Why we’ve made the shift to Drupal

Our web design agency eats, sleeps, and breathes content management systems (CMS). Every project we work on is somehow involved with back-end features that require custom programming to achieve specific website functionality. We have always leveraged the major CMS’s (Joomla, Drupal, Wordpress, and Magento) depending on the type of project, project requirements, and overall functionality needed. However, it wasn’t until recently (the past 6 months) that we have made the official shift to Drupal for good.

So, Why Drupal?

Designzillas is one of the top Orlando web design agencies throughout Central Florida. We don’t use templates, we don’t cut corners, and we certainly don’t do boring. Our websites require specific attention to detail through both the front-end and back-end. The major reason for choosing Drupal above Joomla and Wordpress is it’s rock solid platform. Essentially the customization of each website is extremely flexible, it offers a powerful template construction system for our designers to work with, and allows us to create custom “content types” based on specific information our clients are looking to manage.

Example of Drupal's Flexibility

One example of how we’ve created custom content types, based on the project requirements, would be Chef Creations. Chef Creations is an Orlando based culinary company that outsources their soups and sauces to various restaurants and consumers.

Soup / Sauce Content Type Creation

The client needed a back-end management capability to Add, Edit, Categorize, and Customize various Soups and Sauce pages. Each of these pages would require a specific “content type” that would store:

• Title
• Product Type (Soup, Sauce, or Recipe)
• Category the item belonged to (Big & Bold, From the Sea, etc)
• Features: (Dairy Free, Low Fat, Vegetarian, etc)
• Upload product photo
• Add descriptions / ingredients / heating instructions

Once the administrator had added the details of the soup and clicked “Save” that’s where Drupal’s magic happens. Because our web developers (programmers) created the content type to store this information, our web designers (front-end visual creators) were able to construct multiple “views” to display this data in a fantastic way.

Soup / Sauce Views

Now the data has been added in the database, it’s the designers turn to make a visual representation of this information. The first thing we needed to do is to create a view of the Soups themselves. If you notice the variables that were stored in the content type, here’s how the soups page would look.

Some of the dynamic areas that you will notice is:

• The font replacement we used based on the Soup Title
• The overlay and dynamic cropping of the product image
• The use of icons to represent product features
• Showcasing similar products (You might also like...)

Another view we’ve created were the Soup “Category Views” that shows a thubmnail of the item and classified through the Content Type’s category the soup belonged to. We can use some really nice AJAX filtering between tabs and generate some nice displays to correspond with the content type.

What does this mean for our other projects?

Our Orlando Web Design company is actively working on many projects, and actively seeking new projects as well. Because of the flexibility that Drupal offers, we’ve taken a unique approach to highly suggesting this platform for any and all future work. We do have extensive background in Joomla and Wordpress, and will continue to work and excel using these content management systems, if the project calls for this.

Drupal is extremely powerful, flexible, and highly resourceful for our workflow. We’ve even redeveloped our website http://www.designzillas.com using Drupal because of it’s flexibility for our Portfolio manager, Client Relations Management (CRM) database, Lead request database, Client Surveys / Polls, and a ton of “behind the scenes” features that makes our lives easier.