Agency Profile:
Gere+Donovan
“I spent much of my early career working on sites for very large corporations – using multi-million dollar content management systems that fell far short of the intuitive functionality that concrete5 offers for free. Those systems were inflexible and hard to use; it seemed like you had to call in eight IT people to recompile the entire site if you wanted to change a phone number. concrete5 is the CMS the world has been waiting for.” – Mike Donovan Hausler, partner and creative director of Gere Donovan Creative, Inc.
Who we are
Gere Donovan Creative is a strategic communication and design agency with offices in Portland, Oregon and Anchorage, Alaska. GDC creates innovative brand identity material, integrated advertising and marketing campaigns, online and social media campaigns, corporate and consumer websites, and other creative collateral for companies across a span of industries – from tourism and higher education to finance and high tech.
Challenge
GDC designs a lot of websites – from fairly straight-forward campaign microsites to more complex sites that involve sophisticated e-commerce implementations, live video streaming, and personalized URLs. Increasingly, the agency’s clients had been asking for the ability to manage updates and content themselves; they don’t want to have to come back to the agency every time they want to add or change something simple on the site. GDC has been able to deliver content management solutions in a myriad of ways – ranging from customizing existing blogging tools, to open source and corporate content management systems. At times, the agency even built its own CMS solutions. But, ultimately, the agency decided it was not in the software business. GDC set out to find an easy-to-use, scalable, stable CMS to recommend to its clients.
The designers at GDC wondered: Wouldn’t it be great if there was a robust – and free –
CMS we could use to build complex sites with a variety of content, but still simple enough for our clients to use every day?
Solution
GDC found that solution to be concrete5. The GDC team had used earlier versions of the concrete5 platform to build elaborate and highly-branded corporate websites, including a customer service extranet with online forums and a slick ticketing system. They had long been impressed with the platform’s ease of use and sophisticated content management features. With the current iteration of concrete5, they found everything they liked in the past had been improved exponentially, with many new features added and possibilities opened up. GDC has already developed several sites using concrete5, and appreciates that it’s solid, scalable, extensible and “dead easy to use”. What’s more, GDC’s clients have become immediate fans of concrete5, too.
GDC is currently developing several new sites using concrete5. Its open-source based platform interacts seamlessly with the majority of clients’ installed technologies. Two of the sites the agency has developed using concrete include regenteducation.com and monsoonworks.com.
Why we love concrete5
We love concrete5 because it allows us to create great-looking and highly sophisticated sites with a rockin’ content management system ready to go. concrete5 lets us focus on what we do best – finding creative and effective ways to tell our clients stories.
One thing we really appreciate about concrete5 is that you can start by designing a very simple site, and then easily scale it later if you want to add functionality. It’s clear that concrete5 is built by very smart people who understand the web. In fact, concrete5 is hands-down the best content management system in the industry today – open source or not.
