Drupal, the best CMS.

What is a CMS?

Content management systems (CMS) in general are online applications that allow site owners to log in with a username and password and make changes to their live websites from their own home or office web browser.  There are a ton of these systems out there today, some are expensive, some are free and open source, and others still that are developed and maintained by individual web development companies.   Their capabilities also have a large range.  Some CMS's are nothing more than a way to edit the text on each page, and others like Drupal, allow full control of pages, menus, users, templates, forms and more.  In today's web world, if you're not a geek its not a problem!  With a proper CMS and a short training session, anyone is capable of running an enterprise level web site!

How would a Drupal CMS web site add value to my business?

Glad you asked.  Besides the obvious benefit of not having to call up your local web guy every time you want to change a word or add a promotion to your website, here are a few of the key benefits:

  • Instantaneous publishing of fresh content:  Easily publish news, products and pricing immediately on your schedule and from any online computer.
  • Future-proof:  With a robust, scalable CMS you can extend your site’s lifespan by years and always stay up to date and secure.
  • User appeal: Attract users and keep them coming back with fresh appearance and regular content.
  • User interaction:  Get closer to your users with interactive features such as blogs, discussion forums and feedback forms.
  • Quality control:  Control who can edit what with controlled access levels for creation, editing, approval and publishing of various forms of content.
  • Cost savings: Stop paying webmaster hourly rates for simple work you should be able to perform in house. 
  • Flexibility: With the ability to continually tweak in response to user activity its easier to find what converts and grow your business.
  • Increased traffic:  Not only is a Drupal CMS extremely well optimized for good search engine rank (Google position) out of the box, but regular updates of fresh content also have big benefits in search engine placement.

Why do you say Drupal is the best?

For starters, Drupal was the 2007 and 2008 overall winner of the Packt Publising Open Source CMS Award.  Drupal can also boast being the platform of choice for a lengthy list of illustrious patrons such as: United Nations, NATO, NASA, IBM, MTV, Sony and many many more.  It is a full-featured CMS platform designed to build scalable sites with a vast range of features, search engine friendliness and the ability to be customized and expanded in nearly any way you could want. Drupal allows you or your community of users to easily publish and manage a huge variety of content types on a web site. Tens of thousands of people and organizations are using Drupal to power many different types of web sites, including

  • Community web portals
  • Discussion sites (forums)
  • Corporate web sites
  • Intranet and online database applications
  • Personal web sites and blogs
  • E-commerce applications (online stores)
  • Resource directories
  • Social networking sites

The built-in functionality, combined with hundreds of freely available add-on modules, will enable features such as:

  • Electronic commerce
  • Blogs
  • Collaborative authoring environments
  • Forums
  • Peer-to-peer networking
  • Newsletters
  • Mapping
  • Podcasting
  • Picture galleries
  • File uploads and downloads

and much more.

Drupal is open source, so the platform is free to use and customize by anyone which means your investment goes completely to visual design, customization and integration rather than an expensive software license.  It also means that there is a huge worldwide community of expert Drupal developers contributing to the development, security and expansions of Drupal.  What does this mean for you?  You don't have to pay the price of yearly licensing fees, worry about the security or scalability of your CMS, or be dependant on a local company to support their proprietary CMS that no other company will work with.  What a relief!

So there you have it, that is why I am proud to be a Drupal developer, and why I believe Drupal should be the foundation for your successful new website.  Get in touch and get on board!