Interview with Glenn Hilton, President and Founder of ImageX Media.
What does ImageX Media do and how do you work with Drupal?
ImageX Media is a full service Drupal shop specializing in custom design and development. Many of our present clients have found it challenging to locate a firm that understands their unique design needs and also has the skill to tackle sophisticated development projects. In the past, some have chosen to work with two different shops in order to get what they’re looking for. However, with a full time designer, creative director and information architect, we’re well equipped to handle our client’s design, site structure and usability needs. Additionally, we have a team of seasoned Drupal themers and developers who can handle pretty much anything our clients throw at them. We feel that we can offer the best of both worlds under one roof. But truthfully we don’t all share the same roof. While we’re based in Vancouver, approximately half of our team is virtual and works from as far away as Los Angeles and Cleveland.
Since 2005 all of our sites have been created with Drupal and it has become a big part of our firm’s identity. Drupal has influenced our business direction, approach to design and thoughts about open source. Due to the number of organizations looking for Drupal services it has also opened up opportunities for us to work with clients around the globe, which we really enjoy.
At this point we really don’t have a specific market niche that we work within. We’re mostly concerned about the client relationship being the right fit and the project’s technical requirements working well with Drupal. Luckily the system is flexible so it is rare that we turn down a project based on technical requirements alone. If we had to peg ourselves we’d probably say that most of our projects fall into five main industries. We’ve worked a lot within Education (ASU, UC Berkeley, UC San Franscisco, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology), Media Publishing (CreativePro.com, CommonCraft.com, The Discovery Educators Network), Non-profits (US Catholic, BCLI, Global Oneness), Corporations (Power Integrations, Terminal Forest) and Social Networks (FreshBrain, Fantasy Sports Matrix). Working with various industries had helped us to develop a well rounded portfolio and the variety always keeps things interesting and enables us to bring a broad range of experience to our projects.
What does Phase2 do and how do you work with Drupal?
Phase2 is a web application development and consulting firm. We build large scale web solutions and sites and manage them for our clients, primarily in Drupal, which we have been using since 2005.
What type of websites do you specialize in?
Our work is primarily focused on these verticals: non-profits and associations, online publishing, real estate and international development organizations. Generally, we gravitate to larger projects with interesting technical problems to solve or a large amount of data to play with.
What does your shop do and how do you work with Drupal?
Four Kitchens works almost exclusively with Drupal to build large-scale, community- and publishing-oriented websites. Our in-house staff can handle any task, including designing the look and feel, implementing the theme, developing custom modules, streamlining content workflow, and optimizing sites to improve performance and scalability.
How did you first get involved in Drupal development?
Our first Drupal site was That Other Paper, an Austin-area online publication we founded and operated from 2006-2008. Only two weeks before its launch on the MediaWiki platform in November, 2006, Four Kitchens co-founder David Strauss discovered Drupal and immediately realized its potential. We halted all development on the site and completely rebuilt it on Drupal 4.7.2 in less than three weeks.
Those three weeks were the ultimate crash-course in Drupal design and development. From that moment forward, almost all of our projects and client work were built using Drupal.
What does Tree House do and how do you work with Drupal?
Tree House Agency does custom development and theming of large, high-traffic websites; the largest portion of our portfolio lies in the media space. Drupal is our platform of choice for most of these projects, due to its incredible flexibility and suitability for sites with complex content and user interaction requirements.
Two particular areas of specialization for us are scaling Drupal for high-volume site traffic, and custom theming. With regard to scaling, we have found that Drupal offers a wide variety of tools for optimization, as well as the ability to make more advanced performance enhancements when needed. Drupal’s theming system allows a very high degree of customization without interfering with the functional code of Drupal core and contributed modules.
How did you first get involved in Drupal development?
Believe it or not, our first involvement with Drupal was working on what was at the time one of the largest Drupal sites – myLifetime.com. Coming mainly from a front-end and multimedia specialty, we naturally graviated towards theming and quickly became one of the few shops that could do it to meet the highly customized requirements of our enterprise-level media clients.
Since then we have evolved our team and Drupal-related services to include high-end development and archtiecture, as well as scaling and optimization best practices. We’ve found that for the majority of our clients, Drupal is an excellent fit for their content and community management needs.
What does DPCI do and how do you work with Drupal?
DPCI is an interactive technology agency that delivers integrated Web content management, digital asset management, multi-channel publishing and semantic technology solutions for organizations that need to publish content to Web, print, mobile and e-reader devices. DPCI has chosen Drupal as the best-of-breed open-source Web content management platform to implement for its customers.
How did you first get involved in Drupal development?
Each year DPCI conducts and internal research and development effort to look at emerging technologies to benchmark and compare them to existing platforms. In 2007 we conducted an exhaustive study of Web content management systems, both open-source and proprietary. Drupal rated highly not only in architecture and feature set, but also in the vision that Dries Buytaert set for the community and the product’s direction. At that point we began implementing the technology for our customers, and we’ve never looked back!