A Look Under the Hood: Our Mobile Statistics

I’m not breaking any news here when I tell you that mobile is exploding.  Smart phone sales have overtaken sales of PCs.  There are nearly a billion smartphones worldwide.  10% of all web traffic now comes form mobile devices.

This is all important stuff for us to follow. ...

Drupal and WordPress aren’t Free

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. ...

Why we custom build things only as a last resort

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,...

Seven Ways to Prevent Human Error in Your Web Program

At last week’s Campaign Tech Conference, I participated in a panel entitled “If it crashes, they can’t come: Planning uptime in politics.”  During the panel, we discussed a lot of ways to minimize downtime from a technical perspective.  Choosing the right host provider.  Optimizing your site to improve performance.  Using CDNs to protect server resources....

Does your site need a Content Delivery Network?

Everyone wants their website to be popular. You want to get your idea or product out there and the internet is a great way to do that. After a while of things going smoothly you start to get complaints – the website is slow, people in Europe are having a hard time downloading files,...