Guide to Drupal for agencies

It allows your clients to update their content, create blogs & communities and make sales online.

Why is Drupal right for your clients?

Drupal allows you to provide powerful and expandable websites. It reduces lead times in creating websites compared to bespoke solutions which in turn reduces costs.

You don’t need to reinvent the wheel every project as there are many thousands of modules available.

It also means your clients aren’t tied to one developer or one development company as it’s a widely known system.  Its familiarity and flexibility are core strengths. When the time comes to make changes, your clients won’t be tied to a system that no-one understands - well worth thinking about at the start of a project.

What is it used for?

Drupal is used for a variety of projects from simple brochure sites through to community driven and e-commerce sites.

Common functionality Drupal offers includes:

• Manage site content and structure
• Search engine optimisation settings including titles, meta tags, HTML & XML sitemaps
• Blogs, forums and online communities
• E-commerce and e-business
• Integration with third party systems such as Salesforce and Sage
• Social media integration
• Bespoke functionality specific to your clients requirements

How to get Drupal right

As with most off the shelf systems, it is vital to use Drupal in the right way. Common mistakes made by developers unfamiliar with Drupal include:

• Editing the Drupal "core" code - doing this makes Drupal virtually impossible to update and upgrade.
• Putting modules and themes in the wrong location - again, makes updating Drupal very difficult.
• "Hacking" contributed module code - makes updating modules impossible, particularly for other developers.
• Configuring user permissions incorrectly - this can lead to a system vulnerable to security exploits.
• This list could go on...

Benefits to you and your clients

We’re always up front about the fact that Drupal is not for everyone. Having said that, it works fantastically for the majority of clients.

The main benefits of using Drupal include:

• Flexible - with some off the shelf solutions, you have to adhere to their way of working. Not with Drupal.
• Powerful - used by websites large and small, including The White House, Twitter Developers, Paypal and of course... our site! 
• Customisable - although many modules are available for Drupal, it is possible to create bespoke functionality through custom modules. 
• Stable and secure - Drupal has a dedicated security team as well as a huge developer community which means code is vetted and fixed if issues are found.
• Supported - a large community of developers and development companies means that your clients' website will always be supported
• Future proof - whatever direction your clients business goes, Drupal can adjust. If a client wants a redesign, reuse the infrastructure and reskin as required.

Conclusion

We started using Drupal 3 years ago and haven't looked back... Having created bespoke solutions in the past, we were sceptical about using an off the shelf solution.

However, it has increased the power and flexibility of the solutions we offer while reducing lead times and cost - all good things in our opinion!

Why not give it a try? And if you’ve got any questions, or need a hand with a Drupal project, then we’d love to help.