Drupal Website Development

Drupal is a Content Management System (CMS) and is at the leading edge of new technologies shaping the future of websites and the Internet. Gillespie’s are proud to be able to offer Drupal solutions for our customer’s website needs, and with most of our customers choosing Drupal over traditional website technologies in recent months, we urge you to read on before making a decision about the future of your online business.

Here we provide a brief overview of Drupal and some of its key benefits. If you would like to discuss Drupal in more detail, please give us a call and we will be happy to discuss it with you.

What is Drupal?

Drupal is a technology, a community and a solution. In the simplest end-user terms it is the software used to build your website, but from a holistic perspective it is much more than that.

Drupal is an open-source technology and free to use. This alone has many benefits in terms of passing on cost savings, but this also means that it is supported by a community of thousands of like-minded developers across the world, and Drupal is one the foremost open-source solutions on the market today.

Of course, unless you are interested in web design or technology, knowing “what Drupal is” will be of little use to you. However, what is very interesting for every business, are the various benefits Drupal can deliver when deployed on your behalf.

Why would it benefit my business?

Drupal is ultimately just a tool for building your website, but what it excels at is saving time and money, and extending what your website is capable of.

Drupal saves you money because it is cheaper to host, and faster to develop with. When compared with traditional website development techniques, Drupal will save you, on average, around 50% on development costs. And because of the support provided by the global community of Drupal developers, you can be sure that your website will always be robust, secure, and at the forefront of web technology.

The software, combined with the community support, also provides you with a huge variety of options for your website, many of which would be cost-prohibitive if developed from scratch. But with Drupal, you will more often than not find that what you require has already been developed, and only requires to be integrated with your website.

Key features

Themes and Templates

A large benefit of Drupal is the amount of content supplied by 3rd party developers. This content includes themes and templates, thousands of which are available for purchase online at a fraction of the cost of traditional website design. Once you have chosen your template, Gillespie’s can purchase it on your behalf and have the core of your website up-and-running in a matter of days.

Search Engine Friendly

We have been involved in developing websites since the very start, and we know that the Internet evolves on an ongoing basis. Not so long ago, Google didn’t exist and people found your website by typing in your domain name. These days, how your website performs with search engines is everything, and this is where Drupal plays its trump card.

With minimum effort, your website will automatically be appreciated by search engines, simply because of how the code behind the site is written, and because of how each Drupal site is structured. There are many additional tools available with Drupal to improve search engine ranking, but even out of the box, it will give your website the edge over those of your competitors.

Integration with the latest web trends

With so many passionate developers around the world, Drupal never slows down, and this shows most when trying to keep your website up to speed with the latest web trends.

Social Media and Social Networking are just two examples of how the Internet has changed in recent years, and as a modern business you cannot afford to ignore these key marketing tools. If you approached a web design agency and asked them to make your website integrate with Twitter, Facebook and Flickr using traditional web development techniques, you would be given a cost running into thousands of pounds.

The Drupal community has developed ‘plug-in’ modules for all of these social networking sites, that simply require a few hours of developer time to install and configure.