Drupal Web Development

Why Develop a Website With Drupal?

With so many options available, it’s hard for businesses to know which software to choose to meet their evolving technology needs. At Colorado Digital, we choose Drupal as our primary platform for custom web development and website design. Drupal provides the tools to create beautiful, user-friendly, and functional websites which meet the needs of today’s businesses both now and in the long term.

What is Drupal?

Drupal CMS is an open source content management and web application development platform currently powering over a million sites worldwide.

Not only is Drupal a great CMS. It also provides a mature, well-structured, and highly customizable web application framework. With over 8,000 Drupal community modules and 2,800 themes available (for Drupal 8), we’re able to extend and enhance the functionality and customize the presentation of the core platform to deliver custom solutions to our clients.

Who Uses Drupal?

Many industries, including government, healthcare, education, and publishing have selected Drupal as their platform of choice for their web-based applications.

• Drupal 8 Usage Rate is on the rise. Here are a few names you might recognize who have made Drupal their platform of choice:
• NASA - NASA cites cost savings, open source/large developer community, and scalability as key motivators for selecting Drupal
• Stanford Law School - Another migration from proprietary software, Stanford Law chose Drupal due to its scalability and configurability
• Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles - Drupal’s usability, flexibility, and scalability inspired this move from a proprietary CMS
• Popular Science - Migrating from a proprietary system, key factors in the selection included robust content authoring tools and scalability

We've worked with many content management systems over the years. We’re as concerned with how a system is built “under the hood” as we are about its presentation. Below are some of the compelling reasons why Colorado Digital chooses Drupal.

Quality and Consistency

Drupal’s developer community is fanatical about reviewing code for coding standards, general best practices, and security concerns. This shared knowledge and common understanding results in a library of contributed modules that are clean, consistent, and offer great interoperability. Clean, consistent code is faster for our developers to understand and work with, which also results in more reliable and maintainable websites for our clients.

Data Structure

Many (if not most) popular content management systems tend to focus on presentation, with little attention given to the structure of the underlying data. Without a consistent, normalized data structure, it’s far more challenging to reuse data. Drupal’s data is structured so that content, fields, configuration, and other elements can be related and reused to present information in new and interesting ways. We’re able to add new features and enhancements for our clients more efficiently by using Drupal’s consistent data model.

Security

Drupal is widely regarded as the most secure among popular CMS platforms. The Drupal community has a dedicated security team, which routinely reviews the core and contributed modules for security risks. Regular security updates are released to the community as they are resolved. There are also great community guidelines for reporting and resolving security issues, and the entire community is invited to contribute. We trust Drupal’s security to protect our clients’ website integrity and sensitive data.

Community

Drupal has one of the largest open source communities of any CMS available today. The culture of the community is truly an open source “do-ocracy” rather than a pay-for-features model, which increases the number of features freely available to its users.

Because it is fully open source software, our clients save on license fees, and we rest easy knowing that the source code is available for public scrutiny. We want our clients to have a site that will be supported well into the future.

Extensibility

Having a huge library of available modules and themes is great, but custom software development means we get to think out of the box. The needs of our customers vary and change over time, so we need to be able to adapt their websites to suit.

Thanks to its coding standards, data structure, and documentation, we find Drupal to be the most extensible open source CMS available. By starting with a flexible platform, we’re able to add custom features and enhancements over the lifetime of our clients’ websites in a timely and cost-effective manner.

It takes a team with a deep understanding of the core platform and contributed modules to build a solid, maintainable website in Drupal. You want a team that can fully leverage the power of the core platform and extend its functionality through community contributions. We have over a decade providing customers with Drupal development and design services, which means we possess the depth of knowledge required to build your website right the first time.

We develop our code in accordance with community standards and practices. By doing so, we ensure that security updates, infrastructure migrations, or any other changes in your site’s needs can be performed with a minimum amount of fuss.

From basic brochure sites to complex web-based applications, Colorado Digital has put Drupal to work for clients of wide and varied descriptions. Our Drupal services include:

• General website development
• Custom module development
• Custom theme development
• 3rd Party API integration
• Ecommerce
• Workflow development
• Content migration
• Mobile/responsive design
• Digital marketing and Social media integration
• Data modeling and reporting
• Drupal End-of-Life Services 

Don't Forget About Drupal 9 EOL

Drupal 9 End of Life is happening in November of 2023. Don't wait to migrate to Drupal 10! Get in touch with our team today to ask about Drupal upgrade and migration services.

Start Your Drupal Project With Us!

Whether you're in the planning stages of your web application or you already have a Drupal website, consult with Colorado Digital! If your site needs enhancements, support, or a review of your current setup, we are here to help. We also specialize in Drupal 7-9 End of Life migrations. No matter your Drupal Development needs, our team of Drupal experts will work with you to understand your current and future needs and develop a strategy that fits your timelines and goals.