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Continuous enablement.
Services
Processes
  • Continuous Delivery
Team Leadership
  • Senior Producer
    Kelly Albrecht

On September 1, Haverford relaunched their homepage with some great new features including:

  • Revised site-wide navigation
  • Seriously upgraded search function
  • Enhanced user menu to help users get to resources they need easily
     

Haverford’s in-house communications and development teams executed all of these changes. Last Call Media wants to send them an enthusiastic congratulations on a job well done!

How we did it

This is an enormous success story for Last Call Media. When I saw this, it was the realization of one of the major goals of our project with Haverford, which was to enable them to to build the foundation of a Drupal environment that allows Haverford to leverage a CMS to manage their site, rather than relying on custom templates that can only be updated by the web team.

Back in December of 2014, when LCM got the call from Haverford about redoing their site in Drupal, I thought it was going to be a redesign.

Haverford didn’t need a redesign; their site looked great already. The biggest issue they needed to solve was not having enough time to do new feature development themselves. The recent enhancements in this Homepage overhaul were the results we were hoping for!

Since then, Last Call Media has continued to work with Haverford on an ongoing basis as part of our dedicated Continuous Delivery relationship, where our dedicated team of developers helps to keep their site secure, up-to-date, and assists as needed with anything from strategy to design to development.

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NYSE Euronext.
Services
Processes
  • Agile/Scrum
  • Continuous Delivery
Team Leadership

Providing team augmentation to the New York Stock Exchange

Demonstrated extensive knowledge of Drupal, PHP, MYSQL… contribution to the codebase proved to be complete and accurate… took the initiative to find the root cause of the problems …dependable part of the team… we have been very pleased.

Debnath Mondel, New York Stock Exchange

How we did it

We embedded our expertise into a very large undertaking to assist a variety of needs.

NYSE Euronext needed to migrate from two legacy systems to a single modern content management system with a rebranded, new look and feel. The project was massive and LCM was brought in to round out internal teams with our expertise.

Engagement included working with in-house developers and other development teams to migrate their legacy systems to Drupal sites, as well as to build required new sites, including a custom blogging platform.

NYSE Euronext’s euronext.com website now redirects to the new Drupal sites.

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A Drupal 7 Multi-site Migration to Acquia
Services
Processes
  • Continuous Delivery
Team Leadership

LCM had the deep level of expertise needed to assist USM with a complex migration to Acquia

In preparation for an upgrade from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7, USM was faced with the need to migrate four Drupal sites based on five codebases from an onsite installation to a hosted environment with Acquia. USM was seeking an experienced group of Drupal architects to work hand-in-hand with their iTech team to determine the necessary functional and configuration changes needed to accomplish the migration. USM had a particular interest in leveraging Acquia’s search capabilities.

The University reached out to Last Call Media to drive the high-level technical planning and heavy lifting of a migration to the Acquia Cloud. The University needed a team with platform migration experience to come in and bridge the gap between Acquia and the University’s internal iTech team to ensure that the launch went smoothly. 

Aside from our experience and planning skills, there were several mission critical pieces of the overall infrastructure that needed to be changed to fit within Acquia’s ecosystem. One of these was the site search. USM had previously used a combination of several open source tools to feed data from several different sources into the site’s search engine. While this solution worked well, it was being cut in favor of Acquia Search, powered by Apache Solr. The University brought us in to build a search platform that would be capable of indexing the content of all of the Drupal sites, and searching either independently (within each site’s own content silo), or across the board. Working closely with the iTech team, we planned and executed the search feature within the new infrastructure, including the configuration of environment specific search, so the University team could iterate and test the site search in the development and staging environments before rolling new features to production. 

The final piece of the puzzle was to bring the site’s performance and security up to Acquia’s standards. We worked hard to make the vast majority of the content cacheable by Acquia’s edge layer, and brought iTech and Acquia representatives together to find resolutions for all of the issues surfaced by Acquia’s Insight reporting. At the end of this process, we performed a successful load test across all 4 sites, effectively proving the sites were ready for launch.

As launch day grew closer, we began to focus on the final details. With iTech’s help, we formulated a simple and clear launch checklist that would keep everyone on the same page when it mattered the most. When the final cutover was finished, we had almost no post-launch issues to address.

The work was completed on a timeline that allowed USM to minimize risk by switching to the new site while the University was on break. USM achieved their goal of a smooth migration to Drupal 7 on the Acquia hosting platform with no down time. 

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Upgrading the CAIA Association.
Services
Processes
  • Agile/Scrum
Team Leadership

Time-sensitive reporting was challenged by a lack of exporting and reporting capabilities of the previous web platform, so CAIA was looking at upgrading their existing infrastructure from an outdated, highly customized and modified eCommerce website, to a more robust solution upgraded to the newest version of Drupal.

