So you’ve got a pretty good feel for what kind of new site you want.  Here’s some advice for efficiently building a site of great value.

1. Start with the content.

• gather all content together in one place
• content = words, photos, video, contact info, graphic art/logos…ANYTHING that will be visible by anyone who uses your site.
• organize it into acceptable file formats for the web (check with your web developer)

This is required work for any web project to be successful. Have it before you need it, or you risk wasting resources during your later project stages…because so many design/development decisions depend on what the final content is.

Too many website projects go awry because no one bothered to organize or produce the REAL content they needed for their REAL site. Everybody said “oh, that will be a demo” or “image area”, or “two or three paragraphs of content” and then assumed it would appear out of thin air. Content is the second-most important thing on your site, second only in importance to having users to appreciate it!  You don’t want to mess this up. Organize, write, edit, or produce the content yourself (or see to it that someone else does) now, not as an afterthought.

This is also a great exercise for you to be sure you will actually “say what you mean and mean what you say.”

2. Consider your users.

• put yourself in the shoes of your best customer
• what does he or she really want to do on your site?
• what do you really want them to do on your site?

Understand that the average web user is in a hurry and does not want to hunt for what he/she wants.  Don’t over think it.  Concentrate on user actions and clarity of information.

3. Assess the ‘minimum viable product’.

• what’s the simplest way to achieve your goals in a timely and efficient manner?
• think goals, not features
• separate the “would be nice to have” stuff from your bottom line “must have” stuff.  Prioritize both lists.

Understand that you can always add more stuff later (and you will want to), the important thing is to have a great foundation to build from.

4. Have a defined decision making process

• commit to being an active collaborator throughout the project.
• when it’s time to give feedback, be clear, be specific, and be engaged.
• when it’s time to decide A or B, be confident and be quick.

You should accommodate for change that will certainly occur during the lifespan of your project.  Building a website is an iterative process.  Sometimes the original vision doesn’t hold up under scrutiny.  That’s okay.  It’s not a failure or a setback…it’s an opportunity to improve and get things right.

Be ready to deal with important decisions in short order so you can keep your project momentum going strong and build a site of lasting value.

ENTERMEDIA has built a lot of websites since 2004 for clients of all types. Over the years we’ve gravitated to build practically every site with Drupal. Why is that?

Drupal is flexible.

From it’s inception Drupal was built with open source in mind. The founder of Drupal was smart enough to realize that predicting where the web will go in the future is a fool’s game, so let’s build it to be as flexible and modular as possible so it can adapt to each clients needs as well as any future developments. Remove as many constraints as possible at the outset. What this means is that you need to understand best practices for development to contribute modules that the rest of the community will endorse and adopt, but isn’t that how it should be? For instance, old site planning methodologies such as the waterfall project management approach, were concerned with concepts like knowing exactly where the main navigation menu was going to be before you would write a single line of code. With Drupal, if you decide that the main nav needs to move to the right side or left side instead of across the top you can make that change in a matter of minutes, so long as you haven’t styled the whole site prematurely.

Drupal is modular.

The devil is in the details when you are developing a website. Unfortunately, the majority of projects do not achieve the initial goal of building the entire scope on-time and on-budget. That’s because unless the developer has previously coded something exactly like what you need now, he’s having to estimate how he can get the job done on assumptions alone.  Building every simple thing from scratch is hard.

But with Drupal, ‘there’s a module for that.

Like the Apple store’s claim ‘there’s an app for that’, there’s most likely a feature rich Drupal module that does what you need and can be configured for your exact requirements. If not, there will be soon. There are over 3500 modules that can be used in Drupal to accomplish just about any requirement you can imagine.  Many times multiple modules are introduced that do the same thing, but over time the best solution emerges and the community gets behind it.  Once a module is adopted and accepted by the Drupal community it will be continuously tested and refined to fix any issues or add any ‘got-to-have’ features due to it’s vast number of implementations and specific feedback.  Developers help developers figure out these problems, and then the rest of us get to share in their solutions.

Drupal is scalable.

Drupal works with practically any type of database, so it doesn’t matter if you’re using an enterprise level Oracle databases or a free MySQL database. Without getting too technical, what you need to know is that Drupal can scale to meet your needs, but you’ll need an experienced Systems/Server Admin toproperly guide you to the right hosting a server setup. The greater point is that Drupal can scale as well as any other technology. The best proof is the number of large web properties who are successfully using Drupal, such as the economist. You can find more example drupal sites on the founder of Drupal’s blog.

Drupal is SEO friendly.

SEO is largely misunderstood from our experience. Drupal makes it easy for you to make your site follow best SEO practices.  It also allows you to write, publish, and correct problems with your site content that the search engines might not like with a little training and without needing a web developer to be involved.  Drupal does a lot of things automatically, such as provide strong internal link structure to make sure each link to pages within the site are tagged in the same way.  Drupal does not do SEO for you, however.  For more information on what you should be doing to practice good SEO, start here for a simple overview, but go here if you’re looking for professional help.

