Using Drupal as the Framework to Your Company's Online Success

What is Drupal?

Drupal is an open source content management system (CMS) that allows you to easily add content, make changes to design, and add top level functionalities to your site without limiting customizable solutions to increasing business needs. It allows you to do so all the while using scalable tactics, providing a platform for collaboration, easy and user friendly editing, and limiting the need for any technical skills (programming). Whether you run an eCommerce site, a B2B business, or simply a blog Drupal can help you perform day to day activities and provide professional website design solutions for any and all of your online needs.

Here are a couple of reasons why we at ImageWorks Studio absolutely love Drupal.

The Framework

"In a fair fight, Drupal would either beat Wordpress hands-down building a complex app (because its APIs are far more robust) or fail to show its true colors with a simple blog-style site that better suits WP." Read Ben Buckman's full review here

Scale & speed. Drupal's framework does all of the initial programming and leg work for you. This speeds up the process and allows you to skip all of the non-required initial PHP coding which may leave you left behind instead of focusing on the front end of your website and product.

Collaboration. The framework for Drupal makes internal and external collaboration extremely easy to do. Many users can be logged in at the same time making changes to the site instead of being left to one simple programmer that you always have to contact for changes to be made. This allows you to scale out your efforts exponentially.

The interface and ease of use. Drupal is both very developer friendly as well as user friendly. You do not need to know how to code or program to use Drupal and configure your site the way you want it. The database is set up in an easy-to-learn and easy-to-use platform and editing your website through the CMS framework is extremely easy.

Customizable. Drupal sets the framework, then it is up to you to make the site the way you want it. This opens the door for impressive and compelling websites that are designed specifically to your businesses needs and particulars. There is a solution to every need that your company has for website requirements.

The Flexibility

"Bottom line: As I walked through each tool's administration controls, I found the Drupal tools less intuitive but ultimately more flexible and powerful." Read ComputerWorld.com's full review here.

Any type of website. Drupal conquers all needs and requirements and is very flexible when it comes to your business needs.

Sitewide & page level capabilities. You are able to make edits to the site in a sitewide fashion or at the page level. You can even edit every detail of every "block" on every single page. This type of flexibility is extremely useful for saving time and resources.

Long term pay off. The learning curve is a little bit higher for Drupal as compared to other CMS platforms, but the long term payoff and satisfaction makes it worth it - where you would struggle to perform certain functionalities with inferior CMS's.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

"Drupal and SEO go together so well because it is modular. You can pick parts of it here and there and add on as necessary. Drupal is also great for handling multiple editors, another reason that it works well with SEO. And because Drupal can be changed easily you can shift your SEO strategy quickly if something isn’t working."

SEO framework. Drupal is always pulling all of the SEO legwork - making up for you when you are deficient. Whenever you are making changes and are (unknowingly) kicking yourself in the butt, Drupal is there to clean up any mistakes you have made through automation and innovation. Automatic URL directs every time you change URL structure would be one example, XML sitemap optimization would be another, and there are many more examples just like these two.

SEO friendly design and coding. When it comes to page layout and SEO friendly programming, Drupal is always doing the heavy lifting for you. Never will you have to worry about the Googlebot spiders not being able to crawl your pages because of coding or programming issues. Drupal is the search engine robot's best friend, and will make all of your data and content easily accessible to the search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

To learn more about Drupal and how it can benefit your business, contact ImageWorks Studio today at 800-305-8573 or click here to talk with us. You can learn more about Drupal by visiting the Drupal homepage, or reading over this article which compares Drupal & Wordpress.

Article by Philip Rudy