Five years of Good Work

Happy birthday, Good Work. The big five!

I don’t know how many times I've read our previous birthday messages in the last few months, but it’s a lot. I love looking back and reading old birthday posts to see the progress we’ve made. This year isn’t just a birthday, but a giant milestone, and we couldn't have done it without the amazing team, clients and partners we've built over the years.

We’re now a team of nine web developers, designers and project managers scattered across the U.S., England, and France, with our home office located in Dallas, Texas. We added a few new faces this year, too. Jake Dohm joins us from North Carolina, and Grant Abston became our newest team member out of Abilene, Texas.

Some of you might know Jake from DotAll, the official Craft CMS Conference, and TriangleJS, a 2,600+ member monthly JavaScript meetup in the Raleigh-Durham area that he co-organized. He's a talented developer and has been a great addition to the team.

Grant joins us as our Client Services Manager and will head up our new office in Abilene, Texas. This is where I started my first web agency in 2007 while at ACU, and I’ve been itching to open an office there ever since. Small Town Revival is real in Texas, and towns like Abilene need local access to the high-quality web services found in big cities like Dallas.

While we’ve experienced new changes, some things have stayed the same. We’ve continued to hone in on our focus and streamline our process around it.

As we have since 2014, we’ve continued to grow our strategic partnerships with design and creative agencies around the world, helping with everything from web development maintenance of existing websites to developing websites and other digital products for their clients. This year we added quite a few to that list, including 214 in NYC and Canales & Co. in Austin.

We’re also working directly with more brands across the U.S., like Applause, DPR Construction, and Heartwork, that use Craft CMS, our preferred content management system.

Since 2012 Craft CMS has rapidly increased in popularity and adoption. Craft’s modern approach to content management, and extreme design flexibility has garnered high praise from both developers and content editors. It offers users an expanding roadmap of modern features and has a thriving community of developers.

We’ve been using Craft CMS since day one, and in the last year have started to fly the Craft flag more publicly than ever. In November we were selected as one of the first official Craft CMS Development Partners. We dusted off the blog and are writing about Craft on the 1st and 15th of every month, and have introduced a once-per-month email with helpful articles and resources for people who manage and make websites in Craft CMS. We’re excited about the future of Craft and are doing our part to grow the platform through our agency partners and direct brands.

We’ve continued to develop and tweak our internal processes to better serve our clients, resulting in an ever-growing ‘Playbook’ for our team. Our Director of Strategy, Ariel, completed the LT10 Digital Project Management Apprenticeship in the Fall, and I’m getting notes like this from clients more often than not:

The day we briefed with Ariel I told our team, ‘we need to be buttoned up like that in our process!’ Since then I’ve been digging through resources trying to find ways to get more legit.

It’s been an amazing five years, to say the least, and I’m looking forward to continuing to slow down, simplify, and get better at what we do every day. A huge thanks to our entire team, clients and partners, we couldn’t have done it without you.