Bear Group

Happy New Year! We wish you a wonderful 2012.

Business News

2012 marks the beginning of our sixth year in business. We’ve doubled in size each year following our measured growth plan, and continue to be the most experienced Drupal and Magento development house in the Seattle area.  We added a developer to our talented dev team and hired an excellent new program manager to keep us all on task, so we’re in a good place to handle all sizes and types of clients.

We’ve been buried in projects, but one of our New Year’s resolutions is to keep the blog and Facebook page fresh—please Like us on Facebook if you haven’t already.

We were closed the last week of 2011, and with some downtime we had fun looking back at what we’d done last year. Here are a few highlights of what was another fun and challenging year. They range from long-term engagements with enterprise clients to first sites for innovative startups— and we were proud to have been part of them all.

PopCap Games – We continued as development partners with the internal PopCap.com Content Services team throughout the year.  They have an awesome in-house team, and use Bear Group for strategic projects and accelerating development timelines.  The year started with completing the migration to Drupal and launching their SpinTop Games subsidiary on Magento, and finished with the launch just before Christmas of the completely redesigned popcap.com site.  This was a challenging front-end development project, with custom designs on nearly every page built in HTML5, CSS3.  There’s nothing like this site that we have seen in Drupal – it really shows how far you can push the look and feel of your site, while maintaining as a solid backbone a strong CMS that dozens of people can use to keep the site up to date. Don’t miss clicking on the zombies.

Precor Fitness – Precor became a central client in 2012. We have provided technical PM and development support for the Precor web marketing group across a dozen initiatives.  Looking back into our Jira we completed well over 1,000 tasks across 32 code sprints.   Highlights were developing a migration to Magento, launching 12 language sites supporting all regions of the world, redesigning the chrome, launching our first truly right-to-left Hebrew site, and completing ecommerce builds for Canada and the UK.

Switchback Travel – This startup came up out of the blue, and had such a compelling story we just wanted to be part of it.  Its founder, David, had spent several years travelling, writing and shooting amazing photos and was putting a startup together around adventure travel.  Design Hovie Studios brought this story to life beautifully with a solid scalable design .

Sub70 – Our friends Liska + Associates in Chicago brought us in to work on Sub70, a startup selling the most stylish golf clothes you have ever seen. Check them out.

We did a number of major re-themes this summer for long-term clients. Each of them  put up a new look and did major upgrades to their sites.   They included:

• Antica Farmacista: Implemented a new Magento store, as well as a new look and feel
• zHealth – Launched a complete re-skin of this site, incorporating their active social channels
• Seattle Chocolates – Consolidated three stores into a single checkout pipeline. A new look and feel by Design Hovie Studios allows them to easily customize their site according to the season.
• Glazers Camera –After 5 years with the current look and feel, the team is currently designing a new product-centric user experience, in collaboration with the great designers at Liska + Associates.

What’s coming next? This month we’re launching new sites for the Pritzker Architecture prize and the Institute for Systems Biology, and big new releases for both PopCap and Precor.  It’s also time for a new site for Bear Group—we are playing with adaptive themes and looking forward to rolling one out on beargroup.com. Here’s to 2012!

The Seattle AIGA is sponsoring an excellent event bringing together user experience designers and developers for a one-day conference. Jenny Lam the Seattle AIGA UX director, is pulling the event together. Looking forward to an action-packed day sharing ideas with the best in UX.  More conference info and registration.

Bear Group started working out with Precor in late December, and just launched version 2 of their web site in April.  Precor invented the Elliptical– visit any gym in the world and you’re likely to see their fitness machines.

Precor was already using Drupal for their US site, but needed to expand to 12 languages and consolidate some legacy sites.  The US store backend was built on Ubercart within Drupal—and though Drupal is always our content management system of choice, we prefer Magento for ecommerce, since ecommerce is a big system with its own unique requirements.

So the big pieces of the project were integration and migration to Magento, and the translation and launch of an 800-page website in 12 languages.

We knew that with its great inventory management and catalog capabilities, Magento would allow Precor to manage their global product catalog with one unified backend. Most Magento sites are a single store.  However, Magento also has a powerful model of “WebSites – Stores – Store Views,” which provides a ton of power to clients needing multiple regions or sites served by the same backend.  Each major region of the world has its own website, each country is a store that can have its own distinct catalog, and each store has store views where languages are set.

Admins can control their scope, which specifies geo-location for the product in progress at any given time. It is a very powerful feature for managing enterprise catalogs of inventory.

Magento has great support for translated content, with three main steps:

1. Referencing above diagram, at the Store View level, we set each locale/language.
2. After all English products are added, we use the excellent import/export capabilities in Magento to get an XML export of the entire product set.  This XML file is then translated, typically through a translation house. Then the completed XML file, with the correct store added, is re-imported to Magento in minutes.  For each sku, you then have the translations in Magento, all editable in the admin by changing your scope.
3. The final step is handling the various strings, labels and navigation elements that appear within the theme.  This is managed simply by a 2-column CSV with the English in column 1 and translation in column 2.  This is just uploaded to the Magento locale folder.

