Our partnership with Galen Pharma – a part of Almac

Fully managed WordPress hosting and support

Wibble are known as one of the best web design and web development agencies on the island of Ireland and this is something that I am exceptionally proud of as we are still a relatively small agency based in Belfast.

One of the key features of our agency is the amount of effort we put into ongoing support and maintenance. I believe this is one of the reasons we really stand apart from other agencies because a huge part of our day-to-day focus is on providing exceptional support and maintenance services to our clients.

There is no doubt in my mind that we can design and build exceptionally beautiful and functional websites, and our award-winning web design portfolio is a testament to this. But our ability to look after and maintain sites, both built in-house and inherited from other agencies, is a phenomenal string to our bow.

We have built a service around taking over existing WordPress sites that have been built elsewhere, called the Wibble Rescue Package. This is a service we have built where we can pick up any existing WordPress site, migrate it to our servers without any data loss or downtime and we then wrap it in a bundle of services to ensure that the site is online, protected, backed up and fully managed.

Introducing Galen Pharma as our new client

Galen was founded in Craigavon in 1968 by the late Sir Allen McClay. In 1997, Galen became Northern Ireland’s first £1 billion company and in 2002, Sir Allen formed what is now known as the Almac Group and Galen is a proud member of that group of world-class companies in the pharmaceutical and biotech sectors.

Galen approached us because of our reputation for WordPress expertise and dedicated management and support. But it certainly wasn’t a done deal, and we had to pitch and present our plans for the migration management and support of this huge suite of business-critical websites. Galen had a particular focus on our approach to ongoing security and monitoring, and what processes we had in place to ensure that the site would be secured and monitored on an ongoing basis.

I am exceptionally proud that Galen, with all of its resources and reach, chose Wibble to be their web support and hosting agency. It is a huge get for us and I was absolutely delighted when we were given the good news. It’s a huge indicator of where Wibble are currently standing in the industry. Anyone who reads my web design blogs regularly will know that I want Wibble to be the best web design agency on the island of Ireland. I literally never stop slabbering on about it and picking up a client like Galen Pharma is such a strong indicator that we are there or very close.

Website migrations & dedicated WordPress hosting

With a company the size of Galen, they obviously had a large digital presence with upwards of 13 different sites being utilised by their sales and marketing teams globally. Galen were utilising another studio to manage their hosting and maintenance, but that agency was no longer able to manage the account, unfortunately.

Our strengths very much lie in WordPress design, development, and management. However, we are also a leading fully managed WordPress host and this was a requirement for this client. We have set up and manage a relatively complex hosting environment for all of these sites with deployments and backups, monitoring, firewalls, and all security requirements are in place and managed entirely by us.

Due to the legal requirements around pharma products, we had to ensure a multi-environment setup for each site to allow for legal approvals and management of content at a granular level. This environment was set up by our development team and is now entirely managed by our support and maintenance team, which is a testament to the skills and expertise that we have in-house.

Ongoing website maintenance and support

We didn’t build any of the sites that we currently have on the Galen environment, but that is not a problem. We are responsible for the security, upkeep, and support of all of these sites from a maintenance point of view. I have written previously about our approach to ongoing WordPress maintenance and support via a principle called the Golden Gate Bridge Approach and we have applied this approach exactly the same to Galen. We look after all WordPress core updates, plugin updates, environment updates, security patches, backups, monitoring – the whole works. We are their go-to for all of their web requirements.

As well as the fundamental maintenance and support, we provide more dedicated help and support: the Galen suite of products has a fantastic sales and marketing team behind them, and they have ongoing requirements around updates, changes, content updates etc and we are there to put these things in place. We have a process in place to allow for the rapid communication, pushing, testing and then deployment of changes across the range of sites, which has been a key feature of our maintenance offering to date.

Progress

The project has been run in a relatively short amount of time, so far the engagement from the Galen team and the improvements that Wibble has made to the sites have been great to see. We are working with the Galen team to further improve all of the sites with new features and business development initiatives to help with their plans for further growth and improvements.

This project is truly one of the ones I am most proud of. It is a huge indicator of our standing as a dedicated WordPress and web agency. I am immensely proud of the team within Wibble and have seen fantastic feedback coming back from Galen directly on how pleased they are with the level of support and maintenance that our team are providing.

Contact

If you want to work with one of, if not the best, web design, web development, support, and maintenance agencies in Ireland, get in touch. We are small in size but, as indicated by this project, we are punching well above our weight and providing exceptional development and support services to global powerhouses, like Galen Pharma, part of the Almac group.