Growing Venture Solutions - GVS - Small Business

M Squared Group

evelyn — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 21:09:28 +0000

The M Squared Group came to us with a freshly built site that needed some help. Their site was quickly falling out of date and key features that they needed were difficult to add.

Through our support plan, we helped integrate more of the site content into the homepage, provided a method for posting videos to the site, and have generally cleaned up the site to make sure their site runs efficiently. A large part of this engagement has involved educating the M Squared team about the ability of Drupal to empower them to make their own enhancements.

About M Squared Group

M Squared Group provides a variety of marketing services including Segmentation and Targeting and Customer Analysis. Located near Minneapolis, Minnesota they provide services to clients across the United States.

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Denver Spanish House

evelyn — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 20:39:14 +0000

Initial Project: Basic Site And Building Archives

DSH has a limited budget for advertising and had search engine optimization as a major goal. So, the purpose at first was simply to get content online to help build authority for keywords related to the site. This is when the movies, books, music, and wines sections were created. Those sections are now secondary to the main content on the site, but still bring in a fair amount of interested visitors and certainly helped to build search engine ranking for some of the main keywords important to the site.

Visual Pop: Making the Denver Spanish House Theme Fit the Brand

The next step was to really make the site attractive. Since DSH's brand is based on the idea of exploring culture in a rich, comfortable environment the site itself had to be visually attractive. Fortunately, the DSH had a large bank of photos to draw from, a great logo from 2fold Studio, and a few instructions to drive the design. The result is a rounded corner design that keeps the culture front and center in the form of "banners".

The banners at the top of most pages on the site are sliced out of photos taken by the DSH. They rotate randomly so that visitors can enjoy a wide variety of images.

Final Steps - Classes and Information Architecture on the Front Page

After a brainstorming session where we ranked the most important things to communicate to the customers we created a wireframe of the front page: classes at the top, then an "about" block and then Nikki herself, followed by lower priority topics. Some quick work with blocks, views, and panels and all of the site features and old pieces of content are pulled into no more than 1 click from the front page.

Denver Spanish House - Another Satisfied Customer

Nikki, the founder of Denver Spanish House, had this to say about the project:

"I love my website: it's dynamic, functional, and looks great! It's easy for me to add information, which allows me to be in control of my business and gives my clients the most up-to-date information. My website has been a great tool for my business. Not only has it been a great source of marketing but also a complete source of information for my customers. It's clear that Greg was not only concerned with building a great website, but the foundation for a successful business."

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Twomile Information Services

evelyn — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 20:25:43 +0000

Among their services, Twomile Information Services provides a web service which translates addresses to Latitude/Longitude data. In order to use this service with the Drupal content management system, there needed to be a way to store address data and also the Latitude/Longitude data. There are several means to store addresses, but at the time this work was undertaken there was no simple project for Latitude/Longitude. So, the project involved two steps:

Creation of a simple CCK Latitude/Longitude module
Creation of a second module to tie together the CCK Address module, the new CCK Lat/Lon module, and the Twomile address lookup XMLRPC based web service.

The modules have been completed and the service module is currently only in use by beta testers of the service. When the service is more broadly available the module will be published for general use.

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Top Notch Themes

evelyn — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 01:10:24 +0000

Not Your Typical Drupal Support Client

Many support clients are end users of Drupal - they need help with the menu system, and knowing what the heck nodes are.

As the creators of some of the best commercial Drupal themes (and some great free themes as well), TopNotchThemes needs more than basic Drupal support. We've helped them improve their development infrastructure and workflow to make the process of developing great Drupal themes more efficient, and to also enable some upcoming internal and client-facing features. This lets them focus on building great designs for their themes.

Chris Fassnacht was kind enough to say this about working with us:

"GVS has been a valuable addition to our team. It's a relief to have a team of experts we can rely on to keep our Drupal-based infrastructure running smoothly!"

At Drupalcon Steph thanked us with a hug. What more can you ask for from a client?

TopNotchThemes Supports the Drupal Theme Community

In addition to being providers of great themes and a good customer they are also a company that "gets it." Their community involvement speaks for itself (one highlight is this Ubercart theming thread). They are happy to pay for our time knowing that we are working to keep the modules used on their sites well maintained (see Alternative Price and Moneris).

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