Drupal custom development and hosting
Does your business need a website or an update to the existing site? Do you have a product or service that can be utilized better through the web? This article is going to cover the capabilities and possibilities for developing a custom website using Drupal in specific.
Whether you are looking to create your own website, or use professional services to develop your website, Drupal can be a great solution for the developers that are modifying the website, and the portal administrators who are monitoring and running the site. Let’s learn more about Drupal, and why people are using this technology for their website.
Learning about Drupal
Drupal is an open source CMS (Content Management System) and is the second most popular CMS used today. There are many reasons why companies and individuals choose this system to build their website. Among some of the reasons include:
Features
Drupal administrator UI
There is an extensive amount of features that come out of the box. Drupal is said to be one of the more complex CMS’s, but this is due to the extensive amount of features that comes with the system. You can use multiple page templates or content types to further customize the UI. Drupal also has advanced user permissions which you do not receive with most CMS platforms.
Customizability
Drupal admin panel
Drupal is known for its development community and customizability. There are many developers who prefer to use Drupal as a CMS because of the ability to customize the entire platform.
Security
Drupal reports UI
Drupal is one of the most secure CMS platforms out there. There are many government websites built using Drupal’s system. Out of the numerous security scares, Drupal has remained unscathed and provides an in-depth security report for those companies that need full disclosure of security.
Now that you know a little about Drupal, let’s learn how you can build a custom website using this awesome CMS.
How to create a Drupal website using custom development & hosting services
Since Drupal is such a customizable solution for building a website, there are many resources available for developing your own Drupal website. What if you do not have the knowledge or time to develop the site yourself, but you still want to use Drupal to manage the site? This is the perfect scenario to use custom development and hosting services using professionals to build the site that you need for yourself or company.
Let’s look at the steps that it takes to create a website.
Step 1: Using custom hosting services
To build any website, you need to purchase a domain name and host the website. If you want, you can host the site yourself if you have the servers and expertise. As the vast majority of people do not know how to host a site, you need to choose a hosting service. This could be difficult with the many hosting services out there. Trusting the host for your website is essential. You need to make sure that your host can handle the traffic, data, etc.
If you are going to be building a custom website, it is a great workflow to use the same development company as your host. This keeps everything on one platform, so that the developers have full access to your site, and can easily debug any potential issues in the future. DevRadius provides professional enterprise fully managed dedicated and shared hosting for Drupal. Included with the hosting package are automated data backups, monitoring, and SSL certificate. This ensures that the website is secure and can be restored in case of an emergency. The DevRadius web stack is fully optimized running on dedicated hardware for low latency and fast response times.
Step 2: Choose the technology to build the site
Every website needs to be built using some type of technology. In today’s day and age, you cannot simply build a website from scratch without using any technology. We suggest using Drupal for this article as explained earlier customizable CMS and is perfect to develop a secure and custom website with.
Step 3: Customize and build the site
If you are not building the site yourself, make sure to use a professional development agency that has a good portfolio of past projects. Also, make sure you understand the development process before paying for anything. It is recommended to stay away from those agencies that only charge a flat fee for the development services. This can potentially end up in more money spent in the end, or an incomplete website that has bugs.
An effective alternative workflow for development agencies is the prepaid method where you can pay for blocks of time for working on specific tasks. For example, a task could be developing an image feature on the site. This can be estimated as a single task. The task can be prepaid for, instead of prepaying for the entire site. This makes for a more straightforward and easy to track process for the manager or owner of the site to check the progress of the development. Otherwise, you won’t know what is being done on the site. This is part of DevRadius’s workflow and management of each website/project.
The DevRadius workflow
The first step to develop any custom website is to create a set of requirements including mockups and wireframes. DevRadius has both developers and designers. So if you want us to create mockups or wireframes of the entire site before starting the development process, this is entirely possible and recommended. Once you have the requirements document, you can then send it to a DevRadius representative. Depending on the size of the project, for medium to large projects, the discovery process may be needed. The discovery phase is a way to estimate the entire project by breaking it down into smaller tasks, and providing an estimate on the smaller tasks to provide both a low and high level overview on the projects development. This estimation time is prepaid for. You will then be able to fully create the website and work with DevRadius to complete the project.
Step 4: Launch the site
Once you have finished the development process, you can launch the site, and maintain it. Over the years, the site should also be updated in terms of new versions of Drupal, as well as the UI.
Learn more about Drupal, and the DevRadius development workflow to help with your new website by watching the following video: