The Three-Step Process For Hiring Drupal Developers

Drupal as a content management system has acquired great reputation for building customized and unique ecommerce websites. Drupal e-commerce development is lately at its prime, mainly because of the platform’s extensive modules and distribution packages. It is however worthy to note that building and maintaining a Drupal website requires considerable expertise and therefore, hiring expert developers for your e-commerce project is very important. Let us look at the steps that you must take when you are hiring an individual developer or a team of developers:

Ascertain Your E-commerce Needs:

What kind of functionalities do you want in your e-commerce website? Do you want it to be a simple product display and shopping cart ecommerce website? Or do you have advanced features such as personalization in mind? What kind of a checkout process do you want? Would your project require Drupal Customization Services?

After ascertaining your project requirements in detail, you can convey these to developers perfectly. Moreover, at a later stage while shortlisting a developer, you can see if he has been able to accomplish a project with requirements similar to yours.

Find Suitable Developers:

You can find suitable Drupal e-commerce developers by using freelancing portals, social media platforms, hiring an agency or even manually shortlist by digging through search engine results. Using freelancing portals, social media platforms or an agency for the hiring process would require you to post your project requirements. On the other hand, digging through search engine results would require you to find out the services rendered by a development company, taking a look at their online portfolio, and accordingly send queries of your project requirements.

Shortlist:

After developers or/and development companies get back to you, you can shortlist them on the following basis:

Experience: Check their experience. Have they worked on e-commerce websites before? If yes, have they worked on projects similar to yours? For how long have they been rendering Drupal development services? And what Drupal versions have they worked upon? 

Answers to these questions will help you gauge a developer/team’s experience and their ability to fulfil your project requirements. Moreover, an experienced developer is more likely to deliver your project with success and within your favorable deadline.

Client Reviews: Check what their clients have to say about the work delivered to them. Did they meet their expectations? Did they find them cost-effective? Did they receive their project on time? If possible, talk to their clients directly and check their satisfaction level.

Portfolio: Check the quality of work they have delivered in the past. They are more likely to continue working in the same style and deliver similar quality in the future too.

Price: Finally, put your money on a team/developer who can provide the most cost-effective solution for your project. 

With the execution of the above-mentioned three-step process, you can find the right developer(s) for the accomplishment of your e-commerce website project.

How To Enhance The Loading Speed Of Drupal Website?

A slow loading website is recipe for user dissatisfaction and its consequent failure. So even if you have a feature-rich website built on Drupal, which is one of the most robust platforms available, it is necessary for you to optimize its page loading time. Let us look at the ways by which we can keep the loading speed of a Drupal website at an optimum low.

Enable Cache Modules

Caching a website is the most popular way of reducing its loading speed. By deploying various caching modules, a Drupal website can be cached and optimized for speed. For instance, by deploying the Block cache module, blocks of website content will be cached for all users, whether they are registered or not, and by deploying the views content cache module, the content inside the views module gets cached.

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Your Stagewise Guide Towards Drupal Website Development

Drupal is a content management system that allows the building of websites meant for purposes as wide ranging as e-commerce to not-for-profits. After you have singled out on the Drupal platform for building your website, you need to follow three stages of website development. The first stage involves questioning your website’s goals and gathering suitable content. The second stage involves the design and development part and the third stage involves website testing and delivery. Accomplishing the first stage is easy if you have answered purposeful questions and have prepared the appropriate content. 

Starting with the second stage of design and development, you may need to hire professional Drupal website developer. The aspects of design and functionality of a website, work together to weave a website’s user experience. In order to cater to both these aspects, you should consider availing the following Drupal Development Services:

PSD Conversion Service: Such a service allows you to think beyond the available Drupal themes and envision a unique design for your website, which can be further converted into a Drupal theme. The conversion process includes the following steps: 1) First, write down the list of features which you wish to include on your website. 2) Write down the modules which render these features. 3) Write down the page elements of the features you wish to include. 4) Create wireframes which include these features 5) Convert the page elements of these wireframes into HTML & CSS code. The above steps of a PSD to Drupal Theme Conversion can be actualized by a team of skilled designers and developers with success.

Module Development: A module renders a functionality to a website. Every Drupal version comes with some core functionalities such as system administration, RSS Feeds, and etc. Most often. These core modules are not adept enough to make a website fully functional. Thus, a developer, often, makes use of modules which have been contributed and tested by the community of Drupal developers. If a website needs a functionality that is not met by the existing contributed modules, custom drupal module development can deliver the needed functionalities.

After your website is built with a suitable design and set of features, you need to focus on the third stage of a website’s development process, which is the testing phase. This involves testing if your website’s code meets current web development standards. This ensures compatibility of your website with different browsers. After appropriate testing, the website needs to be delivered to the server by using a File Transfer Protocol. Most often, a company that delivers PSD conversion and module development services, also delivers testing and delivery services for a website. 

Thus, with the employment of suitable services, one can facilitate the development of their Drupal website to completion.

Drupal is a preferred content management system for websites serving a wide range of purposes. Any website development process includes three stages, namely, content gathering, design and development, and testing and delivery. By employing suitable services, you can put these three stages into action, and thus, have your site built to completion.

Interesting Facts About Drupal eCommerce Development

There is no doubt that Drupal has become the most popular and widely used open source CMS in the market. Actually Drupal got introduced at the right time when developers and users for looking some eCommerce solution that could be more improvised, easy to develop and use and with all required features. Drupal has all these things and so it got popular in very short time.

Let us discuss few things about Drupal CMS platform that made it so popular.

Customized Design

The old day trend has gone when people like to use the themes offered by the platform today with rise in competition and unique business idea, there are many websites that need different designs and that is usually not available through themes.

