A website with a security hole could be a nightmare for your business, leaving regular users untrusted. The security breach is not just about the website resources, but it could be putting up the website reputation at stake and injecting harmful data in the server & executing them. There could be many ways to do that. One of them is an automated script, which scans your website and looks up for the sensitive part and tries to bypass the web security with injected code.

I believe you might be thinking of your website now.

• Whether your website is fully secured or not? 
• How to make sure everything ships on our website is generic? And how to protect them? 

As a Drupal Developer, I’ve come across some of the contributed modules available on Drupal.org that can help your site in dealing with security issues. Still, I can’t assure, by applying those modules, you can safeguard your website. But it’s always recommended to follow the set guideline & utilize the modules to minimize the drupal security breaches. 

Let’s take a look at those top and best Drupal modules:

Secure Pages

We all know that moving an application from HTTP to HTTPS gives an additional layer of security, which can be trusted by the end users. Unlike regular modules, you just don’t need to follow regular module installations instead your server should be SSL enabled.

Currently, it is available for Drupal 7 only.
Ref URL: https://www.Drupal.org/project/securepages

Security Kit

The Kit itself is a collection of multiple vulnerabilities such as Cross-site scripting, Cross-site Request Forgery, Clickjacking, SSL/TLS. With the help of security kit module, we can mitigate the common risk of vulnerabilities. Some of the vulnerabilities have already been taken care by Drupal core like clickjacking introduced in 7.50 version.

Currently, it’s available for both Drupal 7 and Drupal 8.
Ref URL: https://www.Drupal.org/project/seckit

Password Policy

This module is used to enforce users to follow certain rules while setting up the password. A web application with weaker security implementation, allow hackers to guess password easily. That’s the reason you get password policy instruction while setting up the password. It’s not just a fancy password, but secure & difficult to guess.

# Password should include 1 Capital letter
# Password should include 1 Numeric
# Password should include 1 Special Character
# Password should MIn & Max Character

This module is currently available for both Drupal 7 and Drupal 8.
Ref URL: https://www.Drupal.org/project/password_policy

Paranoia

This module looks for places in the user interface, where an end user can misuse the input area and block them. Few features that need to showcase here are:

# Disable permission "use PHP for block visibility".
# Disable creating “use the PHP” filter.
# Disable user #1 editing.
# Prevent risky permissions.
# Disable disabling this module. 

Currently, it’s available for Drupal 7 and Drupal 8.
Ref URL: https://www.Drupal.org/project/paranoia

Flood Control

This module provides an Administrative UI to manage user based on UID & User-IP. There is configuration available to manage user restriction based on the nth number of the wrong hit by user ID/IP. We already know that Drupal core has a shield mechanism to protect their user with five unsuccessful logins hit, users get blocked for an hour/minute. With the help of the contributed module, we can dig it a bit.

Currently, it’s available for Drupal 7.
Ref URL: https://www.Drupal.org/project/flood_control

Automated logout

In terms of user safety, the site administrator can force log out users, if there is no activity from the user end. On top of that, it provides various other configurations like:

# Set timeout based on roles.
# Allow users to log in for a longer period of time.
# User has the ability to set their own time.

Currently, it’s available for Drupal 7 and Drupal 8.
Ref URL: https://www.Drupal.org/project/autologout

Security Review

This module checks for basic mistakes that we do while setting up a Drupal website. Just untar the module & enable it. This will run an automated security check and produce a result. Remember this won’t fix the errors. You need to manually fix them. Let's take a look at some of the security features that need to be tested by the module:

# PHP or Javascript in content
# Avoid information disclosure
# File system permissions/Secure private files/Only safe upload extensions
# Database errors
# Brute-force attack/protecting against XSS
# Protecting against access misconfiguration/phishing attempts.

Currently, it’s available for Drupal 7.
Ref URL: https://www.Drupal.org/project/security_review

Hacked

This tool helps developer avoid adding messy code directly to their contributed module, instead of applying patches or new release update. It works on a very simple logic. It scans all the modules & themes available on your site. Download them and compare it with an existing module to make sure modules/themes are on correct shape. The result will give you information on changed module/theme and the rest of the thing you are well aware of - what needs to be done?

Currently, it’s available for Drupal 7 and Drupal 8.
Ref URL: https://www.Drupal.org/project/hacked
 

All of the above modules are my recommendation that a Drupal website should have. Some contributed module will resolve your security issues by providing correct configuration and some of them are just an informer. They will let you know the issue. But you need to manually fix those issue.
 
Further, these contributed modules provide the atomic security based on the complexity of your site and types of user available. You can look up for the security module and protect your site against anonymous.

We, at Valuebound - a Drupal CMS development company, help enterprises with Drupal migration, Drupal support, third-party integration, performance tuning, managed services, and others. Get in touch with our Drupal experts to find out how you can enhance user experience and increase engagement on your site.