Drupal is free.

Drupal is open source and is therefore free of charge.  You will need to pay for hosting if you don’t have your own web server, and if you’re not a web developer you will probably need to hire a good team if you’re hoping for something professional.  However, you won’t have to pay Microsoft liscensing fees, the hosting for open source costs less, and the majority of the web is open source, so there are plenty of capable people in this world who can support a Drupal based website.

Drupal has momentum.

Like most movements, what’s critical to the success of Drupal is the huge adoption rate of the development community and the business community in general.  It is one of the greatest crowd-sourcing success stories around.  It is this community that will decide if Drupal deserves it’s success, if it should continue on, and for how long.  The Drupal 7 User Experience Project is a good reason to believe that Drupal will continue to be the best available option for years to come.  Already, some very big and important websites are built with Drupal, like:

• The British Government
  
• The Whitehouse
• Duke University
• Lucas Arts
• Reuters
• CNN

Drupal is simply an efficient tool.

Drupal is a content management system that allows non-technical site owners to manage their own content. It’s open source, which means it’s free as well. It still requires a high level of experience and expertise in web development practices and principles to build a professional website, which is not free unless you are one of those people. Drupal is simply the tool that allows you to do great things like build an online storefront, event listings, a social community, blog, photo slideshow, multimedia video player, forums, discussion groups, etc.

We’re proud to be co-sponsoring DrupalCamp Austin 2009!

This will surely be a cool event this upcoming Saturday and Sunday, dedicated to timely topics of development, design, and business by and for the local Drupal community.  (Note the ENTERMEDIA room where all the Design and Business track sessions will be held.)

Our own Nick Lewis will be presenting on the topic of Building Amazing Interfaces with Drupal & jQuery UI.  Oh yes.

We hope we’ll see you there. Register here!

The facts:

Who?

• Drupal Gurus and Newbies!
  
• Drupal users, developers, designers and decision makers. It’s where community ties are strengthened and Drupal’s future is decided.

What?

• DrupalCamp!
  
• Where some of the best developers and leading business owners cross paths, exchange ideas, find partners and conceive projects.

Where?

• Norris Conference Center!
  
• Three large meeting rooms for speaker sessions, keynotes, and BoFs. Located at Northcross Center (Anderson Ln. and Burnet Rd.).

Why?

• 20 sessions (10 each day)
• Two keynotes (one each day)
• Session tracks include: development, design, and business
• Dedicated Birds of a Feather (BoF) space
• Breakfast and lunch are included each day

One of our all time favorite clients is Ausley Algert Robertson & Flores, LLP, the best family law practice in Austin.  We redesigned and launched their website in Drupal this summer and really enjoyed the collaboration.  Then they they were kind enough to mention us in their first blog post:

” … The folks at Entermedia are professional, patient, creative, and helpful beyond anything we could have expected.  If you need website help, we highly recommend Entermedia…”

Wow!  Probably the best testimonial we could ask for, but we swear we didn’t ask.  We are very grateful.

ENTERMEDIA cofounder Ethan Worrel and our Head Drupal Chef Nick Lewis will be the speakers tonight at the July meeting of the Austin Drupal Meetup on the interrelated topics of UX, The Client, The Project, and Drupal.

The meetup will run from 7-10p and held at UT’s ACTLab (4th Floor CMB, Studio B, corner of Guadalupe and Dean Keeton).  Ethan and Nick will take turns presenting their brief remarks and then open the floor for questions and comments.

Without giving too much away, here’s a sampling of what you can expect to hear tonight from two of our own most thoroughly enlightening and well-mannered professionals:

UX:

• Fully leverage everything the user already knows
• Display the most valuable data…let users dig for the fine detail
• Make decisions so your users don’t have to

The Client:

• Guide them to think in terms of page types
• Demand supporting content early and often
• Most of the time, you are the client

The Project:

• Making tough choices that pay off in the long run for both parties
• How to use the Website Price Estimator 5000
  

Drupal:

• Clients can figure out how taxonomy works well enough, but how taxonomy fits into the concept of view arguments?  That’s a different story…
• [pause for laughter...the audience will think its funny...]

A robust site redesign in Drupal for Austin-based domestic and international professional pet movers PetRelocation.com.

A brand new Drupal site and corporate logo for Austin’s own health, life, disability, and employee benefits experts CuatroBenefits.com.

Great clients to work for and we appreciate the local patronage.

People often ask us to explain the pros and cons between CMS platforms…why we prefer and often recommend Drupal for many of our client’s website projects.  While we acknowledge there’s more than one way to skin a cat, generally speaking we like Drupal because it’s open source, well-supported, highly extensible, popular, and SEO friendly.