PSD to drupal conversion is the best method using which any website owner can get the website designed in PSD format as per the requirement and then convert it into platform theme. This customization feature has made it favorite among the organizations.

Social Media Integration

Today social networking sites have become the best place for online business marketing as people from round the globe access the networking sites and advertisements tends to yield more results than any other form.

Now if you can integrate social networking site buttons on your website then it would be the best strategy that can do miracles for your online business. Drupal platform has the solution for this in the form of extensions for social networking sites that can be integrated to your website in no time.

Mobile Websites

Today most of the websites are accessed through smartphones and this has created huge demand for mobile based online shopping websites. These websites should have all the functions as a normal website but it should work flawlessly on smartphones. Seems difficult right? But nothing to worry all you have to do is hire drupal developer who has good experience and using amazing features of the platform your mobile website would be ready within short period.

Search Engine Optimization

If you want to draw more traffic to your online stores then it is vital for your store to perform excellently on search pages returned by the search engines. Search engine optimization or SEO is the term that is used for the process that helps in the better performance of the websites in search pages.

Earlier companies were forced to invest good chunk of amount in SEO, so that they can get more viewers to their websites, but today with Drupal like platforms, SEO has become fun. Drupal has the feature to take care of SEO by itself.

Reliable

Drupal has offered the liberty to the developers to customize every function or feature from the scratch and that has made Drupal the most strong and reliable platform for the development of eCommerce solutions.

Above mentioned points are some of the unique features of functions that Drupal is offering to its user, if you go in deep then you would find that it has numerous such benefits.

From the time of its launch Drupal is getting popular day by day, today most of the eCommerce n CMS related websites are developed using Drupal platform only and that is because it has so many unique features and functions for both Drupal developers and website owners.

Drupal Website Development Tools That Make It Best Content Management System

Lately Drupal website development has become very popular among the developers and website owners as various tools provided by the platform is making the whole concept of content management system swift and flawless. These latest tools are developed for the people who have very little or no technical knowledge, so that these people can manage the contents of their site without any assistance.

Let us discuss how the content management system is simplified:

• Latest tools for content management allow user to modify the contents and images of every page with just few clicks, this includes the home page also.

• Website owners of online shopping portals are most benefitted because they have the options to directly upload images from their computers without writing any codes. This property is very much useful during festive seasons and also help in SEO.

• Now there is no need of waiting for Drupal professionals to check the links or to edit links because that part is automatically taken care by the platform.

• If there is anything new to incorporate and if it is simple then there is no need of any professional help. Website owners can do the job by visiting admin panels. If the work is highly technical then it is recommended to hire Drupal developer.

• Installations of Drupal website tools are very simple and do not require any technical knowledge. Once installed the changes to contents can be made just through few clicks, before applying any changes that you have made there are options to preview it to get the feel of what visitors will experience and if you are satisfied then you can finalize it or you can just undo it.

• If the website owner has the knowledge of technical terms like header page, footer page, title and other terms like that then latest Drupal tools provide options to add new page to the website with contents without any coding.

• Website owners can manage the listing or publishing of the comments on their website, this helps in getting good performances during search engine results and also help in finding spam comments.

These above mentioned features of the Drupal platform have made it very popular and today most of the websites are built on this platform. The best part of the platform is that if you don’t like the themes in the collections of Drupal then you can always use psd to drupal conversion process to have unique, customized and attractive design.

Drupal Modules That Should Not be Missed in Your Website

When you are developing websites for business needs then it is necessary to utilize many features and functions that can deliver fully functional and robust website. As per the data available around 80 percent of the business websites are developed using Drupal technology and it is because of many business friendly features Drupal offers to its customer.

The best part of the modules provided by Drupal is that they are plug n play, which means developers don’t have to sweat too much in writing long codes. Very simple codes can integrate amazing modules in the website. Strong content management and strong marketing tools provided by Drupal platform is the major reason for its popularity among business organizations.

Below given are some of the modules that should not be missed in any of the business websites:

Captcha Security

When you have business website, there are very high chances of getting spam responses or inquiries as internet is very open source. Captcha entry is the best security method to avoid spam responses. It is considered as the simplest yet effective spam protection method that should be implemented in every new business websites and most of the Drupal development services Indian companies are using this method now.

Admin Menu

Latest Version of Drupal has this method called admin that can be used to monitor and manage your website efficiently without much of stress. This allows the developers or users to add or remove functionalities just through few clicks and you don’t need to have very deep technical knowledge to use this module.

User-Friendly Text Editor

You may have one of the most wonderful and beautiful website but that does not mean that you have the technical knowledge to edit HTML codes. Suppose you get some great ideas about formatting the texts in your website then it becomes difficult if you don’t have HTML knowledge, but with new editor you can edit texts normally and then add it in HTML.

It provides normal word processor where formatting and editing can be done very easily. This tool is very useful when psd to Drupal conversion process is used to design the website.

Visitor Tracking

This is the best module for any websites that gives real time data about the number of visitors to your websites. This helps to know if you are getting traffic to your website or you need to change strategy to draw more traffic and make your website a success.

When Will be Drupal Completely Ready For The Customers Between Releases

Drupal 8 has arrived with much hype, it was not long before when Drupal 7 was launched creating a buzz in the market. There is no doubt about the fact that each new version of Drupal has lot of improvements and has taken care of drawbacks of earlier versions. However, with these many releases certain uncertainties also grow up.

Most of the developers are still in a dilemma to use the old version on which they have worked and know the limitations and performance or to use the latest version that promises to be better but they have not experienced it. As per the press release the latest version has lot of features to develop a robust website, but there are segment of people who opt to wait till this new version gets matured and then build the portal using it.

Read more: http://drupalindia.co.in/blog/when-will-be-drupal-completely-ready-for-the-customers-between-releases