Until fairly recently the blogosphere has been relatively quiet with regard to Kentico, but as the Kentico story begins to gain traction, there is one voice that is becoming increasingly recognised, that of Ralph Spandl, Interactive Architect and founder of r42.

Although almost accidentally, Ralph’s series of blog posts on his use of Kentico have become a starting point, a research resource, and in many ways, a bible for other Kentico developers worldwide.

In the beginning

Ralph was designing for interactivity well before the heady days of the modern internet, with his first real break coming way back, while completing a Masters of Visual Communication at the University of Fine Arts in Berlin.

Taken under the wing of one of his lecturers Prof. Joachim Sauter, who also happened to be one of the founders of ART+COM, a new media agency, Ralph was hired on a part-time basis, meaning that half his was spent time working with ART+COM, and the other half was spent completing his Masterpiece.

ART+COM had just been fortunate enough to land a major contract with T-Mobile (formerly Telekom), researching interfaces and interactive applications that might prove practical on a broadband connection, and Ralph was taken on in order to bring his knowledge and ideas surrounding user interfaces to developer driven projects to the table.

This very quickly meant that, at a time when user experience design and information architecture were largely theoretical concepts, Ralph found himself at the forefront and exploring what would later become best practice. Ralph had found his passion, and even his Masterpiece focused on developments within the usability space, working with an architect to design and develop applications that allowed 3D models of buildings and skyscrapers to be visualised online. The resulting application (although struggling on the bandwidth and CPU capabilities of the day) even allowed for the rendering of environmental factors and infrastructure details, within an interface that allowed a user to zoom into buildings and perform fly-throughs.

Moving on

On completing his studies, instead of staying at ART+COM, Ralph opted to leave Berlin. “I couldn’t stand the city anymore. I like big cities, but Berlin is very dark, grey, no snow, no mountains, and I found the people very unfriendly. In the six years I studied there I enjoyed it a lot, but in the end I just couldn’t take it anymore.”

During his studies, Ralph had spent some time in Canada, gaining experience at an advertising agency in Montreal. This experience highlighted two things – that he did not want to work in advertising, and that Montreal was not Berlin.

It was here that he had met Matthew Alapi, the founder of another agency, Mosaic, and asked for a job.

“I told him I wanted to get into this interactive stuff and that I didn’t want to do print anymore. So he said ‘let’s try it - come over’. When we started off I still did a lot of print, but the goal was to push websites and CD-ROMs.“

Being 1997, it took a lot of effort for Mosaic to sell websites, but Ralph persisted, determined to follow his passion for interactive media.

While the web was a hard sell back then, Ralph was able to spent much of his six years at Mosaic learning as much as he could about designing and programming for the web.

“We finally had a client where we could build a website where we needed databases so I learned how to set up a database, first using Access then moving onto SQL Server. I was doing everything in ASP and I was doing everything – the programming, the design, the HTML, everything. Even though I came from a designer background, back then you had to pick up everything. You had to learn the programming skills, even if you weren’t that good at it.”

With the bandwidth not what it is today, Ralph often found it more logical to create CD-ROMs as opposed to websites and give them out with brochures. However over time, capabilities improved, and online technologies were introduced, in particular Flash and e-commerce, and this led to new opportunities.

After six years though, Matthew developed a new partnership with someone very keen on print, and not all that keen on interactive media, and so, with the writing on the wall at Mosaic, Ralph decided to go out on his own.

“I still have an excellent relationship with Matthew. We just had a talk back then and I decided that if there was not much more exciting work then I might just go off myself and build something on my own.”

Stepping out

After leaving Mosaic, Ralph started working as a freelancer, a career which continued for the next two to three years. “I was working from home, and as it is with freelancers I had to get myself organised and build up my clientele. I was still doing a little bit of work for Mosaic with clients who had their websites hosted there, but it wasn’t that much anymore. The first year was not easy, but it picked up fairly quickly.”

Work began to roll in through word of mouth. “Everything goes on client satisfaction. They like what I do, they tell their friends, and their friends call me.”

After two years or so, Ralph partnered up with a fellow developer named Francis, with whom he founded Quattrocento, and decided to move out of home into an office to attract higher profile clientele. “When you’re a freelancer there are limits. At some point the companies don’t trust you anymore. They say ‘who is this guy doing my website – he might be gone tomorrow.’ Having an office is expensive, but it changes the client’s perception – you are a not freelancer anymore, you are a company, and you are going to be around for a while.”