What makes Drupal SEO friendly? Features and modules like the following:

• Enable Clean URLs - for instance, turns the awkward www.atlantashoulder.com/?q=/shoulder-treatment into the easy reading www.atlantashoulder.com/shoulder-treatment
• Path Module (or PathAuto Module) - allows you to create URL aliases (either automatically or manually) for your pages, rather than a default string of ugly/crazy letters and symbols (vm&ctl_nbr=2604&cid=TopNav, etc….).  Search engines tend to reward human-friendly URLs–even more so if they include relevant keywords.
• XML Sitemap Module - automatically generates a XML sitemap conforming to the sitemaps.org specification. Google adheres to Sitemap Protocol 0.9 as defined by sitemaps.org.
• Other Drupal modules useful for SEO: MetaTag Module; Custom Breadcrumbs Module; Related Links Module; Alinks Module; Search 404; URL List module; Global Redirects module

To sum up, properly implementing such modules into your site can play an integral role in the organic SEO process and help to automate some of the work and thinking towards getting your site ranked well in the search engine results pages for the keywords you are targeting.

Did you realize over sixty percent of all federal income tax returns were completed using tax preparation software last year?  Fifty million Americans prepared their own tax returns…hard to imagine that all but the most ardent purists wouldn’t prefer the benefit of inexpensive tax software to help them crunch all those numbers, double-check their work and e-file with a click of a mouse.

We recommend Tax-Compare.com if you’re looking for information about tax preparation software.  Tax-Compare is a cool free tool for anyone to use when researching tax prep software features and pricing.  ENTERMEDIA was hired to design and develop this new Drupal site in time for the 2009 tax season.  It launched last month and is getting plenty of traffic already.  Here’s what Tax-Compare is all about, in its own words:

Tax-Compare.com was created to consolidate and organize information about the top providers of tax return preparation software and web based services so that you can make an “apples to apples” comparison of the different products and select the one that best fits your needs.

Here’s how it works:

If you do not enter any information about yourself on our website, the website will show you the least expensive options offered by the various vendors.  After you enter information, the website will determine the least expensive option offered by the various vendors that has the features required to handle your needs.

Of course, the “how it works” part was our job.  Lots of moving parts on this one, and a real communication challenge to ensure all the details agreed with each other. We’re very proud of how it turned out, and thankful for the opportunity.

Take note:  this is not your average comparison site. It looks great, it’s easy to use, and it’s deep with useful information.  Be sure to check it out, especially if you prepare and e-file your own tax return.

Nick Lewis was in charge of making it behave.  He shared how he was able to devise a crucial query solution in a recent blog post here.  Attawaytogo Nick…somebody get that guy a tax-credit!

Drupal is an open source content management platform that we frequently use to build professional business websites, personal blogs, community-driven sites and even ecommerce websites. Here is a great summary of features Drupal brings to the table.

Why do we love Drupal?

• Drupal is modular and extensible
• Drupal is quality-coded and standards-based
• Drupal is fully operational with Apache, PHP and either MySQL or Postgresql.
• Drupal is open source and licensed under the GPL
• Drupal is easy to use for web designers, web developers, admins and end users
• Drupal is effortlessly collaborative, scalable, and search engine friendly

We tell our clients that Drupal is hands down the best CMS platform for websites that have a lot of content or require frequent content updates. We continue to be impressed by its simplicity, elegance and power. Drupal is also very intuitive to work with after learning a few central concepts. We can teach our clients how to update their own content, change their page titles or rearrange their site navigation in no time.

Nick Lewis is ENTERMEDIA’s “Head Drupal Chef”. Nick is an acknowledged expert in the Drupal development community, a member of the Drupal Association, and we consider him a great asset to our web design and development offering here in Austin, Texas.

We’re big believers in open source code. If you’re not too familiar with what that entails, don’t worry, it’s not hard to understand and even better to use.

According to the Open Source Initiative:

Open source is a development method for software that harnesses the power of distributed peer review and transparency of process. The promise of open source is better quality, higher reliability, more flexibility, lower cost, and an end to predatory vendor lock-in.

Mozilla Firefox (web browser), Apache (web server), PHP (web site application language) and PNG (file format) are only a few prominent examples of the open source development model smoothing out online experience–so much better now than only ten years ago when most everyone had to count on Microsoft to play and display nice with others.

We develop using open source programming languages and software packages, in particular Zen Cart (user-friendly ecommerce shopping cart software), the aforementioned PHP (makes web pages dynamic, widely used), MySQL (fast, reliable, easy database used by Google, Yahoo, et.al.), and Drupal (consistently ranked as the very best content management platform).

It was cool to read this article on CNET over the weekend that none other than the U.S. Department of Defense agrees that open source is the hands down best way to go. Apparently the Pentagon is preparing guidelines to leverage even more open source into U.S. defense than they already have.

If there’s anyone left out there who would still tell you open source isn’t safe or advisable for your business because it’s not “protected” or not “legit” enough, what are they going to say when the CTO of a powerful agency within the USDoD declares the following?:

Open source brings to us the ability to have collaborative and agile development environments….Additionally, open source benefits the Department of Defense through…simplified licensing…and security….Security through obscurity just doesn’t work.

As CNET’s Matt Asay puts it, “if your country trusts your physical security to open source, isn’t it time to trust your business’ security to open source?”