Surprise Highway

What were the results of the project?

Additional users can now use the site in a customized way. For example, the faculty can now login to the content management system, update their bio and CV, and upload images around their bio to the website directly. That’s been received in a very positive way. We’ve also developed a series of mini sites. They are templated versions of an ExpressionEngine site on a very small scale that mimic the design of the parent site for the college and allow research units, of which we have several, to create a profile for their activities. That’s been going very well. Another customer for the mini site has been an archive, which is run by the college, but was on a site even older than the one we replaced. The idea that they had a design refresh, functionality and usability that was not afforded by their original site design is a really positive thing.

They also did a password integration project whereby the single password that a campus employee or student or faculty member uses to get into all the campus systems was the same password that they used in order to enter into the CMS for the website. That involved a working relationship with campus IT in order to jump through all the hurdles you have to do in order to have that happen. They did that fairly well.

As far as day to day working relationships, we have a weekly meeting with the team for an hour. We go over a number of projects. We manage the work on a Basecamp site, which is fairly efficient. Everybody is really accessible, and things are happening in a timely manner. To work with a group of programmers that are easy to talk to and collaborate with as the people at Surprise Highway is really rare. There is very little lost in translation between our description and how they would have to program it. It helps make things super efficient. We can’t spend a lot of time explaining things repeatedly or having false starts. It is really valuable.

Was there anything else that you wanted to describe their performance?

Our absolute No. 1 priority was to find somebody who was well versed in ExpressionEngine. They’ve certainly exceeded our expectations with regard to that. I think another thing that was worrisome in the beginning, but ended up having benefits was they were very careful and cautious. We really threw something at them that was designed and programmed by other people and said, “Help us figure out what we have and how it works.” I think, in the beginning, I had some concerns that they approached us in what appeared to be a slightly timid way. I think that has, in the long run, paid some dividends because they really were very thorough and careful in auditing what it is that we had and whether or not it met standards that they would have held themselves to if they were designing it themselves from scratch. Now, I think there is a great deal of trust between us and them.

Looking back on the project, is there any area that you think Surprise Highway could improve on or that you would do differently?

No. [The only thing is that] they’ve never been here. This has been almost exclusively a remote relationship. I had the opportunity to go meet with them in Chicago and introduce myself in person and stuff like that. I think [potential clients of theirs] need to be comfortable working that way. We really couldn’t afford, or in this day and age, felt we needed them to show up. While that is a kind of disadvantage in some ways in terms of a working relationship, it really hasn’t gotten in the way of being able to do a good job.