By April 02, 2014
Mike Pirog co-founded Kalamuna, an Oakland, CA web agency focused on empowering organizations and individuals with easy-to-use websites and products. In addition to building great websites, Kalamuna is also building a team of rule-breakers who want to change the way web development is done.
Drupal for the few?
While Squarespace and WordPress allow you to spin up a reasonably functional website in just a few clicks, Drupal isn’t so easy. If you want to see a website, you’ll need to hire an agency like ours to do some prototyping. This extra step gives Drupal a pretty big barrier to entry. There are only so many Drupal developers to go around. At Kalamuna, we believe Drupal’s destiny lies in lowering this barrier to entry and empowering newcomers. That’s what we try to do.
We build products simple enough for anyone, powerful enough for Drupal pros
Most Drupal products are designed to give other developers a kickstart. At Kalamuna, we believe Drupal products should grow the community. We build fully-baked products simple enough for anyone to use right out of the box, but powerful enough for us to use internally.
You can download Kalabox and set up a modern web server with Drupal power tools and a native Linux machine. Users don’t even need to know what Linux means. Just click the button, and it works.
We’ve been using Pantheon to build products like these, as well as to build and manage our clients’ websites.
Spinning up sites with Pantheon One
For example, building turnkey distributions is one of our areas of expertise. We’ve been using Pantheon One to allow clients like Arizona State University to easily spin up similar-use-case sites. ASU WebSpark is a quick and easy way to spin up an ASU-branded Drupal site. WebSpark sites are responsive and mobile-ready out-of-the-box, featuring a number of style options and tools to make layout and content creation a breeze.
We’re already using Pantheon One to allow clients to scale their website development efforts. Now Pantheon One for Agencies allows us to scale our own client service as well.
Here’s how we used to do things before automation saved the day:
Before automation:
1. MINOR UPDATES REQUIRED EXCESSIVE FORCE
For most of our support clients, keeping websites up-to-date used to mean going into each website, one by one. This required a reasonably competent developer, and took 1-2 hours. As you can imagine, good developers would rather be doing other things. Worst-case scenario, something breaks. The update pathways don’t work. Then you’re looking at 10, 20, even 30 hours. It doesn’t make any sense to have a good developer go in and click a button.
2. 2-HOUR FIX. MULTIPLY BY 20 SITES.
In the past, I’ve spent 1-2 hours fixing something on one client’s site, then having to repeat the process all over again for every other client site. If you do this for 20 sites, that’s up to 40 hours for one simple fix.
3. SPINNING UP NEW SITES TOOK TOO LONG, EVEN WITH A DISTRIBUTION.
Before, we would instantiate a Panopoly project and connect to our feature server, which involved 2-4 hours of setup time. Cash-strapped clients can’t afford to pay us to do that.
4. SUPPORT WAS PRETTY GOOD, NOT “OMG!!!”
Clients need two kinds of support. Updates to make them feel safe, and emergency fixes: “I’ve lost my mind, and need to have this fixed right away!” For our most basic support offering, we used to spend the vast majority of our time making clients feel safe with system and security updates. That’s fine, but it’s not going to make them fall out of their chairs with gratitude and excitement. We want to focus our support hours on things clients can see and touch, not on things with less perceived value, like security updates.
After Pantheon One for Agencies:
After a couple weeks of daily use, we decided to move all our clients (about 30 sites) and people over to Pantheon One for Agencies. Standardizing on Pantheon allows us to give clients ridiculously awesome support, without chaining good developers to their desks.
Here’s how:
1. STANDARDIZING = FASTER TIME TO MARKET
We’re saving about 2 hours on each initial project spinup, thanks to the starter kit we can keep on Pantheon. Our common codebase applies to 95% of our sites, and includes lots of apps. The more we refine, the more we save and can do awesome things. We use Panopoly and extend that with Kalatheme, another easy-to-use and powerful Kalaproduct. We save tons of money on these normal tasks, so we can focus on that extra little piece that makes a project different and special. The savings will increase as we build it out.
The workflow is nice. You can instantiate our Kalamuna base distribution, a Panopoly subdistro and burgeoning Drupal.org distribution called HotSauce! Then you go through the install profile, clicking the features and the theme you want to have. That saves time later in the project. It also allows us to do instant prototyping for clients, turning high-level specs into a prototype within 3-4 hours. More importantly, anyone at Kalamuna can do this--not just our developers. That’s a huge value add.
2. OMG! SUPPORT, NO ADVANCED DEVELOPERS NEEDED
This one-click update functionality make our lower-level support 50% more efficient than before. One person can support 20 clients now, instead of just 10. Many tickets concern common problems that are shared by clients on our base distribution.
Whenever we see a support request that’s an auto-update, it gets kicked to one of the five people who didn’t used to do that sort of thing. People who don’t have solid levels of technical competence can go in and click the button. It’s really fast. If it fails, they tag it for escalation to an actual developer. It really makes the workflow better and more efficient, presenting huge savings for us. Because our lower support is so efficient, we’re now able to quickly resolve the support tickets that matter most to our clients on a day-to-day basis. We’re resolving these mid- to higher-level tickets 15% faster.
3. UPDATE TO THE 10TH POWER
Because we’re standardized on the Pantheon platform, a fix for one client often improves the other clients’ websites, too. As we make improvements to the base starter kit, everyone benefits.
4. FREES UP OUR DEVELOPERS
I think the biggest value isn’t in how much time we’re saving, but in whose time we’re saving. Now we can send out an email to anyone who’s available to do a one-click update. This frees up our mid-level and advanced developers to focus on problems that make more sense to them. Not only does this make our team happier, but it also gives us a pathway to bring in other junior people, so they can get a feel for Drupal. Even project managers can step in.
ADVICE TO OTHER AGENCIES
If you care about doing great work, then you also care about saving money on repeatable things. Good clients hate inefficiencies just as much as we do. Standardizing saves you money so you can focus on things that make your work great. That’s the most valuable thing about Pantheon One for Agencies.
Topics: Education