Over the decades, the Content Management System has seen an unprecedented growth from static web pages built on HTML to customized sites developed using PHP to give personalized experience. Initially, in the 1990’s, we had flat HTML files. Then there was Dynamic HTML to create interactive and animated websites by using a combination of a static markup language.

Here is the look of Apple.com at the very birth of the World-Wide Web in 1992.

Picture by - The Telegraph

Then there was GeoCities, a web hosting service, later acquired by Yahoo in 1999. During this time, GeoCities was the third-most-visited site on the World Wide Web. It was the first kind of web-based CMS that allows users to manage their website. This is a concise history of CMS in the 1990s. On contrary to this, 2000’s seen the massive development in this niche from basic HTML & DHTML web pages to proprietary and open source CMSs. 

Web-based CMSs in 2000’s

In the first part of the 2000’s, Open source CMSs like Drupal, WordPress, and Joomla were launched. These solutions were primarily focussed on one thing - making the CMS easier and more powerful for non-technical people

Initially, these CMSs followed a similar pattern. They contained both backend and the front-end of the website and store all your assets, images, texts, files and others to store, manage, display and download.  

Then came RSS feed which has to shoehorned onto a standard website. This was followed by mobile devices then came responsive designs. Earlier, web pages for mobile were separately built for not so smartphones like Blackberries. These were on the frontend. 

Backend had texts, multimedia assets, files, images. This was followed by the requirement of comments on the post - a user-generated content that can be stored and people could leave comments by creating accounts or anonymously. These were stored in backends.

As people/companies started using CMSs particularly the above-mentioned open sources, the demand for more functionality was raised like giving accounts to people who are managing content, editors, writers, and administrators.

This led to building account functionality and the users had accounts where they can come and register on the site as it will help marketers to track their information. This required a login system so that user can create a profile which has to have user permission system as not everyone can have admin access. Later, this permission system was built into a CMS.

Since administrators of the site didn’t know HTML, CSS or javascript, they wanted layouts so that they can create their own designs. As a result, developers had to come up with drag and drop feature to create a layout, which was followed by other developments like the integration of 3rd party applications such as shopping cart, analytics, CRM and ERP.

Fast-forward to today

The CMS of today puts the content first. The CMss are built in such a way that it should be robust, scalable, secure and more importantly, cater to unique business needs and provide a seamless experience to stakeholders. Let’s discuss some of the most essential features and functionalities of modern-day CMS where personalization, responsiveness, and integration are plays a pivotal role. 

Centralized CMS

The Centralized CMS allows users to collect, manage and distribute the digital content from a single location. Typically, it supports multiple users in a collaborative environment wherein a user from a different community can contribute content. Most CMSs include Web-based publishing, format management, history editing, and version control, indexing, search, and retrieval.

Context-Aware Content Management

Today, organizations are increasingly asked to deliver more value from their online marketing efforts and marketer to do more with less. In this scenario, contextually aware content delivery comes into play as it helps to deliver more value for less effort. CMS Wire defines Context-Aware Content Management as 

“Systems that understand how, what and when to deliver content given an astounding number of parameters. Interfaces will be separate, and unique to the devices, the situations and the platforms that consumers choose.”

Multichannel & Omnichannel Publishing

Simply stated, multi-channel publishing means delivering a publication to readers in many ways at the same time while omnichannel publishing aims to provide a seamless and consistent experience to customers across various platforms such as website and mobile device etc.

Headless & Decoupled CMS

Readers are often confused between Headless CMS and Decoupled CMS. Headless CMS is a subset of decoupled CMS and has no default front-end system to determine how the content is presented to the end user. Read on our previous post where we have discussed how headless Drupal is driving user experience.

Whereas decoupled CMS segregates the back-end from the predetermined content publishing front-end delivery channel and places an API between them. This model provides web developers a great flexibility to innovate and help business owners future-proof their project. Further, it allows organizations to refresh the website design without re-implementing the whole CMS. With all these advantages, the decoupled CMS has gained a major traction in both the Drupal as well as WordPress communities.   

Integration For All

Today, there is hardly any web development project that doesn’t involve the integration of 3rd party applications. These applications are used for varied purposes and must have consumer features to make sure you have proper site analytics and marketing metrics for your growing business. Have a look at our previous post where we have discussed various 3rd party integration options available within the Drupal ecosystem.

Future-proof your CMS

With the digitization at its peak, no software lasts forever and has to be upgraded at a regular interval to fulfill growing market demands. For instance, you can see different versions of Drupal, the latest is Drupal 8.6.0 and the upcoming is Drupal 9. Future-proofing a CMS means you need to be prepared for the growing market demand and should be able to figure out what ideas should pursue and which should you avoid.  

User Experience

Typically a CMS has different stakeholders such as business owners, content developers, marketers, developers, and customers. The different stakeholders, who have different roles to play, require a seamless experience to achieve their goal. This requires a project for experience and not for devices. There are several things which need to be figured out before building a project. 

Here user experience is the core of any project and requires things to be done in order. The development of any project starts with a user persona as they define expectations, concerns, and motivations, helping design teams to understand how to design a product that will satisfy users needs.

