Their Success With Duda
DevObal operates as a full-service fulfillment house for agencies and web professionals with a specialty in Duda websites and migrations from legacy platforms such as WordPress.
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75%
reduction in build times
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2
day average delivery time
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Specialized fulfillment for agencies
The Opportunity
DevObal Technologies has been building small business websites since 2002 and has worked with many website builders and CMS platforms. “We’ve built sites with Joomla, DotNetNuke, Squarespace, Wix, WordPress and more over the last 18 years,” said Frank Condon, CEO and Founder of Devobal. For the majority of this time, the company was platform-agnostic. However, by late 2018, Condon realized that for DevObal to continue to grow, he needed to find a consolidated platform that offered a flexible site builder, reliable hosting, a global CDN and free SSL certificates that would enable him to control his costs better.
“We had several hundred websites and several AWS servers hosting these sites,” said Condon. “When I started to review my costs in personnel and infrastructure, I realized I was not headed in a good direction if I was going to continue growing at scale,” he continued. “The more websites I sold, the more IT people, support staff and servers I needed. What DevObal required was one robust platform where we could consolidate all of our website building and hosting.”
New-Found Efficiency & Cost Savings
Condon wanted his next web design platform to act as the engine that would move his agency forward and did his due diligence by investigating a wide variety of website builders and online presence management platforms. After an extensive review of the market, Condon realized the scalable solution he was looking for that would help him take his agency to the next level existed in Duda.
With other solutions, agency owners often need to manage their own operations stack, and independently manage hosting, security, firewalls, CDN and all the other components required to deliver client success at scale. With Duda, those capabilities are simply part of the platform.
“The first thing I noticed about Duda was how flexible the platform was,” said Condon. He continued, “Duda produces very high-quality websites and I loved the platform’s record on site security. Sites going down had long been an issue for us and realizing that my team would be able to focus a lot more on building new sites and less on providing support was one of the key reasons I decided to go with the platform.”
Additionally, Condon pointed to Duda’s team collaboration tools such as Site Comments and the Content Collection form as key factors in choosing the platform for his agency. “When we saw the comment tool, we knew that would be something our clients would love to use. Collecting feedback in a timely fashion was a problem with our last platform,” he said.
Since adopting Duda, the agency owner noted that these unique and powerful tools have prompted both his small business customers and agency clients to become more engaged in the site-building process and QA, which has vastly reduced the time it takes to get site builds completed. “All of our new clients are introduced to the Duda’s Site Comments tool during the site development phase,” said Condon. “Once we set their site to go live, we let them know this is how we prefer to receive their support request. We have not had a single person push back.”
Condon also takes advantage of Duda’s one-of-a-kind Widget Builder. His team refers to this feature as their “magic bullet” and Condon credits it with playing a huge role in DevObal’s success since making the switch to Duda. “The Widget Builder is something that really sets the Duda platform apart for us and gives us a competitive advantage,” said Condon. “So many competitors simply provide you with an app store or plugin directory to access if you need other services or widgets integrated into a website. But with Duda’s widget builder, our team can create whatever we need. It’s a real game-changer and it’s made site building so much faster.”
Condon knew with full confidence after he evaluated Duda that the platform would allow him to streamline DevObal’s operations infrastructure and workflow. “This meant less out-of-pocket costs and an increase in my bottom line,” he stated.
The Results
Shortly after making the switch to Duda, Condon decided DevObal needed to invest 100% in its new platform and re-think how it interacted with its customer base.
“After switching to Duda, we stopped working directly with small business customers and started operating more as a fulfillment shop for other agencies,” said Condon. He continued, “Along with web design and SEO, we now specialize in migrating websites off of legacy platforms to Duda, helping partners with API integrations, and we even provide white label customer support for other Duda agencies.”
Looking forward, Condon stated DevObal is 100% in on Duda and the platform will remain his agency’s mission-critical platform for providing online presence management services well into the future. “We don’t work with other platforms anymore — they’re just not as efficient and comprehensive as Duda. We’re in the process of moving 200 DotNetNuke sites over to Duda, another 100 or so from WordPress and currently manage about 150 sites on the Duda platform,” he said. “It’s clearly the best way forward for DevObal. Our goal is to get our clients the website they want and need, and Duda enables us to do that by keeping all of our sites running, safe, and current with industry trends,” Condon declared. “We couldn’t do what we’re doing without this fantastic platform.”
