Today, platform upgrades are coming in full versions every 12 to 18 months. How do organizations of any type manage this constantly evolving web world? This is a question that often comes up for many people and it's hard to understand what the value of continually upgrading that can sometimes result in a rewrite of custom functionality is.

If you're marketing or web professional you've been living under a rock if you haven't heard the buzz about "responsive" design. As it buzzes it's away around the internet, design meet-ups, message forums, and web advertisements it's often hard to understand what anything means to it's truest sense. Let's start by understanding what responsive design really is and then help you to understand if it's for you or not.

It doesn’t take long on any project, regardless of genre, to be introduced to scope creep. It is an inherent aspect of IT development. Call it scope creep, requirements creep, call it whatever you want, it is added features or uncontrolled changes that are outside the scope of a project. Scope creep comes about so easily and also, so elusively. A simple discussion about the “what ifs” and before you know it the project scope has expanded beyond the original objectives. The problem with Scope Creep is, as new functionality is added; nothing else gets adjusted, such as funding or schedule. 

Scope creep can be the result of one or several common scenarios.

Regardless of the type of contract you have with your web development firm, we all want the same thing, getting the most for our money. Not surprisingly, Unleashed Technologies wants you to get the most for your money, too. We want you to capitalize on our services.

In this post, I’ll provide several tips on how to capitalize on your web development firm’s expertise, whether that is phone calls, brainstorming website enhancements, or keeping your site current. It all comes down to “billable hours”, right? Regardless of contract type, Time and Materials or Fixed Price, both are based on the number of hours worked or estimated.

Today's keynote presentation was about developing and designing with mobile in mind first. Review of the statistics makes it very clear that we are trending toward an entire generation of people/professionals who will never utilize what we would call the "personal computer". What I found interesting was that the largest area of expected for growth is actually in mobile web as opposed to native applications. Great examples of this are echoed by some of the largest consumer companies in the world, such as Southwest, Facebook, Flickr, Expedia, and many more.

During day two of DrupalCon, I attended several sessions that discussed how Drupal is being leveraged by larger organizations and the challenges that the Drupal community at large faces in enterprise-level adoption. One session in particular, “Competing with Giants: How to Win with Drupal vs. Proprietary Alternatives” by Bryan House, discussed the benefits Drupal delivers to the business/marketing and IT stakeholders of a large organization.

Today I attended a track very focused on eCommerce as Drupal traditionally has not carved out a niche in the eRetail market. I was particularly interested as we are a Magento Silver partner and while we've done some terrific work on the Drupal platform for eCommerce it's not nearly as developed or have the focus to manage large retailers without substantial heavy lifting. First here are some of great examples we were given that I'm going to disect:

The first day of DrupalCon has come to a close and one of the most insightful sessions I attended so far was given by Nicole Lind, entitled, “I’m Leaving You: Risks of Dumping Your Old CMS for Drupal and How to Manage Them.” In this session, Nicole discussed the various challenges encountered in a migration project—such as lack of communication or unclear expectations—and some strategies for overcoming them, including:

The first two days of DrupalCon have really focused on the challenges that service firms and the platform itself are facing as Drupal continues to grow as one of the most dominant CMS products in the world. The key initiatives that have been outlined in order to meet those challenges include:

First, an introduction, my name is Jen Silate and I am the newest member of the Unleashed Technologies team. I am responsible for managing Unleashed Technologies' marketing efforts and this will be my first DrupalCon experience. Since I'm a DrupalCon newbie, while I'm at the conference it's my mission to absorb as much as I can about Drupal and the Drupal community. I'm particularly interested in the case studies that will be presented so that I can more fully understand why organizations choose to move their websites to Drupal, how Drupal improves a business' online presence, and what other benefits it delivers. 

Here are some of the sessions I'm planning to attend: