REQUEST A QUOTE -OR- CALL US: 866-728-9100

Drupal Website Development

Drupal Website Development

Are you looking to build a new Drupal website or revamp an existing one? We have the website solution your business needs. Our full service Drupal shop combines Drupal development savvy, technical expertise and best practices to make the best use of this powerful platform.

Our seasoned experts develop user-friendly and visually attractive sites that will strengthen your online presence and provide all the features that your business depends on. We especially love to delve into Drupal custom module development to give our clients every bit of functionality they need.

Our project planning strategy ensures that our clients are well educated in terms of Drupal’s capability to deliver all the features and functionality their websites will need. Using this strategy, we save our clients time and money while delivering the features our they need with minimal surprises and scope creep. At launch we make sure that our clients are prepared to maintain their websites using Drupal best practices or they can opt to have Sage Tree Solutions handle all the maintenance.

Sage Tree Solutions specializes in Drupal development for Non-profits, Associations, eCommerce, Enterprise, Education and Media sites and is always ready to take on new challenges! Call us now (866)728-9100, we’re here to help.

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: John Bocalig on Developing in Drupal with Eclipse

Eclipse IDE is one of our favorite tools here at Sage Tree.  Yes, Eclipse is known for being the tool of choice for Java, but it's also a great tool for Drupal Development, with it's robust support for PHP.

At Sandcamp 2011, John talked about where development time is actually being spent and how to track it using Eclipse. He did a demo of Eclipse's features that help keep you in the zone and more productive when you're working on your Drupal custom module. End result? More Drupal per unit time!

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: 

Portfolio Project: SDHR Roundtable

SDHR is a growing networking community for Human Resources professionals and job seekers. Their mission is to “have the SDHR website be a top professional resource for all Corporate HR Professionals, HR Service Providers, Business Owners, and Job Seekers in the San Diego community.” Sage Tree Solutions helped them create the platform for living up to that statement by creating key features and functionality for their website visitors. First, we started with a redesign of their homepage to allow visitors to access blogs, news and community resources from the get go.

Portfolio Project: REVA

REVA Medical, Inc needed a website that was compliant with their industries biotech laws, so Sage Tree Solutions gave them just that. We started by rebuilding their site in Drupal 6 and migrating their content. Then we designed and implemented a custom theme. To give their investors the attention they deserved we built out an entirely new section of their site called, “Investors” which gave those visitors access to news, share information, FAQs and much more.

Portfolio Project: The Big Bay

We partnered with EventsOnline to develop a new website for Big Bay intended to enhance the marketing for the Port of San Diego. As part of this effort to stimulate patronage at restaurants, hotels and attractions along San Diego’s waterfront, we delivered a Joomla solution customized to the Port’s needs. We configured their servers, created a business directory, built an events database that is integrated with Google Calendar, and designed a photo gallery. Once the website was completed, we built a mobile site, re-enhancing the original site in order to support mobile browsers.

Pages

Subscribe to RSS - Drupal Website Development