Agathon Group - "The Good Stuff"

It’s been live for a couple weeks now, but we wanted to highlight our latest site launch for  ReFrame Media – Walk the Way.  This site presented an interesting challenge, because the primary purpose of the site seemed so obvious – to watch the Walk the Way videos.  However, we wanted to add functionality that would allow users to customize the content in creative and unique ways in their own playlists, allowing you to add videos you particularly like into lists that you can then watch again or share.

The other challenge with this site was using responsive design to ensure the video player was always the focal point when viewing on any device, while simultaneously making sure  the playlists functionality remained intuitive and easy to use.  For a while, we in the web community designed full desktop sites, and then separate mobile sites, redirecting the user to that when a mobile device was detected.  Now responsive design techniques give us the ability to design one site that works for virtually all devices.  Feel free to drag around the corner of your browser to see how the site moves around (that is all the rage these days with us web nerds ).

There’s a concept that’s becoming more and more applicable called “Mobile First” which just means designing for mobile devices first, and then ultimately moving back to the desktop site.  I’m of the opinion that this is a great exercise even if the site you were making is one you don’t want to design responsively or for mobile devices at all, because it helps you focus on what exactly your site needs to do, helping you to simplify your design and make it far more effective.  I think we were able to achieve that quite well with Walk the Way.

The success of this project has definitely reinforced the “Mobile First” philosophy to us, and we look forward to finding ways to focus and simplify sites for devices of all shapes and sizes.  Cheers to another successful site launch!

The unofficial motto of Agathon Group is, “Do Good”. But what do those words really mean? They are our moral and ethical compass; the two words that provide internal checks-and-balances as we navigate our work and relationships. Still, that’s not enough.

Over the past year, we’ve been more intentional about Doing Good not just with our clients and partners, but also in ways that extend beyond our vocation to other interests, or specifically the interests of our staff.  As members of the Agathon Group team have shared their passions, we’ve begun looking for ways to support and encourage those.  Two recent examples:

1. (1) This coming weekend Morgan Foster and his wife Corinne are running a half marathon to raise funds and awareness for the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation.  Agathon Group is a corporate sponsor for the event, encouraging both the Fosters in their running lifestyle, and the efforts of CAASE.
2. (2) The educational system in Chile is struggling, even moreso in rural areas.  In response to that, Conosur Christian Ministries is establishing a new K-12 school outside the city of Santiago.  Colegio Cristiano Conosur is, “designed to reach students with high academic and leadership potential who might typically be overlooked because of the lower economic class of their family.”  Their particular emphasis on entrepreneurism is a natural overlap with our own beliefs and strengths.  Agathon Group is providing a portion of the financing to get the school off the ground, and they are on track to hold their first classes in early 2013.  And as a fun side note, Agathon Group’s Paul Yuen designed the official school crest!

Both these examples are small in their scope — we’re not curing cancer or anything — but our hope is that we can extend Doing Good to make a small difference in the lives and world around us.

Twelve years ago, Agathon Group launched as a small lifestyle business. For us, it was a way to get paid for work we loved, helping fantastic organizations solve interesting problems. As we like to joke – win / win / win! In our own small way, we build and host websites that make the world a better place.

We’ve grown orders of magnitude over the years, with staff across six timezones developing and hosting not just small mom-and-pops but also Fortune 100s and some of the most respected non-profits on the planet. Over the years, as we’ve undergone that scary, exciting, and rewarding growth, we’ve gleaned truths that have helped maintain a consistent Agathon Group core identity. Conveniently, there are twelve:

clients

(1) The best client relationships are like marriages. That’s a good thing, and a reminder to invest in them and tend them gently.

(2) Sometimes clients insist on bad technical directions. Our job is to listen, push back when appropriate, and then do everything we can to help them succeed. Bad direction often hides a core truth we need to pluck out – clients know their own businesses better than we do!

(3) Relationships trump profits. When we have to choose, we honor the relationships (and the profits eventually take care of themselves). We value clients we can work with again and again, even if there are specific projects where we have to say, “you’d be better off going to someone else for that piece.”

(4) No two clients are alike, and therefore no two clients will need the exact same solution. Our job is to to help sift through priorities and tailor our work to the specifics. Like a tailor, we prefer certain fabrics and styles, but each cut will be a perfect, unique fit.

team

(5) The best results come from giving individual staff a sense of purpose, helping them achieve mastery, and then staying out of the way. (Hat tip to Dan Pink for expressing this so well.)

(6) Telecommuting is awesome for cranking out projects, yet face time is needed for the chemistry. We prefer to brainstorm together, then execute whenever and wherever works best.

(7) Mastery can be taught. I’m not sure the same can be said for attitude. Hire for heart then hone any additional skills still needed.

(8) People are not interchangeable cogs. More often than not, we’ve discovered that the things our staff are best at aren’t precisely the same reasons we hired them. We want to be flexible enough to spot these opportunities and adjust.

ethos

(9) Not all web developers and hosts out there are good at what they do. (There are some!) The best way to ensure we keep working on interesting projects with interesting people is to always strive to be among the best.

(10) You can’t stay in business without understanding your financials, but the finances are a means to an end, not the end goal itself.

(11) It’s all about the people: our own team, our clients, their users. While we like building websites, it’s ultimately just an opportunity to work with people we like and grow together.

(12) Our unofficial motto is Do Right, and we’ve never gone wrong by heeding that.

I have no idea if these truths apply as profoundly to other situations outside Agathon Group. Hopefully a few of them will stick with you as they’ve done with us over the past twelve years (looking for twelve more). We’ll change and learn new lessons, but the Agathon Group core abides.

