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Drupal Architecture & Planning

Drupal Architecture and Planning

Sage Tree is committed to the business values of its clients while leveraging the intrinsic powers of Drupal. We know Drupal intimately, and we take the time to learn the values and priorities of our clients as well. The end result is providing the best, most productive solution for our clients' business.
 
We do this through a comprehensive process of discovery to learn our clients' needs. Ideally, we also educate and promote the most effective approach for using Drupal as a solution, prioritizing time and budget. At our clients' discretion, we're able to produce very custom solutions, prioritizing scope and functional specifications. The choice is always yours, and we'll find ways to fit within your needs and abilities.
 
The fact is that we've been producing amazing websites for years now, and we'll bring all that experience to bear for your benefit. Let's arrange some time to discuss what you need, and you'll come to understand why Sage Tree Solutions will be the right choice as a solutions provider.

Portfolio Project: Comic-Con.org

Comic-Con chose Drupal for its flexibility and robust content management features. With all stakeholders - fans, guests, attendees, volunteers, board members, artists, sponsors, press and award winners, to name a few - interested in the three shows they put on, visitors to the site need to be able to find relevant information quickly on all types of devices. They handle a lot of media, images, sections, program information and had previously been using a static site. Moving to Drupal allowed their editors to take control of the content and not depend on developers for updates and changes.

Portfolio Project: Phoenix College

Phoenix College heads the Miracopa Community College network, one of the largest districts in the nation and the largest provider of higher education in Arizona. Phoenix College needed a scalable, well-designed website that was as cutting edge as their curriculum and could serve as the go-to resource for students, faculty, and community members.

Sage Advice: Ready to Take Your Drupal Site Mobile? Part Two: Mobile-Only Solutions

This second installment of, "Ready to Make Your Drupal Site Mobile?" investigates the options available to Drupal site owners concerned about making their sites accessible to a mobile audience. In the last post, we explored the reasons and methods for going responsive. This time we'll look at the pros and cons of building a separate mobile experience or application for a Drupal website.

Mobile Version

If sacrificing a beautiful, full-featured desktop layout for the pleasure of hand-held and tablet users is not an option, consider a separate mobile site. Organizations with especially complex sites from the San Diego Union-Tribune to ESPN to USA.gov offer mobile users a simplified version of their websites.

Mobile Theme

Some site owners opt to have a mobile-only theme rather than a completely different build. In this scenario, the browser detects the device and serves up an optimized theme accordingly.On the surface this seems like a simple solution, however mobile menus, blocks, contexts and views must be specifically designed for the mobile experience and need to live side-by-side with the existing pieces of the site.

Mobile App

The third approach - sometimes done in conjunction with the previous two - is to build a mobile app. Instead of going to a browser like Safari or Bing, the user will download the app and access the data that way. Of course, apps may never reach 100% of mobile users. One reason being that the user has to take the extra step of going to the Android or Apple Store installing and in some cases paying for what they can get free on their desktops. The advantage of a mobile app is having complete control of the user's experience.

Conclusions

There are no short cuts to having a great mobile site. Experienced developers can ease a client's pain by providing a clear options based on the company's specific needs and current website architecture. Responsive web design is certainly the ideal choice, but not always an option. At Sage Tree we work with clients upfront to discover the most viable option for taking their site mobile. A well prepared client will have metrics for their curent site or in-depth research on their target market.

Sage Advice: Ready to Take Your Drupal Site Mobile? Part One: The Responsive Approach

The world of the mobile web has arrived. Among US adults, 25% own tablet computers and the vast majority have smartphones. Some predict mobile web traffic will surpass desktop traffic in the nex few years. This two-part blog post looks at the options for Drupal site owners concerned about making their sites accessible to the next generation of users.

Responsive: One Site Fits All

Responsive websites look good on any device regardless of screen- and browser-width. By using a design that is flexible and touch-screen friendly you ensure that users have a great web experience no matter how they access your site. Sites that are going to be rebuilt or redesigned today should absolutely consider responsive web design. To see responsive web design in action, go to Comic-Con.org and resize your browser window!

The Good and the Bad

Add Pages Not Regions

For most of web design history we've been able to expand the number of footers, blocks, sidebars, links, slideshows, images and menus with relatively few drawbacks. In the mobile world, those extra pieces of information can make a site painfully slow. When designing, ask your team: do our visitors really need this feature, does it need to be on every page and can it live on its own page? If the feature can live on its own page rather than in a sidebar, your visitors will have a lot less roundabout scrolling to do.

Consolidate Menus

On a hand-held device, you simply don't have the real estate to employ several menu structures. Figure out what pages and features are most often accessed by your audience and from there decide where you can consolidate and simplify the menu structure. Knowing your audience is essential to any site design, but especially important for mobile versions. A tool like Google Analytics is a good resource of information if you have a pre-existing site.

Forget the Slideshow?

Everybody loves slideshows, right? They may be pretty, but they can significantly weigh down a site. A slideshow that also works on a wide desktop screen can turn a 50K page to a full MB (that's 20x the size). This means page load time will be significantly slowed down which can be frustrating to the people visiting your site. Frustrated visitors will usually click away from your site, which in turn hurts your search engine rankings.

Sidebar Right not Left

Sure, you can can move around elements in a mobile page with a little javascript, but things can fall into the mobile space easily by simply using the "mobile-first" thought process for site architecture. From an ease-of-programming standpoint, go with a right sidebar instead of a left sidebar. The right sidebar will naturally fall under the main body text on smaller screens.

Which Base Theme Should You Use?

At Sage Tree, we like using the Omega base theme for most of our Drupal 7 responsive sites. It's flexible, extendable and has a high Drupal community addoption rate, meaning themers from a variety of backgrounds are all speaking the same language. As with most newer Drupal themes, Omega is designed to be responsive and mobile-friendly "out of the box". Right now we'd say Omega is the best choice for the vast majority of responsive use cases out there.

The Bottom Line

If you're ready for a site redesign and new architecture, responsive is definitely the way to go. You'll make those viewing your site on their smart phones and tablets extremely happy not to have to pinch, zoom and scroll like crazy. Desktop and mobile users alike can have access to all of your sites features and content by taking  the "mobile-first" design approach. With proper forethought and consideration, you can have a Drupal site that is easy to maintain and serves a rapidly growing marketplace of smart phone and tablet users.

Portfolio Project: Optex America

Optex America provides industrial strength sensors for high security applications including airports, commercial buildings, military installations, nuclear power plants, seaports and many more. The existing Optex web site was hard to maintain and did not provide all of the interactive features that their internal sales team needed to interact with their customer base of distributors, dealers and system integrators. Optex turned to Sage Tree Solutions to build a new, state of the art web site using the Drupal open source platform.

The key features of the new site are: 

Sage Advice: How to Choose a Drupal Multi-site or Single-site

Recently, we consulted with a large institution who is migrating 200+ websites onto Drupal. Helping to reverse-engineer their needs was paramount to providing them a workable, scalable, flexible and maintainable product for the long-term.
 
While Drupal has the very unique option of having a multi-site environment which means many sites share one codebase, it's not always clear whether this is a good option or not. This is a complex question because there  are several factors to consider:
  • Who owns the site(s)?
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