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Website Development and Hosting Services:OlympicPeninsula.org

[email protected] 206-577-0540 100 W Harrison St N460Seattle, WA 98119

Table of ContentsOlympic Peninsula Proposed Enhancements..............................................................................2

a. Site upgrade, with full mobile experience built-in.............................................................2b. “Magazine” articles............................................................................................................3c. Migrate WordPress Content................................................................................................4d. Social Media/Comments/Sharing.......................................................................................4e. Destinations as groups........................................................................................................4f. Admin tours for destination staff built into site...................................................................4g. Change color palette per destination, per specific article...................................................4h. Things to do near me..........................................................................................................5i. Downloadable Travel Guides..............................................................................................5j. Itineraries.............................................................................................................................5k. Rich Search.........................................................................................................................6l. Direct site sponsorship by lodging, activities......................................................................6m. Make site “cinematic” and flow/animate from page to page.............................................7n. “Vision Plan” for deeper insights.......................................................................................7

Why Drupal 8..............................................................................................................................8Drupal vs WordPress..............................................................................................................8Drupal vs Angular/new front end technologies......................................................................9

Olympic Peninsula Objectives and Concerns...........................................................................10Why Freelock............................................................................................................................10Proposal Requirements..............................................................................................................10

1. Name, address, email and telephone number of the firm.................................................102. Description of the firm (corporation, partnership, etc.) and year established..................103. State of incorporation, if any, and type of ownership.......................................................104. Name(s) of all partner(s), principal(s) and/or owner(s) of the firm..................................105. Names and bios of the key staff that will be managing and implementing the contract.. 106. Name, title, email and business address of person responsible for submitting this proposal................................................................................................................................117. Listing of proposed subcontractors, if any, and the scope of work they will perform......118. A Creative Overview – What are you proposing and how will you accomplish it...........119. An estimate of time required to complete the project and a proposed timeline of work tasks, with the date of final completion of the project..........................................................1110. A budget breakdown of the project, including the firm’s base rates, fees and charges for services, by phase and for total project, and a proposed payment schedule.........................1111. At least three (3) references of other destinations and work samples including individual contact name, name of company, email and phone number................................11

Olympic Peninsula Proposed EnhancementsThe OlympicPeninsula.org site was built 8 years ago. When it first released, it was a very successful, innovative, exciting website for visitors and partners alike.

Times have changed, and the web as we know it is entirely different today than it was 8

Prepared by: Freelock, LLC 11/21/17

years ago. In 2009, the standard website was built for a 1024x768 desktop screen – today it has to look great from much smaller mobile screens to high-definition 1080p displays. In 2009, there were applications like Gmail that ran in browsers, but the state of the art in use on promotional sites were built in Flash, or were relatively simple slideshow carousels – today sites embed video that auto-plays when you scroll to certain parts of a page, can get the location of a visitor, and can flow from content to content without a noticeable change of the page.

At Freelock, we see huge value in your current site – you have a lot of data already there, and with some fresh enhancements, the site can be relatively easily updated to the state-of-the art in content management, leaving a lot of budget available to really add some “Wow” factor to the mix and get people excited about visiting the Olympic Peninsula.

So here are the improvements we propose doing on the site to make it visually stunning, engaging, and alive with fresh content for the next decade!

a. Site upgrade, with full mobile experience built-inFirst off, we still think Drupal is the best platform out there – but you’re currently on a version that released a few months after the very first iPhone, well before the 2nd generation iPhone.

When we trained your destination partners to use the site that first year, it was as easy to use as Facebook was at the time, and most of your partners agreed.

Since then, Facebook has improved dramatically – but so has Drupal. Drupal has had not one, but two major releases since Drupal 6, and a lot of usability improvements have gone into Drupal 8 (which is nearing 2 years old).

Drupal 8 was born in the Smartphone era, but it also is forward-looking enough to support all the modern front-end enhancements.

What’s more, we’ve already upgraded your site from Drupal 6 to Drupal 8, and just have a few polishing touches to make it ready to launch! We will be presenting the upgraded version at the proposal presentation, if you select us – but in the meantime you can view it at http://d8.olympicpeninsula.etna.freelock.net. (When asked for a password, use username “olympic”, password “peninsula”).

The mobile experience is pretty decent, essentially out of the box. So before we even get going on much of the budget, you have a new, attractive, greatly-improved upgrade of your current site, and you can retire the kludgy mobile app.

