By Corey Smith July 24, 2014
Valerie Peterson is President and Corey Smith is Founder and Chief Vision Officer at Tribute Media, a web design and marketing agency, and Pantheon Partner. Tribute Media offers web design, search engine optimization (SEO), email marketing, pay-per-click (PPC), social media marketing and online reputation management to help their clients succeed on the web.
Best Way To Hail A Cab In Southern California?
(HINT: Devices work better than limbs.)
When Yellow Cab—the premier taxi service in Southern California—asked us to build them a cool new website, we needed to do more than simply give them a better design. We needed to make them competitive in a tough industry.
Booking a cab in Southern California has more to do with your standing in Google than with where your customers stand in the street. Most people book cabs from their mobile phones. And the taxicab industry is very competitive. All the companies play hardball in search and social media.
SEO & Mobile Needed. Dispatch Developers Immediately.
Yellow Cab’s former site was pretty old-school. With link stuffing, hidden content, and bad URLs, the site wasn’t set up to support a strong SEO strategy. It also wasn’t mobile-ready in any way, shape, or form.
What We Built: A Responsive, SEO Friendly Drupal Website
In 8 weeks, we built a brand-new design that was both responsive and mobile-ready. The site was a screaming success. Here’s what our clients love best about their new website:
1. Integrates with Yellow Cab’s booking system. Customers can book cabs directly from their mobile devices.
2. Uses Drupal content types specifically designed for SEO. Staff in 51 cities can build landing pages through the Drupal CMS, and tag them to various regions. For example, if they write 100 posts tagged for various cities, each post also appears on the appropriate city page.
Why This Was The First of 350 Client Sites We're Moving From Multisite To Pantheon.
We’ve built and managed more than 350 client websites in our Aegir-based dev environment on Drupal multi-site. Yellow Cab was the first website we built on Pantheon One for Agencies.
Pantheon’s different file structure requirement meant we had a learning curve to figure out which files went where. But even though this project required more time upfront, we knew it would be worth it to transition all our other sites over to Pantheon One for Agencies.
Here’s why:
1. LIGHTNING-FAST SITE. The moment we got everything optimized, the site performed at unbelievable speeds. Before Pantheon, we didn’t always know what was causing slowdowns. Pantheon’s Launch Check dashboard shows us instantly whether a site is adhering to best practices. We can look at the dashboard and realize, “Wow, there are 12 things we’re doing wrong!” Fix them, and voila! Lightning-fast site.
2. SCALE WITHOUT A CRYSTAL BALL. When we managed hosting ourselves, we always struggled to find the balance between making servers big enough to be effective, but small enough to be cost-effective. Plus, we were always managing Drupal extensions and modules, setting up Apache, etc. Sometimes Drupal multi-site would take a performance hit, and we’d need to become server people. Does it need more hardware, different software, both? We’re not server people. It wasn’t fun. You really don’t have all the tools you need to do accurate analysis, alerting, and loads.
3. GUESSWORK-FREE BILLING. Billing was complicated before. We’d tell clients, “You pay this much, and we’ll pay this much.” We weren’t able to leverage hosting as a revenue stream because we weren’t able to get a handle on that question very well. As a business, hosting was just a way to maintain the relationship—not a way to make money. Hosting is no longer an expense to divvy up and pass on to each customer based on how much they need. Pantheon makes it easy for us to manage all 350 client sites with transparent billing. It’s potentially unlocked a new revenue stream for us as well.
4. CLIENTS CAN GET UNPRECEDENTED ACCESS. Before, no one had access to their websites because we restricted it. We had to. We couldn’t give a client FTP access without giving them access to the whole ball of wax—all 350 sites. When we had a customer who needed FTP, we would use a third-party hosting environment that allowed us to restrict accounts, which made managing those sites even more difficult. Pantheon allows us to give clients and developers levels of access they never had before.
5. EASY TO MAINTAIN. The Yellow Cab site is super easy to maintain. After seeing its performance, the group managing the site asked us to move their other sites over to Pantheon, too.
Agency-To-Agency Advice: Are You Too Big To Migrate, Or Too Big Not To?
Speaking from one agency to another, if you manage hundreds of sites, it can be daunting to think of migrating them all to a new system. When a problem arises in migration, the steps required to solve them can be prohibitive. It may mean big changes to your systems. But our experience launching Yellow Cab proved to us the value of the Pantheon Platform. It wasn’t that we were too big to migrate. We were too big not to. The cost isn’t that much more. Once we saw how much better our client’s website was running on Pantheon, we realized we should have been charging our clients more for quality hosting all along.
We’ll post another update after we’ve finished the migration. We already feel more streamlined, and we’ve only just begun.
Topics: Education
