Congressman Sam Farr
Campaign Management
Our Plasha Will has worked with Congressman Sam Farr for the entire 17 years he's been in the House of Representatives. That's Plasha with Sam in 1993 in the photo at right.Plasha started as an intern, then served for several years as a congressional aide. She has been Sam's campaign manager since 2003. Managing a campaign means many things, including developing a strategy; planning a schedule for every event, speech, interview, commercial -- everything that happens, day by day; managing campaign staff, consultants and volunteers; and managing finances, including fundraising and reporting to elections authorities.
In general, campaign management means taking care of anything and everything, while maintaining a unique relationship of mutual trust with the candidate.17 years later, Plasha and Sam are still a team. At right is a more recent photo, also featuring Plasha's husband Randy and their two boys, Hayden and Miles.
Over the years, Sam has been re-elected with overwhelming margins, earning more than 70 percent of the vote in some campaigns. He wins re-election primarily because he is one of the hardest-working, most effective and most trusted members in the House. But Plasha has helped make it happen, as have more of us at Boots Road in recent years, handling photography, web development and more.
Read on...
Web Development
For Sam Farr's 2010 re-election, we completely redesigned the campaign website at friendsoffarr.org. The original version had originally been built as a "flat" html site, meaning it had no dynamic features, and all changes had to be performed by a webmaster. Several years ago, we inherited that site and migrated it to the Drupal content management system. That made the site much more flexible and enabled non-technical staff to update it.For 2010, we made the graphic design bolder and more expressive of Sam's personality, while adding support for greater interaction with residents of Sam's coastal California district. The new design features less text, more and bigger photos (by our Randy Tunnell), plus slide shows, video, and integration with Sam's social network presence on YouTube, Flickr, Facebook and elsewhere.
As with most of our clients, we also provide Sam with managed hosting. We monitor the site’s status 24 hours a day. If it goes down for some reason, we get an instant alert, and set to work fixing the problem right away. We perform regular, automated backup and archiving, install security updates, check that forms are working correctly -- everything needed to make sure this important site is reliable, secure and responsive.
