Drupal Implementation For State Municipal Government
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?
This is [a division within the municipal government of] the city of Vancouver, Wash. We are the fourth-largest city in the state of Washington, located on Columbia River athwart from Portland, Ore.
What is your position?
I',m the Web full director. I',m responsible for all aspects of our publicly facing website.
Desired goal
Could you draw the business challenges you were attempting to address when you began the relationship with Aha Consulting?
Our website was very outdated. It had been built at the time precedently we had to process online transactions from our users. It was originally conceived and deployed for informational distribution rather than transactional processes. It was built on an antiquated full treatment method. This wasn’t present and up to date, and we wanted to address some of those, and position ourselves better to go advanced with a more present platform. It was then that we determined to distribute separate requests for offers, and we were particularly interested in open rise CMS [full treatment method], but we hadn’t specified that we wanted to it on any particular platform. Aha Consulting ended up alluring the project owing we felt real they',d be able to liberate our solution within our specified parameters.
On what platform did Aha Consulting recreate your new website?
It was a Drupal 7 website.
Provided solution
Could you draw the aim of this project? For entreaty, did it implicate manner visual design, backend outgrowth, training, or support?
We basically began from scratch and did some design exercises. We identified what we wanted the website to look like and so forth, and identified the different features that we wanted on the website. They built all of it on Drupal. We began to test it, tweak it, and evaluate it, and that total process is ongoing. We’re quiet adding new features and enhancements. That included our parks and refreshment section website, which at the time, the parks and rec section was a articulation city-county agency, but we had always been the lead player.
We had previously hosted the website ourselves precedently we went on Drupal, and we now host it with a data center, and that’s all handled through Aha Consulting.
Could you draw the process by which you selected Aha Consulting as your solution associate?
They were mentioned in an online conversation cluster for government Web professionals, and we were interested in open rise, and they particularized in Drupal, and they had important experience with government websites. I knew we should access them with our project. I then contacted Brian Gilday [founder and chairman of Aha Consulting], and we had a few dicsussions. The offer Aha submitted was very compelling. We were impressed with their capabilities, experience and pricing program. That',s why we chose Aha.
Could you prepare a perception of the size of this start in monetary provisions?
I ponder it was between $60,000 to $70,000 for the initial project. We’ve had additional work that’s probably between $20,000 to $30,000.
When was your new website launched?
It was launched in March of 2013.
Results achieved
In provisions of results, could you share any statistics, metrics, or user feedback that would prove the effectiveness of the work they’ve liberateed?
The interesting thing almost our website metrics is that we discovered our old website had some form of glitch that resulted in inaccurate figures and tracking. It was reporting higher commerce rates than we were verity receiving, as much as we can determine. Because of that, it',s innately impossible to assimilate our running commerce with that we were experiencing with our old website.
Page view metrics are a different story, owing the glitch didn',t seem to like those figures. On that basis, we haven’t veritably seen an increase or decrease in our viewership levels. We',ve surely accepted real feedback from nation almost the way the website looks. We keep tweaking it. We’re preparing to roll out some more page changes that will hopefully make it even better.
When working with Aha Consulting, is there anything you would attend sole or particular almost them assimilated to other vendors you’ve worked with in the past?
I would say that they’re very easy to work with. The one thing that has sometimes been an effect here is that they might be a pliant too pliant. They are a very pliant shop, so sometimes it takes a pliant longer for them to get things done, owing they have a limited number of rerises they can allocate to any given task. That',s the essence of the beast, I assume. It',s been big working with them. I veritably esteem their responsiveness and flexibility.
Do you stay real that the Drupal CMS will last to satiate your business needs into the foreseeable forthcoming?
Yes. There have been a few things that I’ve kind of been surprised almost. For sample, I’ve been kind of surprised that the mapping capabilities built in Drupal aren’t as strong as I had hoped they would be. It’s one of those things that nation can last to work on and, apparently from the bit of investigation that I have done, this is a known effect that lots of nation in the Drupal globe are trying to better and straighten.