Which leaves most of the budget for the exciting new stuff.


http://d8.olympicpeninsula.etna.freelock.net/

Current layout of Drupal 8 home page is above, with lots of opportunity for refinement.

b. “Magazine” articlesFrom the RFP:

Our current site reflects a Partner-focused presentation; it presents lists of attractions, lodging, and events specific to each Partner community. However, we feel it is time now to recast our presentation as less of a collection of database entries, and more of a magazine – inspiring, informing, and assisting visitors at any stage of their planning and visiting process.

This is a really great direction to go – changing the user experience on the site from a “partner-oriented” experience to a “user-oriented” experience. We think that making “Things to do” very prominent, and having engaging articles that suggest activities could really help drive excitement about the peninsula, and increase both site and physical visits.


The problem is, generating rich articles that look great across the spectrum of devices from mobile to wide screen can be very challenging, and usually involves enlisting developers to do it right.

Drupal has come up with a great solution for this, with functionality called “Paragraphs”. A Drupal Paragraph is a section of content with a particular template, which can be easily filled in by writers and editors with no developer expertise. So creating a “magazine” style article would consist of adding a title, setting the tags for the article, and then addinga section for each part of the story.

We typically provide several different “paragraph” or section types:

• Full width media (image or video)

• Full width text

• Media and text (media floated to the left or right of the text)

• Gallery (image thumbnails that can be viewed as a slideshow in a lightbox)

• Background strips (pick a color or background image as a strip of the story)

This system is very flexible, and can go much further, though we tend to limit the choices(especially at first) so that admins and authors don’t get overwhelmed. It’s possible to addother elements like:

• Tabbed sections (“what you need to know” with tabs that reveal different information when the user clicks/taps – possibly “best time of year”, “what you need to bring”, “expected weather range on the selected date”)

• Signup forms

• Related content

Paragraphs has become our go-to toolkit for authoring pages that break up the layout. We provide the templates, you fill in with content, and you’re off and running.

c. Migrate WordPress ContentThe existing WordPress blog content should be migrated into the Drupal site, each one with appropriate tags allowing the content to be grouped together.

We have tools that make this process a snap – each blog will take 2 – 3 hours, assuming the blogs have not been extensively customized.

d. Social Media/Comments/SharingSocial Media is everywhere these days, and needs to be far better represented on the site. The basics are providing social sharing links on articles, activities, lodging, etc; and providing “follow” and “like” links to the OPTC’s social media accounts.

Posts from your most active social media accounts should be listed on the site, encouraging people to interact with you there.

I would recommend opening up comments (as long as you can identify/enlist moderators


to make sure they stay civil, spam-free, and on topic) and possibly adding a chat room.

In general, we see social media as a bunch of different channels to drive traffic to your main site.

e. Destinations as groupsIn the current site, each partner/destination had a single user account to manage content. Our guess is that the login information for each partner was hard to manage, and somewhat limited.

We would propose giving each partner their own “Group,” with a Group Administrator who can approve any other account to manage content for the group. This actually makes it far easier to handle things like password resets, or getting partners the access they need when they lose it.

f. Admin tours for destination staff built into siteFor the Drupal 6 site, we conducted a training session in Port Angeles. We are happy to do something like this again, but we are proposing to build the tutorials and a tour right into the website for the tasks your destination partners need to do.

The tour will show pop-up tooltips that guide a new user step-by-step through the tasks they need to accomplish: updating a destination landing page, updating their header image, adding or editing calendar events, articles, lodging, things to do.

Users who have been granted a destination staff role will see the tour the first time they log in.

We would augment this with a short orientation video to provide an overview of the things they can post on the site.

g. Change color palette per destination, per specific articleThis would be an optional enhancement. Because the various destinations are mostly geographically contained, it does make some sense to preserve the destination “flavor” for content that each destination manages. We could allow each destination “group” to specify its own color palette for the background, text, headers, and links. Then content from each destination could use that scheme wherever it appears.

This would provide a visual cue for regular visitors that might hint at where a new “thing to do” is geographically related, but it could also make the site a visual jumble.

If this is desirable, I would recommend coming up with a color scheme for each destination and making sure they all look attractive together, and lock it down.

If we create a dozen or so “palettes”, this could also be used for the magazine pages, allowing for more variety of colors on the site.

In general, we would think the way this would be most useful would be for matching colors in your stunning photography to make it more “magazine-like”.

h. Things to do near meWe see real value in the “existing Drupal database” of events and lodging, and think that “Things to do” should be front-and-center for a destination like the Olympic Peninsula. The crucial missing bit is “near me.” The site should ask for the user’s location


(particularly if they are on mobile) and show nearby events and activities.

