15 things we’ve achieved at Annertech over the years

When Annertech was formed in 2008 it had two staff members – Managing Director Stella Power and her husband Dermot Frost. Stella had just quit her job to start her own Drupal specialist agency. She was working from her Dublin home, and initially started creating websites for organisations in the non-profit sector. 

15 years later things have changed a lot for Annertech. Here are some of the highlights.

Annertech’s first contract with a household name in Ireland, Irish charity Trócaire, came in 2009, a few months after Annertech started. Every school child in Ireland was introduced to the charity from their Trócaire Box fundraising campaigns, so it was a very recognisable brand. 

The Drupal Ireland Association was formed in 2010. Finally there was an official organisation to manage the promotion of Drupal in Ireland, including events such as DrupalCamp Ireland. Annertech’s Director of Technology Alan Burke was the association’s first chairperson, and Stella (Annertech’s Managing Director) was treasurer. 

Widely acknowledged as Ireland’s most prestigious digital awards, Annertech’s work was nominated for three Eircom spider awards, as they were known then, in 2011. Trócaire had been nominated for two awards – best charity and best campaign – and runireland.com were in the running for the community award – which they won.

Drupal Developer Days is an annual event that brings together the people who develop, design and support the Drupal platform. Annertech was a silver sponsor for Dublin's Drupal Developer Days 2013. That year’s event was a special one, because it coincided with the final days of development ahead of a Drupal 8 code freeze, and a week-long Drupal 8 core code sprint was held in the week leading up to the Dublin event.

Although they aren't currently at Annertech, the Royal Museums Greenwich project in 2013 was a turning point. Not only was it Annertech’s first overseas client and a household name, it was also a massive project that led to the development of the Managed Services team. 

These maintainers oversee the development of a module, theme, or other subset of Drupal core. Mark, who is Annertech's Director of Development, became a core maintainer in 2017.  This is an incredible honour, and a sign of his dedication to Drupal.
 

In 2016, Annertech won "Web Agency of the Year", along with "Best Website in Ireland", "Most Beautiful Website in Ireland" and "Best Arts and Culture Website" for the Ireland.ie website, a project commemorating the anniversary of the 1916 Rising. 

It's a project that has been kept as an archive that will live (for a bit longer) which is not typical for websites – once a new version of a site comes the old site is usually retired never to be seen again. 

Annertech staff also presented five sessions at DrupalCon, more than any other European agency.

As is tradition, the Irish Drupal community ran the infamous Trivia Night, to a record breaking crowd of more than 300 participants. 

Trivia Nights at Drupalcon are an Annertech creation and production. They’ve become a popular addition to the conference, and we are proud to be leading this. The first Trivia Night was held at DrupalCon Chicago in 2011. There were only 20 people in the room. Now, the events are usually packed to the rafters.

Annertech is a fully distributed agency. This means that we don’t have a physical Annertech office. Our team members work remotely, and has done so right from the beginning. 

We are based in many counties in Ireland, including Galway, Mayo, Tipperary, Kerry, Wicklow and Dublin. 

We have a number of team members in Northern Ireland and the UK. And we have had people working from across Europe, including in the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Croatia, France, Spain, Sweden, Greece, Romania and Luxembourg, as well as in non-EU countries such as Lebanon, Taiwan and even the United States, despite the time difference.

In 2022, Team Annertech passed the 40-person mark for the first time. Although many Annertechies are developers, we have a number of team members who focus on other parts of the business, such as sales and marketing, content, SEO and digital marketing, finances and HR. 

Stella Power, Annertech’s Managing Director, was named as the winner in the Women in Digital category in the Digital Business Ireland-permanent tsb National Digital Awards 2021! It was a proud moment for Annertech as Stella's contribution to the digital world was acknowledged by the business community in Ireland.

We’re incredibly proud of our involvement with the LocalGov Drupal project. This project was started in the UK when local governments decided to pool their resources and share the code for their websites to create even better services for their constituents. In 2022, the first Irish council – Tipperary County Council - joined LocalGov Drupal.

Click on the images below to read more about:

1. LocalGov Drupal – what it's about and how it can benefit you
2. Our LGD Microsites Platform service – the easy way to manage multiple microsites
3. How Tipperary County Council’s LGD website  ties in perfectly with the Irish Government's Build to Share initiative

We built the fundraising platform for the Irish Cancer Society's Daffodil Day in 2021. The platform needed to be able to handle a large volume of traffic and transactions within a relatively small space of time for the Daffodil Day feature on the Late Late Show. 

The site would eventually enable 95,000 visitors to donate €2.5 million in just three hours during the show, so it was important that the system that we developed would be highly resilient in order to handle the traffic and the donations in a timely and performant manner.

The Daffodil Day project won numerous accolades – including a prestigious Digital Media Award!

Annertech UK officially opened for business towards the end of 2021. The new branch of Annertech was started to support the growing number of clients and staff members based in the UK.

In 2022 Annertech was appointed by the Crown Commercial Service as a supplier on two of its digital marketplace frameworks: G-Cloud 13 and Digital Outcomes and Specialists 6. This allows us to do business with the public sector in the UK.

Conclusion

These 15 highlights were selected by Annertech's directors and longest serving team members as the projects or events that they're most proud of. 

We'd like to take this opportunity to thank all our clients, many of whom have been with us for several years, as well as all the team members we've had the pleasure of working with during that time. 

We are looking forward to the next 15!