Hey! A Lullabot.com Redesign

Keen Lullabot fans may have noticed that we launched a redesign of Lullabot.com a few weeks ago. It's not just a redesign, but also a re-platforming to Drupal 7, a reworking of the site structure and functionality, and to some extent, a rebranding of Lullabot.

A lot has changed in the 3 years since we launched the previous site. Back then, we were a 12-person consulting-focused company with all of the work we could handle. Most of our work came from word-of-mouth. We didn't have a sales person and we didn't want a website which would make the phone ring more than it already was. Instead, we focused our website on our growing education department, offering customized on-site training and public workshops – something that we could scale better than consulting.

Since our last redesign, so much has changed:

1. The economic collapse caused us to figure out ways that we could offer more inexpensive Drupal training. This lead to our DVD/download video training, and eventually to our subscription training site: Drupalize.Me. Still part of Lullabot, the site currently employs a full-time staff of 5 cranking out videos weekly on a wide variety of Drupal-related topics.
2. The thriving Drupal community began to offer cheaper in-person training often in conjunction with DrupalCamps, DrupalCons, and meetups. With less need for our public workshops, we began to focus on on-site corporate training and add-on training at existing Drupal events. All of Lullabot's training offerings are now handled as part of Drupalize.Me.
3. As the Drupal ecosystem shifted and grew, it became harder and harder to find development partners who were both good and available. We responded by building out our development department. We acquired two small development shops – Rapid Waters and Sprocket Creative – and nearly doubled the size of the company in 2010.
4. With a complete development department in place and so many successful projects under our belt, we began to grow our services beyond the bounds of Drupal. The rise of technologies such as mobile and responsive design married the art and science of making websites in new ways that we were excited to master. We expanded our design and front-end offerings. We expanded into content strategy, community development, and design strategy. We hired the best systems administrator we'd ever worked with and some amazing project managers. Our staff is now approaching 40 people and we're able to offer complete concept-to-launch services for web and mobile projects.
5. We launched a gazillion amazing projects: MarthaStewart.com, WWE.com, Harvard.edu, Pac-12.com, Tizen.org, and many more. We also carried off our 4th year on Grammy.com and did some great work with Turner Broadcasting, NBC Universal, Verizon, Intel, Rackspace, Tesla, Sony Pictures, and many others, several of whom have sworn us to secrecy.
6. We also figured out how to grow. This may seem trivial to some, but it was no small feat for us. We had built an elite team of expert developers and great communicators who all really enjoyed one another. We'd built a great working culture and an environment that was both fun and productive. To be honest, we weren't sure how we could grow and maintain both quality and culture. Matt and I spent a good six months exploring this and ended up creating a mission statement and core values list which became a common reference point and sort of a rule-book to compare against as we began to grow. It's easy to lose track of culture as big opportunities come along and we wanted to make sure we knew what made us unique and special. We also wrote up a manifesto-like employee handbook which expanded on these values and shared many of the systems, philosophies, styles, and methods which have been successful for Lullabot over the years. These things have all become a scaffolding inside which we can build a larger company without compromising quality or culture.

For the past few years, visitors to our site left thinking that we were a Drupal education company. The truth is that this end of the business only represents about 20% of our revenue. And these days, all of Lullabot's education efforts are consolidated under Drupalize.Me. So our new site focuses less on education, handing those duties over to the dedicated education team at Drupalize.Me which now acts as a sub-brand of Lullabot.

Our new website does a better job highlighting Lullabot's expanded service offerings, our client list, a few case studies, and our talented and expanding team. Of course, we've still got all of the articles and podcasts which have made us famous. We've got regular Module Monday articles, and a growing list of podcast series including The Drupalize.Me Podcast, Insert Content Here, and The Creative Process. We're also posting more and more business-related articles to the site giving voice to more of the non-developers at Lullabot. We find it rewarding to share what we know and we encourage everyone at Lullabot to post to lullabot.com whenever they can.

The new site also has a great responsive desktop/mobile design which adjusts to different device widths and maintains readability across different device sizes. We've got retina-based graphics so the images look nice and sharp on your new MacBook Pro. We've got some cool CSS3 animation stuff and a nice HTML5-based player for our podcasts. Our home page better highlights our work and includes a new "Lullabot Labs" section to show off some of the stuff we've done for ourselves. We've also got some cool stuff pulling sidebar blocks from Drupalize.Me. If there's call for it, we'll do another write-up talking about the tech behind the new site.

So here it is. As it takes the cobbler years to get around to making shoes for his children, this project took us longer than expected to get finished. We're still finding bugs and making adjustments and improvements. But we're really happy to have a new site that better matches Lullabot's current state of being and showcases some of the amazing work we've been doing. Hope you like it as much as we do!