For visitors who are not currently on the Peninsula, they should be able to set a location (and possibly a date) where they plan to be, and get a list of nearby things to do/events and lodging.

With this database, and some locations/dates stored for a user, it would not be difficult to add “trip planner” functionality to the site.

As part of this, we plan to greatly enhance the Lodging, Event, and Activity pages. For example, here’s an example Lodging page from VisitSanJuan: https://www.visitsanjuans.com/members/discovery-inn.

This lodging page shows that the Discovery Inn is a “supporting member” (e.g. they are providing sponsorship directly to VisitSanJuan), has a list of amenities in addition to the map, has their own photo gallery, and a “Specials” box. We would recommend having thebasic listings included for free for all accommodations, and then have sponsorship tiers available that allow accommodations to upload photos, update their descriptions, and add specials.

i. Downloadable Travel GuidesThere are a number of travel guides in PDF format buried in pages on the site. We plan to expose these on a trip planner page like https://visitidaho.org/explore-idaho/maps-and-publications/ and expose them in a far more visual way.

j. ItinerariesThe old site had a “backpack” feature that allowed site visitors to build their own itinerary, and share these with others via a URL. Comments were explicitly disallowed, and currently the presentation of these is quite plain, text-only.

While these have not been extensively used recently, there are quite a few in there, and we think this might be a ripe opportunity for more site engagement, particularly hooking up social media. A possible user scenario:

1. User logs in with Facebook and creates a new itinerary for an upcoming trip.

2. She adds the date she plans to be in Port Townsend, and sees a list of things to do in Port Townsend, along with nearby events on that date.

3. She adds a brief introduction of what her trip is about.

4. She picks 2 activities and an event to add to her itinerary

5. She adds the date she plans to be in Olympic National Park, and sees a list of things to do in the park.

6. She picks 1 activity

7. The itinerary is shown to her with photos associated with the event, an instagram feed of pictures with related hash tags, and a link to “share on facebook”

8. When other users follow the sharing link, they see the activities and events, but not specific dates or locations.


https://visitidaho.org/explore-idaho/maps-and-publications/

https://visitidaho.org/explore-idaho/maps-and-publications/

https://www.visitsanjuans.com/members/discovery-inn

The main improvements we see doing here is allowing more personalization to the itinerary, incorporating a lot more photography into the itinerary, and much more integration with social media. We also see allowing users to edit/update their itineraries after the fact, and perhaps even sending reminders each day of the planned activities (along with encouragement to share their pictures after the event).

This will take experimentation, and some interaction with OPTC and/or partner staff, but could really drive engagement that could greatly expand the overall reach of the site.

k. Rich SearchWe highly recommend adding a stronger search engine that supports auto-complete and fuzzy searching. For any Washington-based location, spelling of place names can be a huge problem! We would recommend the “Solr” search engine, with some location-baseddata used to make “related activities” show things within 20 miles.

We also suggest that if a user does a search, we present “facets” that let them pick distance (with a note about driving vs aerial distance), type of content (lodging, things to do, events), type of activity, dates.

l. Direct site sponsorship by lodging, activitiesThe RFP mentions an interest in considering advertising. The VisitSanJuans.com site (built in Drupal 7) is primarily funded by advertising, from tourism activities and lodging.

These are in the form of small graphical ads that appear alongside “what to do” and “where to stay” listings.

Like the OPTC, this site is partially funded by taxes, but much of their funding comes from direct sponsorship. Having relevant, unobtrusive, clearly-marked advertising alongside directory listings can make the site more sustainable, and make more budget available that might help fund staff to do more social media management, engage with site visitors, get them excited about itineraries, and drive more visitors to the peninsula.

We think this is kind of a “no-brainer” thing to do – it will not take very much budget to implement, and would facilitate making people available for more engagement, better editorial content, and more site improvements.

m. Make site “cinematic” and flow/animate from page to pageThe web is continuing to change. In the past two years, web browsers have developed a whole bunch of new tricks that sites are just beginning to take advantage of. One interesting capability allows us to “flow” from page to page without appearing to leave the page. We plan to have a demo example of this functionality to present in person, should we get invited.

It is still early days in this “next generation” of the web, but we’re finding Drupal 8 to be a fantastic platform for building this out – you have all the current tools for managing content easily, while having the latest data interface to support seamless custom animations from page to page. This type of addition is currently expensive to do, because each animation needs to get planned out and coded – but the result is spectacular, and might draw attention to the site from whole new audiences.

n. “Vision Plan” for deeper insightsFinally, at Freelock we think the ongoing operation of a site is far more important than


https://www.visitsanjuans.com/

the single day when a new site is launched. Any site we develop we build for the long haul, and with Drupal 8, we are confident that this upgrade will be a solid base for at leastthe next decade.

