Why NEWMEDIA?
Initially, prior to contacting NEWMEDIA, they had selected another web development partner for the project. Contracts were signed, timelines were planned, and the TV show went into production. Then, there was a problem.
Apparently, the corporate technical leadership at CBS had bad experiences with Java and Ruby, both of which were specified as components of the solution with the web vendor. Compromises could not be made, and suddenly CBS was looking for a new partner, this time with far less time to play with than originally.
They found NEWMEDIA, and we met with them immediately to review their goals, discuss realistic expectations – with both time and budget – and make a plan. It turned out that, by utilizing Drupal’s core functionality combined with several preexisting modules, we could focus our efforts on the truly custom aspects of the application, maximizing the overall budget to the extent that we were able to deliver a larger functional set in a shorter span of time than had been the case with the original partner.
While we didn’t handle the branding aspect of the creative project, leaving that instead to CBS’ own internal Art Direction resources (with moderate collaboration with us), our Denver web designers were fully responsible for the web development side, creating some surprisingly specific and custom solutions in a very short period of time (60 days from start to finish). After all, whether or not the project stakeholders may change the requirements, if there is a TV show in production, going on the air on a fixed date, then that would be what we call a hard deadline.
As the project lead at CBS put it:
“We came to NEWMEDIA with a vision for our site, but it’s a long way from vision to reality. We had high expectations, a tight budget and an aggressive timeline – NEWMEDIA met or exceeded all of our demands. Along the way, the team was open to our questions, responsive to our changes, and even willing to brainstorm new concepts. The final product was even better than the vision we initially brought to them. It simply wouldn’t have been possible without the team from NEWMEDIA.”