standpoint?

We appreciated their ability to work under pressure and provide resources to augment our team. In this regard, they were extremely helpful and willing to collaborate. We communicated primarily through GitHub, Jira, and Rocket.Chat.

What did you find most impressive about them?

We weren’t a typical client because we wanted to execute a lot of the project ourselves; we needed help with code review and strategic suggestions. As such, we valued their technical knowledge and willingness to work with our requirements.

Are there any areas they could improve?

We really appreciated how quickly they provided resources under pressure, although it did mean we were working with a globally dispersed team. This had an impact on the team's communication. At that time their Tech Lead was in India, whereas the frontend developers were in the U.S. As a result, communication was slower than necessary due to the time difference. We would consult the tech lead in the morning but would have to wait until late afternoon to communicate with the developers. By then, we couldn’t address concerns until the following day.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Nothing. They were a great company and considerate of our needs.

Could you briefly describe your organization?

We are a leading provider of institutional quality investment research that’s widely available to the public. We publish professional research coverage on ETFs, master limited partnerships, and global equities. We’re a fast growing venture-backed company in New York City.

What is your position?

I’m the co-founder and chief executive officer.

Could you describe the business challenges you were attempting to address when you first approached Human Made?

The core challenge for us was identifying high-end WordPress developers that could work on a project that could potentially reach millions of monthly users, certainly hundreds of thousands of monthly users to start, in a way that was scalable. When we began working together with Human Made, we had maybe tens of thousands of monthly page views, maybe a hundred thousand, and now we’re approaching close to one million monthly page views, with astronomical monthly and quarterly growth rates that just keep increasing.

It was really important for us to build a platform that could scale with us from early on in a quality way, and that we wouldn’t necessarily need to rebuild. Many times when startup technology companies hire developers, they build something that works pretty well. It doesn’t work after a certain point, or it doesn’t perform as well, and you need to scrap it and rebuild the whole thing. We wanted to prevent that coming in, so we decided to partner with Human Made in order to have them build it correctly in a very early stage.

We partnered with them even when the founders were investing with the company before we had any investors in the company. After we had our angel investor, we’ve been able to increase the size of our relationship and really scale with that team. It was very difficult to find developers that had experience in large-scale deployments; in particular, it’s difficult to find developers who have had experience developing large-scale projects at multiple companies. There aren’t that many large websites where you can work. The ability to work on multiple large websites is particularly hard to come by. WordPress deployments on a large-scale are very difficult, so we needed to ensure that the vendor we chose would be able to handle that.

The second dimension we were looking for were competent people that could work well with our team, our culture, and our startup environment. We knew there would be times where we might have problems. There would be times where we might have aggressive deadlines. There were problems where there might be an issue in the middle of the night, which would require immediate intervention. We wanted a team that understood that, and was able to be nimble and work with us when the pressure was on. They also needed to understand what our needs were and essentially be very reasonable, but also very high quality. We concluded that Human Made would be able to perform on both of those dimensions, and that was extremely attractive to us.

Could you describe the scope of work in greater detail?

Human Made collaborated with us on every stage of the project, from conception through development all the way to deployment and testing. We provided the necessary strategic guidance, but they handled the actual site build.

How did you select Human Made as your solution partner?

We had initially worked with a couple of engineers: one very experienced, and another one with less experience. We realized that we needed the core skills of engineers that could really build a site that would scale nicely, and that had a culture that would also fit with our team. We’d worked with an engineer that worked with one large site, and we realized we needed engineers that worked on multiple large sites. There weren’t that many of them to start with. On the one hand, that’s a big disadvantage because it becomes a lot more expensive to hire said engineers in volume. On the other hand, it actually means that you know exactly who to speak to because there’s a limited number.

We reached out to a number of WordPress VIP engineering agencies. Some were very large companies. When we first met Human Made, it was essentially two brothers and a third partner, and maybe a handful of additional, high-quality engineers and that was it. They were much smaller than any other firms that we spoke with. It was really clear that each of the VIP agencies had the experience with scalable solutions. Many had indeed worked on a very large scalable website. What was appealing about Human Made, though, was that they had experience with multiple scalable sites while most other companies didn’t have that. Human Made also had the closest cultural fit for us, and that was a huge deciding factor for us.

Could you provide a general cost estimate for this project?

It’s very high relative to anything else you can do, but it’s worth it for us because the alternative is having developers that are less productive, or having code delivered to you that might require revision.

How long has your relationship remained ongoing?

We stated at some point in early 2013, so more than a year and a half, close to two years.

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

We launched a feature on the website, which grew engagement by more than 50 percent, so that’s a massive success. It was a two- to three-month project, and it was extremely successful. Feedback from staff members and other end-users was quite positive, both in terms of the design and the functional usability of the site. We’ve been very impressed.