How we did it

We joined the project to get it across the finish line. We refined the existing agile approach for a better-organized project backlog and a more deliberate iteration strategy.

Our solution included working with in-house developers to migrate and upgrade numerous features and systems to work with the most current major Drupal version. Tailored reporting capabilities were developed, giving real-time statistical and sales figures for their support team and company executives.

 

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Implementing A Digital Media Strategy With Measurable Results
Services
Processes
  • Continuous Delivery
Team Leadership

Challenged to increase enrollment and retention, the University of Southern Mississippi looked to their existing ongoing relationship with Last Call Media for ways to implement a digital media strategy with measurable results. Last Call Media focused on building a new digital platform for the University that focused on increasing engagement with the University’s primary audiences: prospective and current students by implementing fresh designs with improved pathways and navigation. 

We already knew that USM.edu was an aging Drupal 6 site that was slow and difficult to update under the hood, but furthermore, site admins had little to no visibility into the performance of the platform, coupled with limited functionality and almost no reporting tools. Beyond Drupal 6 quickly becoming end-of-life from a development standpoint, USM agreed that from the marketing ROI perspective, it was time to move to Drupal 8. 

Due to Last Call Media’s long-standing working relationship with the University of Southern Mississippi, we were able to break ground quickly. The marketing and IT teams on USM and LCM agreed to work iteratively by first focusing efforts on launching a pilot site on Drupal 8 and prioritizing additional departments and colleges after the initial launch. This allowed the LCM team to formulate a focused yet creative digital strategy that would get into the hands of the USM audiences faster and allow for user feedback to inform future, more complex, development and content needs. Additionally, USM was able to communicate directly with the Acquia Certified Drupal 8 developers and architecture consultants at LCM, to provide expertise on best practices and development techniques. This direct line of communication with our certified team gave USM confidence in their ability to develop the new Drupal 8 platform alongside us. Some Acquia technologies we used on USM.edu are Acquia Cloud, Acquia Cloud Shield, Acquia Cloud Edge, Acquia Search, and Acquia Ready. The Acquia platform allowed USM to maintain a homogenous interface to their new Drupal 8 product and the workflow tools have allowed internal and external developers to collaborate in building new features and has made the quality assurance and release process consistent and seamless.

Since the relaunch of USM.edu on Drupal 8, feedback on campus has been overwhelmingly positive. The community was engaged and involved along the way, so it was a huge moment on campus when the site went live. 

There have even been some tangible technical results that the school benefited from almost immediately. One of the key results the site achieved was a sub-second page load for the homepage, despite using a video in the hero region. To accomplish this, we worked with the USM development team to obsessively reduce and minify front end assets, prefer CSS over images for presentational styling, and to lazy-load large assets not required for the initial pageview. Throughout the process, we tested using a front-end performance benchmarking tool (Phantomas) to keep us on track and efficient.
 

Though the LCM and USM teams were optimistic and bases were seemingly covered, the immediate success or failure of the site, however, rested on its ability to stay up during the initial launch. The University expected up to 85,000 visitors in a day due to our marketing efforts. To meet this goal, we developed and executed a load testing plan, giving the University the confidence and success they expected on launch day. Since its launch, the new USM.edu has been a huge victory and the University continues to see benefits from more in-depth reporting via Acquia, to site admin efficiency, all on a stable and supported Drupal 8 platform. 

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Product discovery through faceted search.
Services
Processes
  • Continuous Delivery
Team Leadership
  • Senior Producer
    Colin Panetta
  • Senior Development
    Tom Fleming

Alan Goldberg provides a lot of resources to a lot of athletes across nearly every sport. There are many different personas who frequent the site, including Coaches and Parents, in addition to the athletes themselves.

After getting the right personas to the right area of the site, faceted searching was one of the solutions Last Call Media implemented to help. Visitors can drill down into the specifics, matching the right user to the right product or resource.

How we did it

We developed a faceted search tool for their catalog to solve the challenge of filtering through the options to get to a specific product. By structuring and categorizing the products and content of this store appropriately in the database, we were able to implement faceted searching functionality, not only for the store, but for other content as well.

Site visitors are able to use this implementation to find the specific content or products that are most relevant to them. This work has, in turn, substantially increased eCommerce conversions.

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Consulting and continuous delivery.
Services
Processes
  • Continuous Delivery
Team Leadership
  • Senior Development
    Tom Fleming

Last Call Media pursues work that we feel good about. We engage institutions in the artistic, education, and nonprofit sectors because we believe in what they do. CreativeGround, a product of the New England Foundation for the Arts (NEFA), was exactly the kind of partner LCM wanted to have, and they just happened to be in the market for a new partner when we met them.