For the past 8 years, we have provided maintenance and support for OlympicPeninsula.org. The support has been as requested, and the maintenance has become what we now call the “Protection plan”, which keeps your site safe, secure, performing well, and recoverable in the event of an attack.

In that 8 years, there have been a handful of incidents where the site has been attacked, allof them “denial of service” which leads to slow loading times, or the site unavailable. And all of them have been blocked or resolved in an hour or less. The site has never been hacked under our watch, and the downtime can be measured in minutes over the past decade.

We have greatly expanded our regular monthly offerings beyond just “Protection” aka maintenance, and we now work on nearly 40 sites on an ongoing basis. Our two new offerings:

• Vision Plan – We actively monitor your analytics and key metrics, and provide a monthly summary analysis of key information on your site – how much traffic, how much new content, what events had the biggest impact, etc. In addition, each month we do a deep-dive into a single topic, and provide feedback on your particular site along with recommendations of what to consider doing next. Examples include: Site Accessibility, internationalization, mobile page speeds, engagement, heatmaps, and more.

• Results Plan – Our premium plan takes the vision plan one step further – we include implementing our recommendations, and running experiments (such as A/B tests) to determine what actually works for your particular site.

We would recommend starting out with the Vision Plan, which, combined with operational budget to implement, should keep your site entirely up-to-date going forward with the latest web trends (or at least know how your site stacks up).

With additional revenue, our Results Plan might be an excellent fit for OPTC going forward.

See https://www.freelock.com/drupal-maintenance for more details on all three plans.

Why Drupal 8In short: Usability, and Long Term Support.

Drupal 8 is currently the best CMS available on the market, bar none. It is far more powerful than WordPress or Joomla. It is far more usable and feature-rich than the proprietary CMSs, especially at the high-end of the market. It has a great security track-record, it is freshly re-written to support all the current web trends for the foreseeable future, and it is built to be maintainable and upgradeable for the long haul.

Compared to Drupal 6, it shares much of the same information architecture – content of various types with fields, users, taxonomy (categories, tags), comments. But the interfaces have been entirely re-designed with feedback from extensive usability testing,


https://www.freelock.com/drupal-maintenance

https://www.freelock.com/drupal-maintenance

and the code has been entirely rewritten from the ground up with one key difference: like the Olympic Peninsula, it’s evergreen.

All previous Drupal versions involved a sizable project to update to the next major release. Drupal 6 to Drupal 7 upgrades often ran to $15K. Drupal 8 upgrades are much easier than Drupal 7 – there’s a robust migration path from Drupal 6, so these are more like $5K - $8K. And we’ve taken the liberty of doing most of this upgrade work with the support budget you’ve provided to us over the past couple years.

But the big difference is that going from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9 will be part of regular ongoing maintenance – Drupal has adopted an “object oriented” architecture for its codebase that has been a proven model for mature software, and this will allow upgradinga piece at a time – the site will just eventually be Drupal 9, without having to do any big rewrite.

Drupal vs WordPressDue to customer demand, we now work with WordPress as well as Drupal. We have clients that have multiple sites, some Drupal, others WordPress, and they liked our uniqueservice offerings enough to ask for similar WordPress coverage.

It’s not really a fair comparison – they are so entirely different. Here are the 4 key reasonswe think Drupal is far superior to WordPress, especially for sites that are doing more thana simple blog or brochure site:

1. Security. Drupal has a far better security track record than WordPress, for several reasons. A few crucial ones: the Drupal security team reviews most modules published onDrupal.org, which is where most modules exist. Drupal itself is far easier to set up and manage testing, deployment, and development – supporting professional development processes, whereas WordPress is largely developed and changed live on production, without testing. Drupal provides secure, tested, commonly used APIs for vulnerable things like forms, user access, mail, etc.

2. Usability. We hear all the time how much better WordPress is compared to Drupal, but our experience is the exact opposite. I think WordPress may be more usable for design professionals who know how to do HTML (which at this point includes a lot of marketingprofessionals, who have learned how to use it effectively), but for regular non-designer users, or those new to WordPress, a WordPress site with any level of complexity quickly becomes a hot mess – plugins organized by plugin company name, not grouped by functionality, lots of use of “short codes” and directly editing HTML templates. In contrast, a well-configured Drupal site is easy to administer, manage content, manage media, find functionality once you learn a few easy patterns. Drupal administration is far more consistently organized and discoverable than WordPress, and generally takes less development skill to make simple content changes than comparable WordPress sites.