It sounds a bit complicated, but it elegantly handles a fairly complex process.

We had a big launch day, with 6 major region sites going up simultaneously with 12 language variations in time for Precor’s European conference, and the new site has been a hit.

Domu, celebrating its one-year anniversary, continues to innovate and bring their particular flair to apartment hunting. Their latest feature is a Chicago History Map.  You know, Chicago is a big city, and some great (and not so great) things have happened there over the last century.  Say you are new to town, or just wondering what has happened in your neighborhood or apartment historically.   You need the Chicago History Map:

http://www.domu.com/chicago/history-map

Zoom in to your neighborhood, filter by categories, and discover the scenes from movies shot there, nearby celebrities, and crime scenes and gangster hangouts of yesteryear.  You can click for video/images and more details about what’s happening on your block.

Based on the same geo-coding and location technology used to power the Domu listings map, the Chicago History Map is pretty sleek.

Bear Group is a proud sponsor of the Seattle youth Ultimate Frisbee team called the Fryz.  Their two teams won – swept – the Paideia Cup Ultimate Tournament down in Georgia in April.  Paideia is the national tournament for the best of High School ultimate frisbee teams. Randy Lim (who not coincidentally did all of our company identity work) has two sons on the team. Congratulations to the team for all the hard work and the amazing victories!

5/17/2011 Update: The national rankings for both the Open and Girls came out this week and both the Open and Girlz Fryz teams are ranked #1 in the Nation.

News story…

Highlight video…

What do these three faces have in common? (Hint: Check out the title of this post)  That’s right, Whitehouse.gov, BeyonceOnline.com and RafaelNadal.com all use Drupal to build and maintain their web sites. In fact, lots of sites you know and love are operated by Drupal. Here is a sampling of the other Drupal sites out there:

And keep in mind, these are just some examples.  There are a ton more Drupal sites in all different corners of the web. If you’ve got a favorite Drupal site that we haven’t mentioned, let us know in the comments section below.

Shot by Jonah Ellison

The Bear Group dev team spent a fun week in Chicago at the US Drupal Conference last week.  There were 3,000+ of Drupal’s finest attending.  With more than 85 sessions crammed into the span of three days, there was no shortage of intense Drupal knowledge up for grabs. Presentations ran the gamut from enterprise selling tactics to deep dives on specific Drupal development topics.  Some sessions were great, some were merely interesting, and some… well, let’s just say that public speaking is a vastly different skill than writing code. The photo above was taken by Jonah, from the evening event at the Chicago Field Museum.

For me, it was a chance for our remote teams to all be in the same room, share ideas, hang out and take a rare pause from our high-output coding routine.  We had a great time at Lou Malnatis in Chicago sharing some Deep Dish.

Bear Group team at Drupalcon catching some Chicago deep dish. Left to Right: Fernando, Brian, Matt, Jonah, Greg

Dries Buytaert, Drupal’s founder, gave his annual “state of Drupal” keynote. Drupal 7 released in January after about 3 years in development, and much of his talk was about Drupal 8. He presented a clear path of strategic initiatives to keep Drupal relevant. There is definitely a large play to move Drupal into the enterprise space further.  He was able to make specific, actionable recommendations, such as making Drupal more context-aware, easier to work with web services, and building support for newer technologies such as HTML5/CSS3.

One common aspect to the Magento and Drupal conferences was the push toward mobile.  Dries pointed out that Drupal certainly can output to any format at this point, but it favors HTML.  One of the aspects that will be important for Drupal 8 will be letting Drupal become your central content repository that can output as easily to xml, fbml, web services, and whatever context comes next. There is module support for much of this, but it will move into the core in 8.

You can see his full presentation here:

The next DrupalCon will be held in Denver, March 20-22. http://denver2012.drupal.org/

I spent couple of days in Los Angeles last week attending the first-ever Magento e-commerce conference. Magento is the application we most frequently use to build online stores. The Magento team had decided to put together a conference just 90 days before actually holding the event, but somehow it all came together, and 500 people gathered from 27 countries.

To start off, here are a few interesting stats from Roy Rubin, one of Magento’s founders:

• An estimated $25 billion has been transacted across Magento-based sites.
• There are about 90,000 live sites running on Magento.

Incredibly, the word “Magento” is now searched for in Google more often than the word “ecommerce.”  Impressive, considering this platform didn’t really exist 3 years ago! Bear Group took our first client over to Magento in September 2008 — www.glazerscamera.com.  Since then we have done more than 24 implementations for clients.  That figure pales in comparison to our 125 Drupal sites, so we’ve always thought of ourselves as Magento newbies.  Due to the hosting complexities, and shifting code base (that has made upgrades a significant amount of rework), it certainly has been a love/hate relationship.  So I was surprised to learn that having 24 Magento sites under our belt positions us as strongly as any agency I met with in LA.

