After graduating from MTSU, Joy began her marketing career with the Nashville Scene. Since then, Joy has spent seven years as the sales lead at Horton Group. Joy's passion is helping her clients to improve their online presence through web development and calculated inbound marketing strategies.
Horton Group is a web, mobile and marketing agency founded in Nashville, TN in 1996. Horton's full marketing services include web design, web development, mobile app development and digital marketing. Horton Group builds websites and critical marketing tools for effective communication on the Internet and beyond. We help our clients get their message out to current and prospective clients and, just as importantly, to maintain their market share.
Sales Lead at Horton Group
Please introduce yourself and where you work?
Horton Group is a full-service digital marketing and design agency headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee. For 20 years we have helped organizations in a wide variety of industries bolster their presence and business online. Using a team-based creative approach, we provide dynamic solutions in inbound marketing, website design (Including Wordpress, Drupal & Custom Squarespace), custom mobile applications, search engine optimization (SEO), social media marketing and more.
What Drupal services do you provide to your customers?
1. Drupal Website creation
2. Drupal Website maintenance
3. Drupal Website hosting
4. Custom functionality
5. Theme work including ARIAA and ADA compliance, UI/UX enhancement, Google event tracking
6. Using Drupal to manage and consuming APIs.
But truly, the reason why we favor Drupal is that we can use it to create about any deliverable.
How do you think Drupal has evolved in the last 5 years?
At its core, Drupal is a PHP based CMS. With the advent of PHP 7, PHP is now a mature Object Oriented Programing language. This alone dramatically improves Drupal's functionality and versatility with code that is more easily written synchronously and asynchronously. Understanding the foundation and implications is the difference between an error message and the White Screen of Death.
In addition, Drupal 8 no longer relies on hard to maintain files to install and manage dependencies, using composer for this purpose. Following the best practices used by modern Node JS package management.
Why do you think Wordpress dominates the market as of now?
Cheap and Easy. It’s great if you have a few types of content. But for any sort of system associated with large data sets, be it content or user, Wordpress inevitably is more trouble than it’s worth.
With Drupal 8 coming in, what is your take on the adoption of Drupal in the coming time?
Horton Group has already started creating new sites exclusively in Drupal 8. Clients that are on Drupal 6 are being migrated to D8, since D6 is at its end-of-life. HG maintains or migrates Drupal 7 sites as best practices dictate.
What is your advice to people who are looking to build expertise in Drupal?
Any development is best-guided goals, be clear in what you are are trying to accomplish in Drupal before you begin. Identify stepwise deliverables and prioritize your list by blockers. Blockers are any functionality that you do not know how to perform, focus on eliminating blockers and building around those successes. For example, if you can’t clear a blocker, the primary goal needs to be reimagined.