When working with Human Made, is there anything you’d consider unique about their approach or development methodology that distinguishes them from other vendors?

We didn’t work with other vendors. In the cultural sense, we consider our engineers our partners. One of the challenges with partners is what happens when you have rough times, and they’ve been there for us 100 percent when there have been problems. I’m not sure that you’d get that kind of service and commitment from the vast majority of vendors.

Could you briefly describe your organization?

I work for a media company. We provide cable network called Fusion.

What is your position?

I’m the chief technology officer.

Could you describe the business challenges you were attempting to address when you first approached Human Made?

We needed to build a website for the World Cup. We were going to cover the event, and tell stories about that, so we needed a technology platform to publish stories and videos. We decided to build the site using WordPress as the content management system. Humanmade helped us determine that WordPress would be the best fit for our project goals. They were to be responsible for designing and developing the site from scratch.

Could you describe the scope of work in greater detail?

We hired them as our external development team and essentially outsourced the majority of the deployment tasks to them. They were responsible for the design, development, testing, optimization, and support. We collaborated closely, but they handled the grunt work. 

How did you select Human Made as your solution partner?

A close friend recommended them to me after having a great experience with them. I had a few meetings with the founder, Tom [Willmot], and after the meetings, we decided to use them for our project. They seemed well put together and the work they’d completed in the past seemed to speak for itself. I felt confident in their capabilities and approach, and they certainly justified that confidence.

Could you provide a general cost estimate for this particular deployment?

I would say we spent between $50,000 and $200,000.

When was this project completed?

I don’t recall the exact date, but it launched around June 10 of this year [2014].

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

The staff was very happy with the flexibility and versatility of WordPress. There was some initial resistance to the idea of switching to a new system and site, but once we’d gotten it up and running, and people began using it, all of the anxiety subsided. Human Made customized the design, integrated all of our tools, plug-ins, and APIs [application programming interfaces]. We created a very rich visual experience that was used widely and was very popular. We received very few support requests at launch, which was also fantastic.

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

I’m very happy with them because they communicated very well and their entire process was transparent. Tom was very hands-on and kept track of how things were going. They provided a great level of service to ensure we received everything on time and within budget. They’ve got some very talented people over there, which is reflected in their process and all of the work they deliver to their clients. This was, of course, what my close friend promised, and Human Made didn’t disappoint.

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

I have no critiques. I think they’ve done an extraordinary job.

Could you briefly describe your organization?

We provide digital marketing solutions for small- and medium-sized businesses.

What is your position?

I’m the digital contact manager.

Could you describe the business challenges that you were attempting to address with you first approached Human Made?

We wanted a flexible, easy-to-edit website that would give us great SEO [search engine optimization] value. Our older site was obsolete and static. We didn’t feel like it adequately reflected the quality of our brand.

Could you describe the scope of work in greater detail?

They were more like consultants in the beginning, so they were advising us on why WordPress was right and how they could use it to meet our strategic objectives. They weren’t directly involved with the design, but they took the designs from our creative team and applied it to the backend of the site. They did quite a lot of the custom work to install the various plug-ins we wanted. They built some plug-ins from scratch for us to meet specific requirements, and managed all of the testing and deployment process for us, too.

How did you select Human Made as your solution partner?

We’d selected WordPress as the preferred content management system beforehand. We then searched for a number of agencies that had extensive WordPress expertise Human Made was one of several shops that emerged from our search. We talked to them about their previous work and had them propose some ideas for our own project. We were impressed with their presentation and decided to award them the work.

Could you provide a general cost estimate for this particular project?

It cost under £50,000 [$83,000].

In terms of results, could you share any statistics, metrics, and user feedback that would demonstrate the effectiveness of their work?

The site itself took about four months to build, and was launched in October of 2011. We operated the site for about two years before replacing it about a year ago. Since then, we’ve made the decision to go back to WordPress, because we miss the flexibility and the SEO value. During the two years we used the site, we saw considerable improvements in both process efficiency and administrative flexibility.

We also saw our Google placement in search results improve rather significantly. It definitely improved our SEO ranking on a number of key terms, which was the major objective of the project. The deployment of the site was absolutely flawless, too. They were really hard working, and any issues that arose were resolved quickly. They were absolutely tireless in making sure that our project got delivered when we needed it, despite any issues that came our way. They dealt with it all, and they’re fantastic in that respect.

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

They absolutely seemed to be at top of their game. I know they’re approved partners for WordPress, and I believe that’s quite a specialized thing to be, but these guys were superb. They’ve invited us to various talks that they contribute to, in London, that are organized by WordPress. They have very deep expertise. More importantly, they’re never difficult to get a hold of when we’re in need of their assistance.

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

Sometimes, they wouldn’t always submit their invoices on time, but that’s not a detriment to the client. Other than that, they were completely attentive to our project needs.