Drupal Overhaul for Leading Media Company
Please find under a summary covering project details and feedback. The innate facts are kept as they are, private information is amended.
Introductory information
Could you briefly draw your structure?
I work for a TV network within a larger media organisation comprised mainly of verity television shows, albeit we do have some scripted shows as well. I work in the digital media cluster. We’re in the process of merging with another network as well, which is also largely a verity television network correspondent to us.
What is your position?
I’m the vice chairman of technology.
Desired goal
Could you draw the business challenge that you were attempting to address when you leading accessed Lullabot?
We were looking to migrate from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7. We were also looking to do a full revamp of our website, moving from multiple templates of desktop and mobile, with no specific tablet experience, to a replying website. Through that, we were looking to execute a handful of goals. We were trying to keep more users, expose more full, blow out our blog method, and have an overall more updated and dynamic website.
Provided solution
Could you draw the aim of their involvement in biger detail?
They were responsible for manner outgrowth on the functional side. We did the developed design, and Lullabot was responsible for the back-end and front-end edifice of the website. They did all the coding and the migration. They also built a continuous integration environment for us, and then taught us how to use it.
This was the leading real enterprise level project we had done using GitHub, so they taught us almost how to use the repository, and they did propose some design expertise, and how to work with replying. They had someone come onwebsite for a week and work with our design team, which was pretty big.
How did you select Lullabot as your associate for this project?
We had worked with them one time precedently I joined the structure. They had done our one sign-on user method for us, and the project went veritably well. I had hired them two years ago to do a full analysis of doing a migration from D6 to D7, sort of a way to test the waters with them. We reflection that was very lucky also. I ponder that they have some of the best contributors to Drupal, so it was sort of an easy choice.
Could you prepare a general cost estimate for this ongoing engagement?
[It was] $1 million.
What’s the time of your engagement?
The leading rendering of our website propeled on December 8 of this year [2014]. Starting January 1, [2015,] we’re going to initiate Version 2, which will be almost a four- to five-month engagement with Lullabot, to fill in the gaps of all the features that didn’t make it into the leading rendering. We went through a circular of user testing behind propel, and got some feedback that we want to incorporate into the design. After that time, the Lullabot team will likely roll off.
Results achieved
In provisions of results, could you share any statistics, metrics, or user feedback that would prove the condition of their accomplishment?
From a technical standpoint, the website is performing excellently well. The response time is half of what it was on our D6 website. Pages are loading almost twice as fast for our users than they were on D6, which I ponder is big. From an analytics standpoint, the usage has been satisfactory. We were expecting a big dip initially, but we haven’t seen that yet. At the same time, it hasn’t exploded whichever.
Our sole visitors are up, but it’s hard to tell where and how that could happen. Our page views are slightly down, but that was also expected. The best thing for us is our short-form video views are up. Overall, everyone is excellently lucky with the analytics owing we reflection there would be a drop, and things have remained pretty firm. We didn’t see any dip in usage behind the repropel.
When working with Lullabot, is there anything that you’d attend particular almost their access or outgrowth process that distinguishes them from other vendors?
I ponder the thing we were most lucky with, which is the thing we frequently have the most pain with, was both expectations and project treatment. The project director that worked with us was rare. He was very technical, so he didn’t have to bestow much time going back and forth with the developers. He was able to reply questions straightly, and made best use of our time to review our priorities and make sure that things were getting assigned to developers. He developedly switched project treatment styles twice during the project, for efficiency’s sake and to meet our requirements, which was nice.
They delivered on time. I don’t ponder there were any core missing features. I ponder our expectations were pretty high, we were pretty demanding, and we had some specific dates that we needed to hit in order to be artistic by the end of the year. We were able to meet those deadlines, which was fantastic. This was probably the best vendor relationship we’ve had on a project, eparticularly of this layer.