Dougal Campbell

For many years, I have been a member of the Clan Campbell Society of North America. This non-profit organization helps maintain historical and genealogical information about the Campbell clan and its various septs, a quarterly Journal, a calendar of events throughout the United States and Canada, and various other benefits. Through a Highland Games event, my family became friends with Randy Seale and his family.

Randy is currently trying to get the CCSNA website updated. For years now, the website and membership services have been manually maintained, and Randy would like to bring the website into modern times with a CMS. He is already familiar with Drupal, and would prefer to use Drupal 7 to create the website (though I did try to sell him on the idea of using WordPress, and he hasn’t completely ruled out that possibility).

Randy already approached one well-known Drupal consultancy (who I will not name here), explained his needs, and told them his budget. They agreed that they could do the project within his budget, and set to work. But then, after billing him for about a quarter of his entire budget for their discovery process, they revised their project estimate to an amount that was about 3-times the original estimate. This has left Randy in a bad position, with a diminished budget and a soft deadline of sometime in April approaching.

I had planned to stand up a WordPress-based demo for him to look over, but I had another job opportunity come up that moved very quickly, and found myself without much spare time to help out. So, I promised I would help Randy find someone suitable to assist him with the new website.

A Few Details

I know that many of my web development colleagues, like myself, are WordPress developers, but because he is already familiar with Drupal, he will probably lean towards someone who can build in Drupal 7.

He can provide the wireframes and other notes that he paid the other consultancy to do, but he’s not married to using them. However, they might provide some useful information and ideas about menu and site structure that could be useful in any case.

He has a set budget, which I believe is reasonable for the project, and would probably provide for roughly 8-10 weeks of work, depending on your usual rates. Without getting too specific, the original consultancy was charging about 2-3 times my usual hourly rate.

Wanted

• A web developer who can work quickly, communicate well, and deliver within budget.
• The site needs an e-commerce portion which can handle merchandise sales, and recurring membership dues. It should also handle multiple/alternate shipping addresses (for gifts, for example).
• A membership CRM which can provide members-only access to some portions of the website, extended member profile information (social media links, membership information, etc.)
• Some simple calendar/event management would probably be useful, as well, to track the dates and locations of various Highland Games and other gatherings.
• Workflow for user-contributed articles.

Notes

Randy is capable of and willing to import the old content into the system on his own, so that isn’t a part of the project you really need to budget for (except that you might want to manually cut-and-paste some initial pages from old site to new, in order to test your layouts and such).

Personally, I think his needs can be met while coming in under his time and budget requirements.

Interested?

Please contact me to let me know if you think you can take this project on. Also, please state whether you would be using Drupal or WordPress, and point me to your portfolio and projects. I will pick the best few candidates and pass their contact information along to Randy.