Problem: Flakey webmasters
In early 2008, we noticed an unfortunate trend in website development – flakey webmasters. This often lead to sticky situations and disputes between business owners and the person/company managing their website. Something as simple as changing the phone number on the company website could take months because of difficulty communicating. Time to make what seem like straightforward changes end up taking hours and driving up costs. The web design company goes out of business, the contractor they hired is out of town, or they're simply unresponsive to support requests.
Solution: Do it yourself with a content management system
We researched the many content management systems (CMS) available and chose Drupal as our CMS of choice. With its huge library of modules, flexibility, and active development, it put it miles ahead of any other open source CMS. You may be familiar with blogging software such as WordPress or sites like Google Blogspot and wordpress.com. These offer an elegant and easy way for site owners to publish their own content by just logging into a website on any computer with Internet access.
Room to grow
What makes Drupal so powerful is it goes beyond being a simple way of adding, editing, and deleting content from your website to being an actual development platform, enabling us to develop feature rich sites for our clients. It goes beyond being a blog engine or CMS and becomes almost any type of website you can imagine – photo gallery, support forum, social networking, portfolio, e-commerce, and more. The possibilities are endless and that's why we confidently recommend it to our clients.
Ease of Use
The learning curve for Drupal can range from very short for things like adding and editing content, to very long for things like advanced user and content management. We find that if our clients are comfortable enough to use word processing programs and composing an email with some graphics and font styles, they'll pick up on Drupal within half an hour.
Security and Reliability
What's wonderful about large scale open-source projects like Drupal is that all users are able to review and modify the code, revealing and patching up any vulnerabilities. The end result is an extremely well reviewed and documented software package that is secure.
What does it cost?
Drupal is open-source (free!) and anybody can download and use it. However, with all the features and flexibility, it does take a bit of customizing and there is a moderate learning curve, so professional help may be necessary.
For more information, visit the official Drupal website.
If you're interested in starting your own Drupal website, give us a shout. We can explain the whole process and get you set up.