Much has been made over the recent years—including on this blog!—about the benefits of cloud computing. However, with all of the past hype comes the present reality that, just like any other single technology or product, cloud computing is not a panacea meant to solve all of your organization’s problems.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the rash of “Dear John” letters companies have written to cloud providers. The most recent, entitled “Why We Moved Off the Cloud”, comes from Mixpanel Engineering just one short year after they moved wholesale from Rackspace to Amazon’s cloud. They highlight the cloud’s strengths, particularly in Amazon’s cloud, namely: low initial costs, fast deployment times, hourly billing, and cheap CPU performance. These strengths are significant… but they don’t tell the whole story.

Mixpanel writes that, ultimately, “highly variable performance” led to their decision to ditch the cloud. This is not a problem that was introduced with cloud computing, of course; any technology that shares physical resources across multiple clients runs the risk of those clients affecting each other’s performance. There are applications for which that’s just fine, where the risk of seeing slower web response times is mitigated by the fact that the site might only see a few hundred visitors a day. But clearly, the risk was not acceptable for Mixpanel, and they moved (back) to a dedicated hosting environment.

Unfortunately, Mixpanel didn’t ask us before they gave up on the cloud and moved back to dedicated hosting. (I kid, of course; Mixpanel doesn’t even know us!) If they had asked, I would have told them about what might be the perfect solution for their particular case: private clouds. Combining the strengths of cloud computing and dedicated hosting, a private cloud would have allowed them to deploy quickly, scale up or down easily (within the constraints of their dedicated physical hardware), and manage virtualized environments seamlessly. It also would have given them the assurance of using dedicated hardware, where they would not have had to worry about their neighbor creating an I/O or network storm and making their application 6x slower, as they experienced on Amazon.

The landscape makes it easy to conclude that there are only two options: dedicated hosting or cloud computing. The major cloud players have especially tried to fuel this false dichotomy, setting up the new, glamorous cloud computing against the old, dusty dedicated hosting. The question of where one should host and using which technologies is best answered by the adage we repeat on a regular basis: “Use the correct tool for the job.” Which is why Agathon Group specializes in helping organizations find the best tool for their job, be it shared cloud, private cloud, or old-school dedicated hosting. Contact us to start that discussion today!

Agathon Group often helps with “rescue missions,” where an organization already has an application or site, but for one reason or another it needs a serious intervention to take it to the next level of growth. The situation needs rescuing before it reaches critical mass.

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Congratulations to Agathon Group art director Paul Yuen for winning a silver ADDY® award this weekend for his beautiful design of ChurchJuice. ADDYs are awarded in recognition of creative excellence in advertising and design, and he was up against stiff competition!

ChurchJuice, a site to help “energize” church communications, is a production of Re:Frame Media. Although Paul was the vision behind the designs, this site was truly a team effort, with strategy provided by 5Q Communications and site programming by Re:Frame’s own Marc Miller.

Well done, everyone!

Too often internal departments within an organization are the biggest obstacle to innovation. Who can blame them? Change, particularly the kinds of radical shifts brought by cloud computing, can be scary. But it also offers the promise of lower costs, greater flexibility, and often better security than traditional hosting options.

Agathon Group CTO Peter Green recently participated in a series of video interviews by CA Technologies with leading cloud hosting providers, talking about getting started in the cloud, and the need for IT departments to be part of the solution rather than the problem. Watch the short interview for more…

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Today and tomorrow (Nov. 1-2), Joel and I are in San Diego attending An Event Apart, a design conference for people who make websites.

We’re excited to hear what many of the leaders in UX design like Dan Cederholm, Aaron Walter, Jeff Veen and many others will have to share.

We’re also looking forward to connecting with those who are attending. If you are at the conference, connect with us on Twitter and let us know! We’ll grab a bite to eat and share ideas!

See you in San Diego!

The Internet Ministry Conference is back!  A couple years ago, Agathon Group and loads of friends, clients, and partners were at the 2008 Internet Ministry Conference, thinking it would be the last IMC ever.

Well through the work of many people (most notably David Korff), the conference returns to the currently very windy Grand Rapids, Michigan (and that from the Chicago guy!).  I will be Agathon Group’s representation at the conference this year, and I’m excited to catch up with a lot of people I haven’t seen face to face in a while, and excited to see what will hopefully be the restart of wonderful things to come with this conference.  If any of you out there will also be attending, make sure to track me down and say hey.  I’d love to catch up and hear how things are going in your neck of the internet.

Cheers!

Agathon Group is seeking an experienced web programmer to join our team and give us the ability to tackle larger and more interesting projects. This is a full-time staff position as a telecommuter, and requires candidates to be eligible for employment in the United States. Contractors and agencies will not be considered.

We need someone who is:

• Self-motivated, who works diligently with minimal supervision;
• Proficient in both PHP and Ruby on Rails — we’ll ask for sample sites and detailed descriptions of your role in each;
• Capable of hand-coding XHTML + CSS;
• Confident in your wielding of jQuery;
• Well-versed in web development and design, even if you may not have mastered all aspects;
• A strong written and verbal communicator;
• Motivated by solving hard technical challenges in an elegant fashion;
• Comfortable with distributed development, version control and Linux servers; and
• Available immediately or sooner.

Several of our largest clients in the coming year are Christian non-profits. If this is a concern, then perhaps this isn’t the right position for you at this time.

Agathon Group is a virtual company with staff distributed across five states and six timezones. We need someone we can trust to be highly motivated to produce good work even when we can’t look over your shoulder. You also need to be very good at what you do, because our clients trust us to deliver higher quality work than they can get anywhere else.

In return, we offer great team chemistry, interesting projects/challenges, competitive pay and a decent benefits package.

Please email hr@agathongroup.com to get the ball rolling.