The non-technical guide for building a successful Drupal website

Key points to consider and pitfalls to avoid while planning a new Drupal website. Co-written by Razan Khatib

I’ve been building websites on Drupal for 10 years now @Spring, and it has been an exciting journey to get to be part of the growth of the platform in terms of structure, robustness, community and number of live websites to date.

From building small/medium business websites to community portals, to online shops & large corporate websites, the following key aspects contribute to the success of the project and livelihood of the websites for years to come. Moreover it helps remove the ambiguity involved with adequately setting the budget for the website design & development efforts.

The allure of the perfect module(s)

One of the powerful aspects of Drupal is the existence of thousands of modules that do almost anything, from integrations to any type of functionality you’d think you need. The community is large and the quality of modules ranges from OK to excellent. However, a lot of the modules that are industry-specific or function-specific, like hotel booking or eCommerce..etc. come bundled with a lot of ready functionality that you might not want to use.

Most people think, well we can use whatever we need and just ignore the rest. Think twice: Doing this one module at a time can add a lot of unnecessary code to your website that will bulk up its footprint and eventually contribute to bad performance and difficulty upgrading the website in the near future. (We see this in other CMSs like WordPress quite often as well).

Another aspect that is overlooked in the planning phase is design, specifically the user experience (UX). Every module comes with a default user experience the owner thought it would best serve the function of the module. However, creating a more engaging user experience will probably bring the need to create a new module that best serves this user experience instead of hacking the UX of a selected module.

The right thing to do is to decide on your module customization vs. development strategy from the get go, in order to better estimate the effort and better plan the exact modules you will install vs. create moving forward.

Content is King: Structuring your content

Content can’t be the last thing you think about when you create your new website. The communication strategy as well as the content structure are key aspects that need to be discussed as early as possible with your design and development team. From the types of content you want, to the content structure of each content type, in order to make sure you have set the right format and more importantly to make use of global field formats that can make theming and searching your content more effective and precise.

Operating your website: Content Management

We make it a point in every project to create a content management plan for the website before we start any development. This tool helps us as well as the client make sure we create a CMS that works with their operations and content. Instead of just using the default CMS settings that come out of the box in Drupal, this process allows us to extend the functionality further to allow any operation like leads management or application management go smoothly and follow the right workflow.

Find-ability of your website: Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

To drive traffic to your website from Search Engines, you need great content but also well optimized pages. A basic level of SEO is built-in with Drupal yet, properly adding SEO modules and configuring them well is a must-do task to ensure your website is SEO ready. From setting the meta tags to URL aliases as well as the xml sitemap.

Maintaining your website

Drupal like other CMSs or frameworks need regular updates. The fact that you pay zero to use them doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t pay someone else to maintain them. New security and bug patches get released all the time and not every update is “automatic”. Someone knowledgeable of the platform should handle this for you in-house or externally.

We hope reading this article will help you succeed in your Drupal adventure and we’re ready to roll our sleeves and dig deeper if and when you need us to!