3. Community-driven best practices. In Drupal, there is strong pressure on developers to add functionality they need to existing modules, rather than going out and creating a new module. This has led to “best of breed” power modules that are broadly compatible with everything else in the Drupal ecosystem. This is not the case for WordPress, with a huge range of incompatible plugins that all do similar things – it’s far more difficult to find a plugin you can be confident will continue to be maintained for years, work with other plugins, get any kind of security review.


4. Code freshly re-architected, built for the next decade. The Drupal 8 release cycle was long, drawn-out, and painful in many ways. It took nearly 5 years to release. But the result is spectacular. As a developer it’s very refreshing to use and extend. It already has great support for front-end technologies and “headless” applications – they have cleaned up most of the “code debt” that had accumulated up through Drupal 7 with a full rewrite. WordPress, on the other hand, has a similar serious rewrite ahead of them. By many accounts, the code is extremely stale, not maintainable. Newer WordPress administrative tools skip WordPress entirely and just talk directly to WordPress databases. The pain that is now behind the Drupal community looms ever larger ahead of the WordPress community.

As mentioned above, we do support WordPress – but as you might guess, we do not recommend it. We have comparable monthly plans for WordPress, but charge more for them because we can’t automate quite as much of our testing and deployment – and our service is even more valuable, due to a greater need to make sure you have a solid recovery plan if you get hacked, as well as being able to actually support a development/stage/production workflow for deploying changes in a professional way.

Drupal vs Angular/new front end technologiesWordPress is not really competition for Drupal on any site with data to manage – Drupal is a far better fit. However, there is all new competition coming from the new generation of front-end frameworks. There are 3 leading contenders in this space: Angular2 (by Google), React (by Facebook), and Vue (a new upstart by a former Google employee, andour current favorite).

These frameworks make it much easier to build a rich, interactive user experience. However, in themselves these are purely “front-end” technologies.

Most of the shops that work with these have gotten very light on the back end – they often pair these with Javascript on the server (Node.js) or a more traditional custom framework. For example, the VisitIdaho.org site, while having a WordPress back end, makes extensive use of Angular for all of its interactive content – they probably had to write the supporting back-end code on the WordPress side of things to get the data, while creating the front-end in Angular.

Drupal 8 is a great complement for these front-end technologies. It already has a great user experience for managing the content – but it also has great support for the newest data retrieval format, “GraphQL.”

We are preparing a demo for you to illustrate just how this might work – and we don’t have to do anything in Drupal to support it, we simply turned on GraphQL – now we can create the front-end experience with full access to all the data in Drupal, whatever needs to be exposed.

Drupal essentially jump-starts and provides a great platform for the richest digital experiences possible on today’s web – and nothing needs to be done (other than launchingthe Drupal 8 site) to make all your data available to all these cutting-edge technologies.

Olympic Peninsula Objectives and ConcernsIn the RFP, OPTC outlines 5 main objectives for this project, along with some concerns


about Drupal.

1. User-friendly, Open Source, & Rock SolidWe propose to use Drupal 8, which is open source, far more user-friendly than Drupal 6, and with proper setup, on par with the best usability in the industry – and is the rock-solidsolution favored by a huge number of large or media-savvy organizations.

WordPress at its simplest might be easier to get going and get a result quickly – but as soon as you start adding additional database functionality like lodging listings, things to do, and more, you end up going down a rabbit-hole of custom functionality, and end up with your own special snowflake of a website. Good for uniqueness – very bad for long-term maintainability.

We are happy to provide on-site training in Port Angeles, and you have 8 years of experience working with us already to know about how well we handle security, uptime, and availability. Oh, by the way, we made the current site secured with SSL many monthsago.

2. Drop Dead GorgeousWebsites are gorgeous today for one primary reason: Stunning photography. Website design has converged a lot since the last time the site was designed. You can pick your fonts, colors, and branding – but beyond that most sites have very similar designs today –for one good reason: website design has become convention.

What separates great sites from average ones are media – great photography, great video, great writing, great digital experiences.

We think your site would look great with a background video right front and center on thehomepage, and attractive photography leading users down some well-defined paths into the information-rich areas of the site.