Ralph continued with Quattrocento for around three to four years, at which point he and Francis began to have different ideas about the direction of the company – Francis wanted to move more towards communications, while Ralph wanted to stick to interactive and websites.

“These days everything is becoming so specialised that you cannot do both in a small company. It would just not work out.”

Founding r42 and Kentico

True to his passion, Ralph founded r42 in September 2008, an agency built upon website development and interactive media design that he was able to get started with the support of Alice O’Brien - who he’d worked with at Mosaic, during his time as a freelancer, and at Quattrocento.

The work at r42 lent itself nicely to content management, and this led to his discovery of Kentico. “Kentico is something that I had been looking for since I started doing websites and databases.” “Very quickly I realised that you have to separate content from structure from representation. In the beginning things were more laborious, with changes having to be made manually, and interfaces having to be created for e-commerce sites. It became obvious that this was expensive, and that not many clients would be able to invest that much money.”The work at r42 lent itself nicely to content management, and this led to his discovery of Kentico. “Kentico is something that I had been looking for since I started doing websites and databases.”

“Very quickly I realised that you have to separate content from structure from representation. In the beginning things were more laborious, with changes having to be made manually, and interfaces having to be created for e-commerce sites. It became obvious that this was expensive, and that not many clients would be able to invest that much money.”

As a solution to this Ralph began building his own CMS, but he realised very early on that the time and development required developing and maintaining this would be too much to make it worth it, and so began the hunt for a good off-the-shelf CMS. After trialling the most promising of those available and being turned off by bad support, awful interfaces and inadequate features, he came across Kentico.

“I installed Kentico and tried it out on a website on a one month free trial. The support was really good, and I was even given a longer trial – it was all no problem. I reported some bugs and the bugs were fixed during my trial period. It was a completely different experience – they really listened.”

“We got an opportunity to use it on a website we needed to build quickly and I decided to take the gamble. The project we did was quite large – over 100 pages – and it went well. The client was super happy, and at this point I decided that we should build everything with the same system.”

On a recent trip to Prague, Ralph found time to meet up with some of the guys from Kentico. “They are really nice guys. Petr seems to be the genius behind everything, but they are really nice and humble and friendly. I had a list of things I still don’t like in Kentico and we had a great discussion about them and I think most of it will come out in the newer versions. I felt comfortable with the people and felt comfortable with the software.”

Getting social

Surprisingly, Ralph is relatively inexperienced with social media. “Social media is something new to me. I have to admit that I didn’t believe in blogs, or Facebook or Twitter. I thought that this is just stuff for people that just want to communicate on the web. I was never a great communicator – I just never thought I had to say a lot. Everything was written there, why should I have to add my stuff in here.”

This changed as he began writing about Kentico to convince clients that it was the best solution for their project. “Every time I meet a new client I have to repeat myself, showing off all of the features, so I started writing articles. Then when I got a new client I would just send them a link to all all of my blog posts, and they could read up on what I’m preaching.”

But he’d tapped into something. Other people were picking up on the content in his posts, even Kentico. “They talked about my blog posts on their website and made me sort of ‘famous’. I started to think about using social media to create a network - to get out there and say ‘this is my point of view’ and start some conversation. I realised that you have to make some sort of fuss to get people to pay attention. It’s not good enough to be good. You have to tell people that you are good to have them know about you.”

Ralph has become a bit of an accidental celebrity in the Kentico space. “People think I’m the big Kentico expert, but I would say there are hundreds of people out there who know a lot more about Kentico than I do, they just don’t talk about it.”

Accidental or not though, Ralph is certainly becoming revered as a specialist when it comes to Kentico. “I don’t just go off the Developer Guide and then just write about it. Everything I write about I have tried before. I don’t go into major detail though. I give people the basics.”

With the passionate voices of others like Ralph, Kentico are slowly managing to create a community around licensed software, in a similar manner to that of open source software. “I am committed to Kentico as a CMS, so anything I can do to help them and build a community I am happy to do.”

And like most of us he also commits to more than that. “I am going to try to do one Tweet a day, and two blog posts a week, so let’s see how I go.”

Will he hit two blog posts a week? Maybe not, But will the posts he write be read by an avid Kentico community? Without doubt.

r42
the r42 blog

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