Footbridge Media Wins Accelo’s Community API Competition With Site Health Check App

In 2022, the Accelo Community hosted a competition for existing users. We wanted to discover how they use our rich API to expand the client work management platform’s capabilities. Below, you’ll hear about one talented entrant’s creative build and how it saved them time and cut costs.

1st Place: Footbridge Media

Footbridge Media is a digital marketing and website management firm in Pensacola, Florida. Co-founded by Aaron O’Hanlon and Ryan Stempniewicz in 2004, the business provides web design, SEO, site maintenance and online marketing services for contractors. 

Footbridge implemented Accelo in 2021, primarily to handle client requests using the Tickets product. Chief Technical Officer Garet Green shares how he and his team used the powerful API to customize its functionality and improve their efficiency.

What They Built With Accelo’s API

A small team at Footbridge used to be dedicated to performing site health checks and SEO tests, then producing and sending reports to clients. The process was inefficient and daunting: They checked over 1,500 websites every six months. 

With Accelo, Garet saw an opportunity to automate and speed up this process. In three months, he used the API to build an impressive application that:

• Executes site health checks for client websites
• Emails clients when a health check has been completed and informs them if the Footbridge team is addressing any issues
• Auto-generates requests in Accelo
• Notifies the appropriate department about a site that needs attention 

This API-powered creation allows Footbridge to complete the same amount of work automatically in two days that it used to do in 30–60 days manually.

Garet and his team plan to execute even more elaborate site monitoring using Accelo’s API in the near future.

“If it’s mechanical or redundant, there’s most likely a way to utilize Accelo’s API to automate it and make it more seamless and streamlined.”

- Garet Green, Chief Technical Officer

That’s only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Using Accelo’s API and several others, the team has automated client record creation to save time on rote data entry. When a new client signs up in Footbridge’s billing software, it takes just 60 seconds for webhooks to be sent to Accelo to:

• Create a new company record
• Input custom fields (if applicable)
• Generate new tickets and requests for onboarding

These ongoing processes help the business establish a digital paper trail: The API logs exactly what happens and when, making it easier to detect and correct potential errors and further streamline workflows.

Interested in learning more about what Garet and Footbridge Media built? Check out their GitHub SDK to find out more.

Winning Tips for Succeeding With Accelo’s API

• Reference Accelo’s documentation: Garet describes Accelo’s API documentation as easy to work with: “If you have a development team, I would recommend having them reference the documentation to see where they might be able to reduce redundant labor.”
• Get a strong code editor: Having a good integrated development environment (IDE) is a must, Garet says, because it gives you invaluable pointers along the way.
• Test your builds: Garet and his team use an app called Postman to test API endpoints before fully writing their code. 
• Iterate — and iterate again. “If you’re developing something to interface with Accelo’s API, the first iteration probably shouldn’t be the one you launch,” he says. “Refactoring your application at least once is a good idea.”
  
  

Advantages of a Client Work Management Platform With an API

Capitalizing on the availability and breadth of Accelo’s API has yielded measurable positive results for Footbridge. 

Before Accelo, the business had brought on five new staff to handle administrative work such as site health checks. By getting rid of the large margins of human error with Garet’s application, they shifted those employees’ efforts to more profitable work. He says they’ve cut labor costs and achieved a higher standard of client excellence.

How did the team know Accelo was the right fit before they ever envisioned this outcome?

“When we were choosing a ticketing software, we wanted to find a robust API because we knew that a software that we didn’t develop ourselves may not be the perfect puzzle piece,” Garet explains. “Through the API, anything that wasn’t necessarily solved by the platform already, we could build ourselves. The fact that Accelo had documentation that was kept up was also an important factor.”

Curious about how API-driven smart automation could make Accelo even more valuable for your professional services business? Schedule a demo.