Strowberry Code

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

We actually have two affiliated entities - an NGO working for the sustainable development of rural Northern Albania, and an associated small business to function as an umbrella for small rural producers working in tourism and/or agriculture.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Strowberry Code?

Strowberry first did a major redesign of our tourism website: JourneytoValbona.com. Lately they have added a major new interactive section to the NGO's website, toka-albania.org. In the upcoming months we will again redesign JtoV.com, to include a greater region and more activism messages.

What were your goals for this project?

The old JtoV website had started as an informal wordpress blog, and grown over 10 years to the major tourism information site for Northern Albania - it was a MESS. Strowberry adapted the whole site to be much cleaner, professional, functional, and to encompass representing many different businesses. For the NGO site, the quarantine situation drove us to convert a conventional workshop training into a bi-lingual online presentation of a large body of information regarding sustainable tourism and agriculture, with a q&a, responsive platform.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

Strowberry was recommended by a respected tourism agency we had worked with for some years, so we trusted the professional recommendation. In addition, the founder is actually from this region, so he also has invaluable local understanding.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

I actually don't want to go into painful detail about designing a website - but I can say that Strowberry was happy to work around all of our disorganization, and inability to stick to deadlines.

What was the team composition?

We always dealt directly with Emmanual Malaj, and didn't know - or need to know - who else he may have been involving.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any information that demonstrates the impact that this project has had on your business?

The JourneytoValbona re-design has completely changed and improved the function of our tourism activities - allowing us to generate income for the first time ever - until this, we gave the information as a free service, because it was needed, but as the demand grew it became unsustainable.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

Everything was managed via direct and personal contact and it was wonderful.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

The most remarkable thing about Strowberry is their passion for doing good work, even to the length of putting the quality of the work before their own interest or profit. When you ask Strowberry to do something unreasonable, or extra, they seem to actually enjoy the challenge, rather than quite reasonably telling you that 'we never talked about that before' and cheerfully get on with it.

Are there any areas for improvement?

I honestly can't think of anything.