One of the announcements at the conference was the introduction of a new product called Magento Go.  This is a fully hosted version of Magento, with all the basics a new store needs to get off the ground.  Since no integration or customization is needed (all you can do is customize the theme and add in widgets), it’s a very interesting solution for some small businesses. It is similar to Volusion, Shopify, or even Yahoo stores.  One unique benefit is that as you outgrow the Go solution, there is a natural path to the Community Edition we use at Bear and even the Enterprise Edition, both of which had new versions announced at the conference.  For customers for whom we might have previously recommended a Drupal site with Paypal buttons, or another simple cart solution, this will be a natural choice, as it allows much more robust inventory management, payment options, a full cart, promotion management, and all of the flexibility we’ve come to love from Magento.

One of the most compelling speakers at the conference was former Head of MySQL Mårten Mickos, the open-source database project that provides the data storage for pretty much every major web site on the planet that isn’t Microsoft-affiliated. He sold Mysql for a billion dollars a few years ago to Sun.  We use it on all of our sites as the storage mechanism for both Drupal and Magento.

Mickos spoke directly to the value of open-source development, and the hidden costs of closed, compiled/licensed software.  His belief in openness extends well beyond software.  One of the things you hear about is how open-source software is somehow at a higher security risk.  His perspective is that the bad guys will hack in either way, but if open, the good guys can help resolve the issues.

I met a ton of interesting people from hosting companies  to developers to implementation partners like us to retailers. We heard from the CEOs of Nordstrom, President of GoDaddy, Former COO of Zappos, among others – people with a very wide lens on digital commerce. I got the heads up on a lot of cool product announcements. And I saw the sun for the first time in awhile.  All in all, an excellent conference.

Photo Credit

As the saying goes, “Behind every great website, there is a great web developer.”  In our brand-new series, Behind the Magic, we thought we’d introduce you to some of the Bear Group employees.  Brian is our resident Senior Developer and Architect and a valued member of Team Bear.  He took a few minutes out of his busy web developing schedule for a quick Q & A.

Tell us about a memorable project you’ve worked on.
My first job building websites was for my university. I was asked to advise a committee re-designing the university’s homepage, and I got my first taste working on a highly valued, high traffic website. I was hooked, dropped out of college, and have been building websites ever since.  Editor’s note: Kids, don’t try this at home. Web development is addictive. Brian went on to the pioneering search company Lycos, and eventually pulled himself away long enough to return to University of Washington for a BS in Computer Science.

What would have been your ideal job if you had lived in a time with no internet?
I remember the time with no internet, but not willingly. I would be a scientist researching computer networking.

When I’m not working, you can find me…
Outside. The worst thing about being a programmer is the sedentary nature of it. I run, bike, and hike as often as I can.

What are the three websites you check every day?
arstechnica.com – publicola.com – drupal.org

If you could have one super power, what would it be?
The power of flight.

What is your favorite thing about Seattle?
The weather, honestly. Icy winters and hot, humid summers are not for me. A close second is the beautiful landscape with trees everywhere, surrounded by mountains and large bodies of water.

So, there  you have it.  Stay tuned for more Bear bios in upcoming posts.

Clients often come to us with questions about Search Engine Optimization.  Maybe they’ve gotten a tip that it’s something they need to pay attention to, or maybe they just want to know how to make sure that Google ranks their beautiful new site higher than everyone else’s for their industry.  Or, wait a minute—doesn’t Drupal just automatically take care of that?

So, how does Google (or Yahoo, or Bing) decide which sites should rank highest for different searches?  The short answer is that search engines determine the page rank of web sites using a series of complex algorithms that have to do with a variety of factors (Google says there are around 200 “signals” they use to make decisions about each page indexed).  And there are many things you can to do make your web site more appealing to search engines… that’s where SEO comes in.  And while Drupal makes it easy to implement good SEO practices on your site, it doesn’t inherently give you a rankings boost.

We don’t specifically offer SEO services at Bear, but we have a lot of experience with it, and luckily there is a lot of great (some free!) information out there that can help you sort through the seemingly endless world of SEO.

Brought to you by the SEO experts at Seattle’s own SEOmoz, here is a comprehensive guide to SEO for beginners.

This 10-chapter long guide is brimming with detailed explanations, background information, context, practical tips, best practices, examples and, of course, illustrations.  It’s full of links to additional resources to help you go deeper and implement your newly learned search strategies.

This guide covers everything from the basics—like link building, keyword research and how search engines work—to measuring success and usability.  Plus, it explains a lot of terms you’ve probably heard before but weren’t exactly sure what they meant.

Even if you are not a total SEO newbie, there is probably at least a small part of you that could use this refresher course.  It will help to reaffirm your currently held SEO beliefs and there are undoubtedly new tips and tricks you’ll pick up along the way.

Stay tuned to this blog as we’ll continue to post excellent SEO resources as we come across them.