With more than $1.25 trillion generated via global eCommerce in 2013, according to Internet Retailer, it’s no wonder that so many businesses are scrambling to build websites that will serve as a gateway to the two billion plus people now surfing the web everyday, as estimated by Internet World Stats. Of course, building a website is not nearly so simple as many hosting services would have you believe. The needs of mobile web-surfers and traditional users need to be kept in mind when designing a page. Walking the line between pleasing search engines and users is a constant battle. Great web development is difficult, but with Drupal CMS development, it doesn’t have to be.
What is Drupal, and What Makes It Unique?
According to Drupal.org, Drupal is a software package written to enable web publishers to easily manage, create, organize, and publish their content on the worldwide web. The Drupal content management system (CMS) is unique in that it is completely open-source and is distributed under a GNU General Purpose License. In other words, anyone who has anything useful to add to Drupal development can do so without risking legal issues.
This is the main reason why the commercial Drupal support offered by this CMS is light-years ahead of other content systems, like WordPress and Joomla. The Drupal development team regularly holds conventions, known among Drupal development teams as DrupalCon and DrupalCamp, taking suggestions from Drupal website developers in order to make for a better product. In turn, the team is able to offer unrivaled commercial Drupal support in the form of major changes every 18 months, as is the case in the upgrade to Drupal 8, and in smaller additions known as extensions. Take a look at some of the best extensions offered for commercial Drupal support:
- ShareBar
- Webform
- Backup and Migrate
Drumal.net, a web-based development community for Drupal, writes that ShareBar is one of the most useful extensions for commercial Drupal support. By providing a floating toolbar containing Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and other social media share-buttons, this extension gives businesses an easy way to have their content shared across social media and attention brought to their brands.
One of the best ways to implement an effective marketing strategy using both inbound and outbound marketing is by giving visitors to your website an easy way to enter their contact information. Webform, suggests CodeKarate.com, is the best way to fill that need. Perfect for novice and expert Drupal developers, Webform provides simple forms for entering contact information, giving you a simple way to add potential customers to an e-mail list.
The single best piece of commercial Drupal support is Backup and Migrate. No matter if you’re making tiny changes or installing huge updates on your website, you need ways of backing it up, just in case something goes wrong. Backup and Migrate, according to Computer Weekly, can easily be configured to backup your site on a schedule, ensuring you always have a working copy of your site to go back to.
There’s no doubt that having a website is the key to succeeding in the Internet Age, but you should make sure you’re using a CMS that can make that website great. As you can see, commercial Drupal support comes standard when using the Drupal CMS. What other CMS can offer the same quality of frequent support options? Helpful research also found here: www.drupalgeeks.org
