Sometimes it’s not when you see the light, but when you feel the heat that things change. Here’s the saga of Advomatic’s shiny new site, and what makes it 200% great.
When we founded Advomatic on January 1, 2005, word-of-mouth referrals from co-workers at the Dean campaign were already bringing clients to us, so we got the website up in a hurry to accommodate all those great orgs.
We figured out the branding and logo and rushed out a site with general information about us, adopting a generic template from Drupal.org to meet our needs. It was a basic site. It had no “flair.”
Back then, there was just the two of us. When we grew to a team of four in year two, we said to ourselves, “Man, we need to build a new site.” Then we got too many clients and decided we would get to it later.
When we grew to a team of eight in year three, we said to ourselves, “Man, we need to build a new site.” Then we got too many clients and decided we would get to it later.
And then when we doubled again to a team of 16 in year four, we said to ourselves, “Man, we REALLY need to build a new site.” We once again had too many clients, our portfolio was by then old and rusty, the content outdated; and then the inevitable happened: A client rejected our proposal based on the look of our four year-old site.
Though we’d been building beautiful sites for years, they went with a company who had a slicker design. Our friends in the business started making fun of our site. It was clear we could not keep postponing it to later.
So we started plotting.
After 19 design iterations from our in-house design team; after fleshing out the features we wanted to showcase; after almost every person on staff got in on the action, we finally accomplished what we set out to build:
Welcome to Advomatic 2.0, a site built by the hardest working Drupal developers and designers in the business.
Everyone on our team contributed, and all have been extremely patient as I erratically added features and changed things on them constantly. Our team did awesome work. So now I get to brag about it:
- New Design – Amanda Luker and Jack Haas, our in house design team, spent a lot of time updating our look. I’ll let them go into the details about their process, but we have them to thank for our retro-futuristic clean design.
- New Services – We’ve been offering a couple of our services under the radar for a while, but now our new Services section allows everyone to know what we are offering and how much it costs. Check out our two newest services: Drupal Maintenance Plans and the Advomatic Click to Call Advocacy Tool. Also see our detailed hosting services pages.
- New Portfolio – The portfolio has been updated to archive screenshots of our favorite projects, as well as allowing us to explain in far more detail. If you click the images on a portfolio page, a lightbox will pop up with up more details and screenshots.
- Blogging – Blogging about Drupal will now happen on a regular basis. We’ve gotten the Advoteam to write far more often, and we hope to contribute to the discussion on building better sites and running a development shop. We’ll be talking about internet strategy and the nuts and bolts of Drupal programming. Plus, we’ll be cross-posting more case studies to the main Drupal blog at Drupal.org.
- Drupal Information & Drupal Contributions Module – Aaron Winborn, our lead developer, and author of Drupal Multimedia, has built a cool new module that’s useful for any org that contributes back to the Drupal community. The module tracks every user’s Drupal contributions, creates a list of all modules that have been patched or maintained, and keeps a total count of all the patches and modules we contribute to. You can see it in action on our About Drupal page.
- More Features – We won’t let another four years go by without updates, and have plans to keep adding cool features regularly (be ready when we roll out Advomatic 2.1)
I’d like to congratulate our amazing team on a job well done.
And if your organization is considering development of a new Drupal site, needs hosting, security upgrades, a click-to-call advocacy system, a new design, or strategy consulting, please, feel free to drop us a line.