More important than making it gorgeous on day one, is facilitating your ability to keep the site fresh while making sure it stays gorgeous. Drupal can make it easy to swap out images, manage media assets, and update things without requiring web assistance. Our focus is on making sure you can handle this yourself, and highlight fresh content as it is created.

3. Inspirational, Educational, AssistiveFor visitors, having “magazine” articles can be very engaging and educational, while the database of lodging, events, and activities along with an interactive trip planner can greatly assist them in planning a visit.

For industry professionals, key items are the database, search, and social interaction.

For partners, overview videos of the back end along with a couple helpful tours should greatly help them use the site, encourage more content contribution.

4. Integrated, Inbound-capable, and Analytics-enabledThe big issue right now is that the analytics are scattered across multiple sites. This problem largely goes away when the blogs are incorporated into a single site, and the mobile-specific site is retired.

The “Paragraphs” approach works really great for custom landing pages, and depending


on what action you want the user to take in a call-to-action, you can select a lead capture form, a newsletter sign-up form, or just a custom block of information to place wherever you would like, on any of these pages.

The Freelock “Vision plan” makes us an active partner in helping you make sense of youranalytics, providing feedback based on our work with 40 other sites, what we see workingand not, what new technologies and user experiences are getting hot, how else you might reach other users, in an ongoing way.

5. Supports Social –Pretty much every site we do has two elements of social media integration, for this site we plan to do 4:

- Extensive sharing links

- Easy-to-find “Follow” and “Like” links

- “Log in with Facebook” for user generated content like trip plans (this can also work foryour partner logins)

- Display strategic feeds from your social media – Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterestin particular

Why FreelockFreelock has provided support and maintenance for the current OlympicPeninsula.org sitefor the past 8 years, ever since we built it in the first place. So we’re the boring choice, and it’s perfectly understandable you might want to see who else is out there, what can they bring to the table.

We have had many clients work with us, like OPTC, for years at a time. Why? For lots of boring reasons that are easy to take for granted:

• We have great communications skills

• We follow through on our commitments

• We have a strong track record of successful projects, and great outcomes

• We have strong security and operational practices that keep sites safe, running smoothly, scaling appropriately, and recoverable if there is an incident.

But you know all of this, because you’ve worked with us for years.

Some things you might not know:

• We have built our security practices based on cleaning up dozens of sites that have been hacked – there’s a reason you haven’t had any problems like this. Several of our clients came to us with hacked sites, and we were able to recover most of their data.

• We don’t think you need a new site – we think all you need is a fresh look-and-feel, a fresh skin, a fresh user experience, and perhaps some cleanup of the old stuff – but in


general we think sites gain value if you don’t dispose them and completely redo them

Our service offerings are pretty much unique in the marketplace. Broadly, our offerings overlap with three different kinds of agencies or vendors:

Web developers/Designers – Most web developers move from project to project. They design and build a site, and then move on to the next one. They are not well equipped to handle ongoing requests after a site has launched – this is a key part of our service. We are discussing with several agencies being a “maintenance partner” – allowing them to build sites, and then hand over to us for long term maintenance. This is kind of de-facto anyway – we manage a bunch of websites that other firms developed.

Marketing firms – Many marketing firms do provide ongoing service – after all, you don’t stop marketing after a day. Most marketing firms lack the technical depth that we have, and often they end up being a great partner for us – they provide creative direction and content, while we implement any needed functionality and provide the ongoing security and maintenance.

Hosting and DevOps – “DevOps” is the intersection of development, ongoing operations, and quality assurance, and that’s how we characterize our business. There are a bunch of specialty hosting platforms that provide similar “devops” pipelines with testing, security maintenance, and deployment automation. For Drupal, there’s Acquia, Pantheon, and Platform.sh. For WordPress, there’s WPEngine, Pantheon, and a bunch of others. However, these firms tend to all be “self-service” – you still need somebody reasonably technical to drive the process, apply the updates, create the tests, verify the results.

Our service is built for medium-sized organizations like yours – those who need more than a self-service blog, who need security, support for ongoing improvements, and a truepartner on the web.

Finally, we would love to continue to work with the Olympic Peninsula Tourism Commission. Diane Shostak was always one of our best references and advocates and we have really enjoyed working with everyone in the organization. We would love the opportunity to deepen the relationship, to get better acquainted with Stefanie and Allegra, and be able to continue providing the best support possible going forward!

Proposal RequirementsAll proposals submitted in response to this request for proposal must contain the following information in the stated order.

(Numbers refer to the numbers specified in the RFP).

