FOWYDB - almost looks like a "bad word", doesn't it? Well, it is something we have been telling ourselves the last couple of days. Focusing on what WE do best. The Worx Company started out as an .asp shop, and when it merged with Meridian Data, well, not much changed. For several years, we stuck with our .asp content management system.
About three years ago, our President, Kurt Vanderwater, decided that we needed an open source content management system. He has always been a huge advocate for open source products, and found Drupal after some research. That's how we got into Drupal - one man's vision to change how we do business.
Three years later, we are still fighting upstream. We have many clients with .asp websites who still host with us. Every day we get e-mails from clients who need us to change a sentence, an event date, a pdf catalog on their website. We have been slowly contacting them to change over to Drupal, because soon, we will no longer support .asp. Period. It's a difficult fight.
Our convictions are tried quite a bit when a BIG client wants to add features to their old site. "We have a perfectly good website, we just want more features on it. So no, we don't want a whole new system." You know, one of those clients that you really want to keep around? But we have to make a decision and tell ourselves that we can't be everything to everyone, and we need to focus on what we do best. Which is Drupal.
Can we start an .asp project? Sure. We still have staff in-house who can probably do that. But we have decided, today, that we would rather have them focus on learning more Drupal, rather than to go back to the old system that we are trying to get rid of. Can we go learn Joomla to suppliment the guy who couldn't make it do what he wanted in the first place? Sure. We have some smart people who could learn anything they wanted. Will we lose these clients if we don't do what they want? Maybe. We are definitely feeling the pressure, but we also feel that if we don't move forward through this growing pain, we won't ever grow to be the Drupal shop we want to be.
FOWYDB - Focus On What You Do Best.
Here is a quote that my mother-in-law sent me, not knowing what I was writing my blog about - I think we are all on the same wavelength!
**It is better to say, "This one thing I do." than to say, "These forty things I dabble in."**
--Washington Gladden
