Friday, November 21, 2008

A little boost up from for the sake of time

At the office yesterday we talked with the folks from CraftySpace.com who also front the YourLibrarySite.com and who've been talked about recently by David King, John Blyberg, and others. They build templated and custom Drupal sites for libraries and nonprofits, and by all accounts are pretty good at it.

In our shop, we've been lusting after a new web space / environment / experience for some time now, and although one of our member librarians described our current site as "making her nauseous," we haven't yet moved it up the rungs of the ladder of things to do. Yesterday, it began an upward climb.

Unlike some of the clients CraftySpace works with, we actually have very talented technical staff who are capable of creating / adapting a CMS driven site with modular functionality ... what we don't have enough of is time to do all of the projects on our ladder. In talking with the company, it became instantly obvious that we could work with them to create a site that will meet our short horizon needs, and we could do it quickly. We talked about hosting the site ourselves and being responsible for all maintenance and further development, but we also agreed that we want to maintain a sharing relationship with them (and/or others) to propagate creativity, time-efficiency, and yes ... craftiness!

No deals have been done yet and we may end up going a different direction ... life's like that. But I like the option of being able to lean on a group that is open to sharing in the open-source sense, and can deliver for a set fee.