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The Dice News Network blog had a slated launch date of April 1st, and Oomph was charged with the task of preparing a theme for WordPress VIP as well as performing a data migration with under a week to accomplish these tasks. After an initial consultation on Friday, Oomph started work on this seemingly insurmountable task, and was able to get the site polished and ready for launch on time. Our client was thrilled and had the following to say:
I am very happy with [Wordpress VIP's] recommendation of Oomph. This week, they did what all consultancies should but rarely do: under-promise and over-deliver. Our launch is clearly due to their skill and willingness to work the problem until it’s resolved.
Just another example of the hard work we do at Oomph to ensure that our clients meet their deadlines.
On January 11th, a microsite for Rhode Island Hospital hit the web. The content of the site addresses recent news and concerns about patient safety at the hospital and is meant to deliver the latest news and structural enhancements the hospital is undertaking to address and improve patient safety and quality care.
The design seems relatively straightforward until you learn that it was mocked up, coded and tested within five days. One Friday we were given the brief, and the following Friday we were delivering four coded templates, ready for content.
Last month a momentous site launch occurred at the Oomph headquarters. Jake was able to finally throw the switch and make the new Rhode Island Green Building Council Virtual Green Marketplace live. It was momentous for a few reasons, the first of which is of course the fact that this represents the first major comprehensive listing of LEED™-certified projects and “green” resources in the state.
Though the RIGBC site was developed on the WordPress platform, the first thing you may notice is that is does not have the typical “look” of a WordPress site. Since the site was designed and mapped out first, the CMS platform was chosen after the storyboards were developed. This allowed Oomph to choose the right platform for the job after the details of how the client wanted everything to work were mapped out. The site was developed from scratch, so we were able to make it look anyway the client wanted.
UPDATE: If you found this post worthwhile, check out Matt Asay’s latest post at CNET, “What open source could learn from proprietary platforms”, which includes a reference to our post.
Increasingly, savvy organizations are asking for web solutions built on open source content management systems. We’re all for it: we’ve built solutions on a variety of platforms, including WordPress and Drupal, both open source projects. We’ve even released a few open source plug-ins of our own.
Open source certainly offers benefits, including a transparency that we believe encourages better programming (“the best disinfectant is light”), the removal of the dependence on a single software vendor, and often times, incredibly low cost of ownership. All of that said, as advocates of custom solutions for clients with custom needs, we know that the open source solution isn’t always the right solution.
More importantly, we’ve found that savvy clients and prospects asking for open source are actually getting at something more essential: open platform solutions.
The Council of Public Relations Firms launched the first version of RFP Builder; a web application that guides prospective PR firm clients through the process of selecting the right firm. Our new case study has the details.
Acelero Learning released the new version of their public website. Built on CitySoft Community Enterprise, the site includes a new Head Start Resource Center with self registration, a custom news channel with improved formatting, and a custom jQuery-powered slideshow on the home page that offers all the elegance of Flash without the overhead or maintenance costs.
YAMI-U and the resulting campaign, No LOL in HIV, was featured in an article in the New York Times. We led the web component of this campaign, working closely with the youth advocates and the creative directors, The Watsons.
Since last Wednesday, I’ve been hunkering down at the Hilton Garden Inn in Washington, D.C., leading the web component of Cable Positive’s Youth AIDS Media Institute University (YAMI-U). The purpose of this 7 day program has been to develop and produce a multi-platform social advocacy HIV/AIDS awareness marketing campaign, working with about 20 young adults already active in various HIV/AIDS awareness campaigns.
Over the past week, we developed an overarching campaign theme that individual YAMI-U teams have translated into public service announcements that will be carried nationwide, a series of print ads, an interactive text messaging campaign, and, yes, an engaging and integrated web presence.
Any educator will tell you that the best way to communicate a concept is not just by stating it, but by opening the door for the learner to discover the concept by way of their own experience or reasoning. Science experiments that go on in classrooms across the country are a testament to the importance of knowledge earned through experience, known, in the case of science, as experiments. Learning on the web, often called eLearning, is no different.
The Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a D.C. based think-tank dedicated to advancing educational excellence in U.S. schools, understands this concept as well as anyone. So when they approached us to help them build an interactive study resource and web based game to illustrate some concepts for their “Accountability Illusion” report, we were excited to get started.
