A Complete Guide To Make Your Drupal Website User Friendly

Drupal is one of the best website building platforms. Moreover, as a business, it makes for an ideal choice for building your site as:

• It is scalable, making it easy for you to expand the content of your site as your business grows.
• Offers a wide range of modules, enabling you to make your site feature-rich and make it multi-functional as and when your business matures. For instance, you can create an e-store on your basic site by deploying an e-commerce module in the future.
• It is SEO friendly and also offers a variety of SEO modules, enabling you to get your site in top search engine rankings.
• Drupal has got great accessibility standards in its core, allowing even your disabled customers and clients to find you and know about you.
• It has a dedicated security team, which gives your site safety against hackers.

Now, while these features make Drupal an excellent platform for creating a website for your business, it is important to note one thing: choosing a great platform doesn’t automatically make your site user-friendly, a vital feature for your site’s success. A non-user friendly website quickly turns site visitors away. So, before you make your site, it is important for you to know what attributes make a site user-friendly. Knowing these will help you make sure that the perfect website is made.

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3 Tips Which Can Help You Keep Your Drupal Site Secure

Using the Drupal platform for website development comes with many advantages. The platform offers scalability, an extensive range of functionalities, flexibility, and security. Most of these advantages can be tapped with expertise by a professional Drupal Development Team. However, it is important to note that the platform’s prime advantage of security can only be tapped if the website owner stays alert and takes relevant measures. Let us look at the significant safety measures a site owner must implement:

Subscribe To The Security Newsletter

Being updated about vital security news is the first step towards protection. Subscribing to

Drupal’s security newsletters will keep you regularly updated about security updates, any recently found vulnerabilities and risks, and patch releases. The newsletter can be subscribed in the my newsletter tab.

Pay Attention To Security Releases

Security releases are software releases which play a critical role in maintaining site safety. Thus, whenever there is a security release of the Drupal core, modules or theme, website owners must pay attention and hire a Drupal Developer to install and configure the software release. It is important to note that availability of security updates of modules and theme can be found in the ‘available update’ report, which can be accessed in the reports tab of the admin dashboard.

Regularly Check If Website Components Have Been Hacked

Keeping a check if any of your website components have been meddled with is also an effective measure of safety maintenance. The Hacked module checks if your website’s theme and core or contributed modules have been changed. Additionally, it indicates the exact lines which have been changed. While the module is a good tool to check if your website components have been hacked or not, it cannot be used for a production (live) website. For a production site, the File Integrity Check module must be deployed. It reports potential backdoors, modified files, and files which have been removed from the site. These detections can be used by a Drupal Programmer to make necessary changes to your site’s code and thus, make your site safe again.

How To Make An Ideal UX for the blind using Drupal?

Today, governments across the world are working towards making their websites and e-services easily accessible to one of the most largely ignored sections of society, the blind or the visually impaired. Considering the role of governments to be easily available to all their citizens, the goal is an important one. Implementing the goal, however, calls for using an appropriate web development platform. A platform can be called appropriate for making an accessible website if:

1)The platform’s core features conform with the accessibility guidelines given by the world wide web consortium.

2)The platform offers a sufficient number of modules that adhere to accessibility principles 

One such platform which satisfies the above-mentioned conditions is Drupal. It is, however, important to note that to make sure that a Drupal website renders an optimum user-experience for the visually impaired, one must abide by a few important Drupal web design guidelines for accessibility which are as follows:

1)Make The Text Of Your Website Disabled-friendly

Choose fonts that score high on readability. Examples include Verdana, Tahoma, Helvetica, and Trebuchet. Additionally, choose a font colour that contrasts well with the website background. Drupal’s official website recommends a colour contrast of 3:1 for large-sized texts and a colour contrast of 4.5:1 for regular-sized texts.

2)Make Images & Media Accessible

Use ALT text for every image. So, whenever a user hovers the cursor over an image, this text shows up. Just make sure you write an optimum and relevant image description as alternative (ALT) text for every image. For videos, make sure they display textual description and transcripts.

3)Use Accessible Contributed Modules

There is a variety of Drupal contributed modules that have been created with accessibility in mind and can be easily configured on a website by a Drupal Website Development Company. While every accessible module comes with a D7AX hashtag, some of the most popular accessibility rendering modules are:

• High contrast: The module lets site visitors to switch between an active theme and a high contrast version of the theme
• Text Size: This allows users to increase or decrease a website’s text size
• Accessible Forms: The module provides accessible forms that can be easily filled in by visually impaired users
• Readability Analyzer: The module checks to what extent the website text is readable

4)Finally, validate your website’s accessibility using free tools such as functional accessibility evaluation tool and web accessibility evaluation tool. Note the result and hire an experienced team rendering Drupal website development services to make necessary amends.

It is worthy to note that rendering an ideal user-experience to the visually impaired can not only help governments achieve their goal but also help businesses to create a wide user-base. Therefore, making note of the above-mentioned guidelines can prove useful to businesses and governments, both.

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.