1. Name, address, email and telephone number of the firm.Freelock LLC100 W Harrison St. Suite N460Seattle, WA 98119206-577-0540

2. Description of the firm (corporation, partnership, etc.) and year established.Freelock LLC is a Limited Liability Company formed in 2002.


3. State of incorporation, if any, and type of ownership.Washington State, Limited Liability Company. For tax purposes, changed from a sole proprietorship to an S-corporation in 2017.

4. Name(s) of all partner(s), principal(s) and/or owner(s) of the firm.John Locke

5. Names and bios of the key staff that will be managing and implementing the contract.


John Locke, Principal/Lead Developer

ObjectiveLead developer and founder of Freelock, LLC. In addition to being a proficient web developer, he is an experienced technical writer, network administrator, and all around problem solver.

Skills & AbilitiesDrupal and open-source software development.

Applicable Experience

Client: Washington Occupational Therapists AssociationBrand new Drupal 8 website development. In charge of creating an entirely new member management back-end system. Created a custom module that was contributed back to Drupal.org.

Client: Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center – Shared ResourcesDrupal 6 website development. Tasked with developing a custom module to integrate with Harvard University’s Eagle-I library system.

Client: Georgetown University - QatarDrupal 7 website development. Primary lead developer to split out multiple site domains on Acquia enterprise hosting accounts.

Education and Organizations:

Alaska Pacific University,BA, Languages and Literature

MIT Enterprise Forum of the Northwest,Board Member, Web/Tech Chair

Applicable Tools Include:

● CMS platforms - Drupal, Joomla, WordPress, OpenCommerce, ZenCommerce, LimeSurvey● Frameworks - Symfony, CodeIgnitor, Dojo Toolkit, Bootstrap● Linux, Firewalls, Networking, Troubleshooting● Web servers - Nginx, Apache● Containers - Docker● Relevant Languages - PHP, Javascript, Python, Perl, Bash, Sass● Configuration Management - Salt● Continuous Integration - Jenkins, Concourse● Cloud servers - XMPP (ejabberd, Openfire), IRC, Matrix, Chat bots, OwnCloud/NextCloud● Databases - MySQL, MariaDB, Postgres, Memcache, Redis, Apache Solr● Monitoring - Prometheus, Nagios, Icinga, Check_mk● APIs- REST, SOAP, XML-RPC, JsonP

Prepared by: Freelock, LLC Page 1 11/21/17

● Test frameworks: PHPUnit, SimpleTest, Behat, Wraith, Selenium


Don Dill, Director of Client Services/Project Management

ObjectiveScope web development projects for clients on the front-end and manage the successful delivery of those projects on the back-end, while managing developer resources across sprints and client deliverables.

Skills & AbilitiesAgile project management methodology, along with Drupal site building


Client: Peninsula CollegeManaged client budgets and set expectations based on desired functionality requests. Coordinate Drupal web development QA/Launch/Release expectations and timelines between developers, staff, and clients.

Client: Appliance Standards Awareness ProjectWorked with client to develop user stories, assignment of tasks to developers, and assist in QA.

Client: American College of Healthcare SciencesAssign projects and web development tasks to developers, while ensuring that technical deliverables remain on schedule and on budget.

Education and Organizations:

University of Washington - Seattle,BA, Environmental Science – Minor: Environmental Science & Resource Management

Forcontu Drupal Training,Certificate in Drupal 7 creation and administration of websites

University of Washington - Program on the Environment Alumni Board,Alumni board member


● Agile Development Practices● Disciplined agile delivery● Dynamic systems development method (DSDM)● Extreme programming (XP)● Feature-driven development (FDD)● Lean software development● Kanban● Rapid application development (RAD)● Scrum● Drupal CMS● HTML5


● CSS


Chris Yim, Senior Developer

ObjectiveWork alongside clients and the web team to deliver quality software programming, solid best practices in development, and meet all project expectations.

Skills & AbilitiesDrupal development, information architecture, theme/design CSS.


Client: Middle East Policy CouncilDrupal-based version 6 - 8 migration project. Set up flexible content displays to display multiple types of content with a consistent, uniform look and feel.

Client: Appliance Standards Awareness ProjectDrupal-based project. Migrated from version 6 - 8. Built responsive, custom theme based on client's design, built custom data tables, based on client's content data structure.

Client: American College of Healthcare SciencesDrupal 6 - 8 migration project. Built responsive, custom theme based on client mockups, built custom menu behavior based on site structure.

