Brick by Brick

Earlier this week our partner Lucien Parsons sent us a great TED video  of Renny Gleeson explaining what a great opportunity to communicate 404 pages present.  Watch for yourself.

This quote from the video really resonated with me, and summarized succinctly what we strive for when building web programs for our clients.

"Little things, done right, matter. Well-designed moments build brands.”

Having taken the time in the past to build cool 404 pages for clients, the video also reminded us that we hadn’t done anything special with the 404 page on our own site.  So our CCO Tom McCormick quickly put together this John McEnroe inspired gem. 

For the youngsters out there, here is the video of the famous McEnroe tantrum that served as Tom’s inspiration.

For the past few years here at The Brick Factory, we’ve fully embraced using open source content management systems (CMS) – particularly Drupal and WordPress.  Why?  Put simply: They work.  By using them we don’t have to start from scratch on building a web site and can focus on fine tuning the design and functionality of the site for our clients.  Although the don’t cost money to use like a commercial CMS, they do have costs.

Although we acknowledge these costs, we still believe that Drupal and WordPress are more economical than using a commercial CMS or building something from scratch since these same costs also exist for those options.

Here are some costs associated with Drupal and WordPress:

Creating a design – While there are many themes available for purchase, most organizations and businesses require a design that fully incorporates their existing branding.  This requires the work of graphic designers who can design an interface and then apply it to the CMS.

Configuring functionality – There are plenty of modules for Drupal and plugins for WordPress; they add specific functionality to a CMS.  However, they sometimes malfunction, conflict with other aspects of the site, or are unstable prototype versions.  That’s when it is nice to have some programming know-how on your side, and unless you’re a programmer, you likely have to pay one to help out.

Staying up to date – Open source CMS communities regularly update core CMS code and the associated modules and plugins.  These updates fix bugs, add and enhance functionality, and plug security holes.  Sometimes these updates require minimal effort, but sometimes they break aspects of the site and design.  Thus, programming and design expertise come in very handy sometimes.

Optimizing performance – Depending upon the complexity of a site, it can take some sites longer to load than others.  Sometimes this complexity is not tied to functionality or content, this can involve the configuration of the entire CMS.  There are plenty of caching options for both Drupal and WordPress, but enabling caching can sometimes break functionality on the site.  Thus, it requires attention to fine tune caching.  Further, I have seen plenty of CMS driven sites where the owner – not the developer – piled on modules or plugins but then either didn’t use them or configure them correctly.  An enabled module or plugin doesn’t have to be used, but even if it is not used, it does affect the performance of the site if it is enabled.  Optimizing site performance – through caching and module/plugin management, for instance  – can sometimes take advanced technical knowledge, and unless you have it yourself, you have to pay for that expertise.

Handling the “Oh, Crap!” moments – Recently I made a seemingly very minor configuration change to a module on a client’s Drupal site.  When I hit the save button, I got a blank white screen; the site was down.  It took our systems administrator about 15 minutes researching and working on the database to get the site partially back up.  It took him and a programmer another 45 minutes or so to get the entire back up again.  The process required yanking the module out via ftp and then figuring out how to remove any settings in the database since enabling the module again without clearing the database would take the site down again.

At the beginning of the year, we scrapped a custom time tracking system we had used for years in favor of a service called Harvest.  To be blunt, our custom system was dated and kind of sucked.  Harvest is much easier to use and has much better reporting tools.  The transition to Harvest has been super smooth, and I couldn’t be happier with it.

But that isn’t really what this blog post is about.

One of the best things about working at a company like the Brick Factory is that we have the skills  to build pretty much any web tool we can imagine.  Strangely, this lack of constraints has also been one of our biggest challenges.

Over my ten plus years working at The Bivings Group and now the Brick Factory, we’ve built a lot of proprietary tools.  The previously mentioned timesheet system.  A  Content Management System.  A mass email tool.  A custom search engine. A donation system.   I could go on.

Having started in the web development space in the late 1990s, we built a lot of this stuff because we had to.  There weren’t that many good, cost effective software options so building custom systems for our own use made sense.  We also built stuff because we like to.

But with the maturation of open source systems such as Drupal and WordPress and the rise of the software as a service model, building stuff ourselves started to make less and less sense.  We found that we were wasting time trying to solve problems other people had already solved.  We were also spending a ton of resources maintaining legacy systems that weren’t as a good as new stuff that was released recently.  So around five years ago, we transitioned away from using proprietary tools and embraced open source platforms and cost effective paid software.  We scrapped a lot of the tools we had spent so much time building.  It was hard, but necessary.

This is one of the smartest decisions we ever made.  This approach allows us to recommend the best possible solution for the specific client problem.  It has lead us to develop deep expertise in open source systems such as WordPress and Drupal.

Further, using existing software for most of our work has freed up a good chunk of R&D time.  We have used that extra time to solve problems that other people haven’t figured out yet.  We have built things that truly add value, like our enterprise media monitoring system and our online training platform.

Our philosophy now is to perform custom development as a last resort.  We only do custom builds if we are truly doing something others haven’t done before.

We quietly launched a new version of our Brick Factory website on Monday.  I wrote a post a month or so ago with all the gory details about the redesign, so I won’t rehash all that here.

My favorite part of the site are the bio pages our design team put together.  Like every consulting firm, we have the traditional heads shots and boilerplate biographical information you would expect.  So as to not bore site visitors to tears, Tom McCormick and Freddy Trejo from our design team collaborated on custom illustrations for each employee.  The illustrations appear when you roll over the photos on the bio pages, and provide a peak into the personalities of our employees.  I’m particularly fond of the illustrations they put together for Tom, Steve, Gerry and Teddy.

All the illustrations are compiled into one large graphic below.  Check out our new site and let us know what you think.

Growing up in Texas, country artists Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings and Kris Kristofferson served as the soundtrack of my childhood.  Today, musical legend Willie Nelson, who still maintains a busy touring schedule, turns 79.  To celebrate his birthday and his show at DC’s 9:30 Club next week, we are paying tribute to Willie on our Brick Factory homepage.  Check out our homepage to see an animation featuring Willie’s tour bus, the Honeysuckle Rose.  You can also enjoy a few Willie performances embedded below.

(more…)