Case Study All Work

Long-Term Craft CMS Partnerships

Ongoing development, infrastructure, and support for three Craft CMS clients — the kind of work where knowing the system inside out is the whole point.

  • Role: Lead developer — CMS updates, server infrastructure, security, performance, backups, on-call support
  • Stack: Craft CMS, PHP, Twig, server administration, static page caching, critical CSS
  • Clients: The Betsy Lehman Center (via Raincastle Communications), Janson Media, Seal-a-Deck

What the work looks like

Some of my longest-running client relationships aren’t project-based — they’re ongoing, and several stretch back the better part of a decade or more. I maintain Craft CMS sites, server infrastructure, and hosting for three clients, each with their own scope and integrations. The baseline is the same across all of them — CMS and plugin updates, security patches, performance monitoring, backups, server configuration — plus the things you wouldn’t think to ask for until something breaks at 9 PM on a Thursday.

Each of these clients knows that when something comes up, I’m the person who picks up the phone. I know their systems, their hosting, their content workflows. There’s no onboarding lag when something needs to change — and, just as often, no wasted effort building something that turns out not to be worth building. Years inside a system teach you where it’s worth investing and where it isn’t. That’s the quiet value of a long relationship: I can tell a client what not to do as readily as what to.

The Betsy Lehman Center is a patient safety organization. I’ve worked with them through my partnership with Raincastle Communications since 2016. I maintain three separate Craft CMS sites — two public-facing, and a third research-focused site where doctors study medical errors and how to prevent them. Over the years the work has expanded well beyond CMS development to include UX review, accessibility improvements, and building out their backup and caching infrastructure.

Janson Media is a media distribution company I’ve worked with since 2018. I maintain two Craft CMS sites for them, one with a custom integration connecting their FileMaker database and their payment processor, Tipalti. I also built an embeddable widget using the JW Player API and Vue that displays live and upcoming programming for their “Hungry” streaming service.

Seal-a-Deck builds and restores outdoor living spaces — from preventative maintenance to complete rebuilds. Their Craft CMS site includes a HubSpot integration that ties their web presence to their sales and marketing workflow.

The pattern is the same across all three: the maintenance relationship creates the context for better decisions. When I already understand the system, the hosting, and what the team actually needs, new work starts from a much better place — and the question is never just can we build this? but is this the thing worth building?

Why it matters

Keeping a site healthy over years is a different challenge than building one from scratch — and the two feed each other. Long-term maintenance isn’t glamorous, but it’s where reliability comes from, and it’s where judgment comes from too: after enough years inside a system, I’m not just a safer pair of hands, I’m the person who can tell a client which of the next ten ideas is the one worth doing. That’s why these clients have never had to go looking for a new developer.