Education

University of Washington - SeattleBS, Infomatics


● Drupal● PHP● SQL● HTML5● JavaScript● CSS● Theming● Bootstrap

6. Name, title, email and business address of person responsible for submitting this proposal.

Don Dill


7. Listing of proposed subcontractors, if any, and the scope of work they will perform.Misty Speck, NetGrafix – Graphic Design and UX work

8. A Creative Overview – What are you proposing and how will you accomplish it.See the first section above...

9. An estimate of time required to complete the project and a proposed timeline of work tasks, with the date of final completion of the project.

We propose to launch the first improvement of the site at the end of the first sprint, 3 weeks after the beginning of the project. And then roll out new functionality every 2 weeks, based on priorities identified while working with OPTC. We plan to mostly followthe sequence provided in the budget breakdown, but will combine a couple of the shorter sprints.

If the project begins January 4, we expect the Drupal 8 site to be launched by January 26, and 6 more 2-week sprints to make the site fully ready for tourism season by April 20.

10. A budget breakdown of the project, including the firm’s base rates, fees and charges forservices, by phase and for total project, and a proposed payment schedule.

Our base rate for clients on a maintenance plan is $140/hour. The below table breaks out each item with an expected budget – with some advertising in place, we assume that morebudget could become available.

We also provide a couple options including 1 year of service and excluding that. Please reach out with any questions!

Item Notes Budget CostDevelopment-onlycost

a Site upgrade Finish off the migration, re-create missing views, ensure webform is working correctly

30 hours $4,200.00 $4,200.00

b Magazine article layouts Custom paragraphs 15 hours $2,100.00 $2,100.00

c Migrate WordPress content Assuming 3 blogs to migrate, each with minimal customization

10 hours $1,400.00 $1,400.00

d Social Media improvementsFacebook login, share, follow, embed feeds

20 hours $2,800.00 $2,800.00

e Destinations as Groups

Handles multiple logins per partner, simplifies login, pw reset process for partners, allows for destination-based theming

30 hours $4,200.00 $4,200.00

f Admin tours for staff Tooltips to orient on main user stories, video, in person training

15 hours $2,100.00 $2,100.00

g Color Palette optionsChange per group, per magazine article

15 hours $2,100.00


h Things to do near me

Includes major enhancements of lodging, event, and activity pages with photography, category icons, etc

30 hours $4,200.00 $4,200.00

I Downloadable Travel Guides View of PDFs 5 hours $700.00 $700.00

j ItinerariesRevamped with “trip planning”, comments, social sharing, photos

20 hours $2,800.00 $2,800.00

k Rich SearchFacets for activity type, contenttype, distance, date, author

20 hours $2,800.00

l Direct sponsorshipAdvertising for lodging, things to do

10 hours $1,400.00

m “Cinematic” page animations“Nice to have” possible future development – excluded because of budget

60 – 100 hours

Development costs – total $30,800.00 $24,500.00

n Vision Plan12 months of support at Vision Plan level

$799/month $9,588.00 $9,588.00

Hosting(current hosting plan, subject totaxable – 12 months)

$10/month $120.00 $120.00

Total cost, year 1 $40,508.00 $34,208.00

11. At least three (3) references of other destinations and work samples including individualcontact name, name of company, email and phone number.

Client: Peninsula CollegeContact: Emma Janssen, Web ManagerTelephone Number: 360-417-6503 E-Mail Address: [email protected]: https://www.pencol.edu/

We’ve had a relationship with this client for over 3 years. We’ve assisted in new design development, along with providing continuous site maintenance and security.

Client: Appliance Standards Awareness ProjectContact: Marianne DiMascio, Outreach DirectorTelephone Number: 339-933-8140E-Mail Address: [email protected]: https://appliance-standards.org/

Freelock worked with this client to upgrade them from Drupal 6 to Drupal 8 platform. Migrated all of their content, set up new and enhanced functionality, then re-themed their site, working with a design consultant.

Client: American College of Healthcare SciencesContact: Tracey Abell, MS, BS, Chief Operating OfficerTelephone Number: 503-244-0726 x103


https://appliance-standards.org/

mailto:[email protected]

https://www.pencol.edu/


E-Mail Address: [email protected]: https://achs.edu/

A client that has a long-standing relationship with Freelock. We’ve been working with them for almost 5 years. We’ve been providing site maintenance and hosting for them for years and upgraded them from Drupal 6 to Drupal 8. We migrated all of their content, integrated their outside systems into the website, then worked with their design team to implement a new theme. They’ve recently did a small re-do on their theme, and we work worked with their consultant to make sure this was safely rolled out to their production site.


https://achs.edu/


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