How we did it

CreativeGround is a free online directory of profiles for cultural nonprofits like libraries and theaters, creative businesses like recording studios and design agencies, and artists of all disciplines. They came to LCM looking to escape a pattern that many organizations find themselves in: the design, creation, hosting, and support of their website had been handed off multiple times between different agencies, and some things had been lost in a long game of telephone; they were in a support contract, but didn’t feel supported; they knew they needed to make some big changes to their site, but needed guidance on where to start. They needed a partner that would be both capable and transparent, and help them take their site to the next level.

Understandably, CreativeGround was wary of jumping into another agreement with yet another dev shop, so we started off slow. Through concise communication, thorough support, routine site updates, and honest recommendations over the course of several months, LCM was able to show CreativeGround that it’s possible to have an expert team of developers on their side, with all of their best interests in mind. 
 

LCM migrated the CreativeGround site from an internal host server— which caused a lot of troublesome deployments due to a complex workflow— to Pantheon. This move offers CreativeGround more control over their own site, increased transparency around the work performed on it, and greater ease when it comes to deploying work and performing site updates. Not to mention, it will save them time and money on all fronts!

Last Call Media has continued to assist CreativeGround with site maintenance and feature development since the switch. They remain one of our favorite partners to work with.

Last Call Media has been incredibly attentive to our unique needs as an arts nonprofit. They’ve gone out of their way to do more than just maintain our site. There’s heart to their work!

Nicholas Medvescek, Website Administrator, CreativeGround
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Continuous delivery to the College of Natural Sciences.
Services
Processes
  • Continuous Delivery
Team Leadership
  • Senior Producer
    Kelly Albrecht
  • Senior Architect
    Tom Fleming
  • Senior Development
    Tom Fleming

LCM has been pleased to offer our expertise whenever possible to the UMass College of Natural Sciences. 

It has been a pleasure working with you and the very knowledgeable and competent team at Last Call.

Beth Armour, Web Designer/Production Administrator, Center for Agriculture, College of Natural Sciences

How we did it

We’ve worked alongside the College of Natural Sciences at UMass Amherst on numerous projects. These projects have included the migration of department sites and functionality into Drupal 7, as well as ongoing consulting on and the implementation of new functionality, such as event sharing across all departmental Drupal websites. In addition to Drupal, we’ve assisted with WordPress, Joomla, and even DevOps needs for their internal server infrastructure.

We have used the expertise of the wonderful folks at Last Call for several projects with outstanding results. Last Call has always been attentive to our needs and our budget while not compromising quality.

Beth Armour, Web Designer/Production Administrator, Center for Agriculture, College of Natural Sciences
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Heavy lifting for the new Amherst.edu.
Services
Processes
  • Continuous Delivery
Team Leadership
  • Senior Producer
    Kelly Albrecht

We joined their internal team to provide our expertise.

Amherst College needed expert assistance with some of the heavy lifting as they upgraded their infrastructure from Drupal 6 to version 7. Resource needs were fluctuating as the project was nearing its last stretch of available time. We provided availability that scaled up and down as needed to hit the project’s overall strategic launch date for the college.

How we did it

Our engagement included working with in-house developers to migrate and upgrade numerous features and systems to work with the most current major Drupal version. Highlights of our primary focus on the project included systems handling:

  • Scheduling, registration, and payments for reunion events
  • A dynamic implementation of fundraising forms providing visitors the ability to give in various ways, in different contexts, to several different departments in the college
  • Menus, rating, and reviews for Dining Services
  • Management functionality for various college book clubs
  • The tool used by the area’s five colleges for their students to request and register into courses across the Five College Consortium
  • Payment processing for use by all aspects of the site needing to process payments

Amherst College relaunched a fully functional upgraded Drupal CMS on their online infrastructure.

Thanks for the pieces you guys worked on with that, it was a big help.

David Hamilton, Chief Information Officer, Amherst College
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Getting FITiST fit to startup.
Services
Processes
  • Continuous Delivery
Team Leadership
  • Senior Producer
    Kelly Albrecht

FITiST is a fitness and lifestyle business that sells a single membership valid at all gyms in a city. The database needed to compile a schedule of all FiTiST-affiliated classes, provide tokens for customer registration, and charge a recurring fee for the membership.

How we did it

We developed an eCommerce solution that compiles classes from from FITiST-connected gyms into a member-facing scheduling interface, as well as a recurring token payment system to handle class registration purchases.

FITiST became a success in NYC and soon expanded its operation to LA with plans for five more cities to follow.