Chatbot

Also referred as conversation interface, this has turned out to be a must-have feature for all sorts of business whether it is media & publishing, hi-tech or e-commerce. According to a report by Grand View Research, the global chatbot market is estimated to reach USD 1.25 billion by 2025, growing at a CAGR of 24.3%. Further, the report revealed that the development of chatbot will substantially minimize operation costs. 

Innovation in artificial intelligence and machine learning - the key component of chatbot will boost its features. There are numerous advantages to deploying chatbots as part of your digital strategy, such as:

• Conversation interfaces can be operational 24*7*365 days a year.
• It can process a chunk of requests simultaneously.
• Using chatbot, organizations can get real-time insight into their customer's preference.
• These are cost-efficient as it easily gets configure to meet different requirements. Updating cost is relatively low.
• It can easily record data, trends, and metrics to monitor interactions and adjust their processes and responses accordingly.
• These are time-saving as it helps companies save time by answering the queries raised by clients. 

Virtual and Augmented Reality

Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) are the next two big disruptive technologies, companies are focussing on. The rise of AR means that publishers will now be able to bring stories to life in a whole new way. Read on why virtual reality is the next big thing in the media industry and how it can help increase revenue? 

Although the decades-long story can’t be narrated on one single post, I have tried to summarise the past, present, and future of the CMS as much as possible. The gist of the entire post is that technology keeps on evolving so does our and users necessity. In the fast developing digital era, it’s crucially important for media and publishing companies or any other to keep up with the latest technology in order to stay ahead of our competitors and provide an enhanced experience to users, seamless navigation and interactive interface as required. 

We, at Valuebound - a Drupal web development company, help enterprises with Drupal migration, Drupal support, third-party integration, performance tuning, managed services and others. Get in touch with our Drupal experts to find out how we can help you with building a CMS that offers an enhanced user experience and boost engagement. 

Reference

https://events.drupal.org/baltimore2017/sessions/future-cms-decoupled-multichannel-and-content-service

Have you ever thought about how people with visual & auditory impairment or cognitive or physical disabilities access websites? People with disabilities can access the web as we do only when a website and/or mobile apps have been developed keeping a different set of audience in mind. This is where web accessibility comes into play.

Making a site accessible isn’t that difficult to implement as it seems to be. You just need to understand the underlying issues that make a site difficult or impossible to use by the challenged people.

So what is web accessibility?

Web accessibility is all about making sure that websites work for the widest possible audience.

According to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) - an international community - web accessibility means that websites, tools, and technologies are designed and developed so that people with disabilities can use them.

Importance and benefits of accessibility

Expands your audience base

An easily accessible web provides equal access and equal opportunity to people with disabilities thus resulting in an increased audience (more users) and increased effectiveness (more useful).

Good for SEO

Accessibility has a direct correlation to developing best practices for SEO. It increases the visibility of the web page.

Grow your Business

The most obvious benefit of building accessible websites is to help businesses and organizations widen their reach.

Build Positive Public Relations

Building an accessible website also builds your reputation. Why not stand out from your competition by being accessible to everyone and demonstrating social responsibility?

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0

Level A

The most basic web accessibility features are:

• provides text alternatives for non-text content
• Provides an alternative to video-only and audio-only content
• Accessible by keyboard only

Level AA

Deals with the biggest and most common barriers for disabled users:

• Text can be resized to 200% without loss of content or function
• Do not use text over image
• Suggest fixes when users make errors

Level AAA

Deals with the most complex level of web accessibility

• Provide detailed help and instructions
• Do not use text over image

To get a full list, refer WCAG 2.0 checklists

Ways to make your website accessible

The heading is an outline of your webpage. Use headlines to introduce content, they are labels, not a statement.

Heading 1 is the most important for the page use it as the title of the page. Heading 2 is subheadings of the H1. Use it to divide content into scannable blocks. H3 is for subheadings of the H2.

Below are the guidelines for the heading:

Nested Heading

The heading is an outline of your webpage. Use headlines to introduce content, they are labels, not a statement.

Heading 1 is the most important for the page use it as the title of the page. Heading 2 is subheadings of the H1. Use it to divide content into scannable blocks. H3 is for subheadings of the H2.

Below are the guidelines for the heading:

• Every page should have an h1 heading
• Headings must be properly nested
• Headings are used for structure, not formatting
• Don’t hide headings

Form Accessibility

• Every Form elements must have a label and announced before the input
• Keyboard Accessible Field
• Use Inline Form error
• Always include a button for users to submit their form information

Add an Alt Text to All Images

Alt text is a replacement text of the image if it fails to load. ALT text is accessed by screen reader users to provide them with a text equivalent of images. It also helps in improving SEO.

Screen Reader Output With ALT Tag

Screen Reader Output Without ALT Tag

Aural Alerts

Users with visual impairment cannot see all visual updates of the page such as color changes, animations or texts appended to the content. In this case, Drupal provides a JavaScript method Drupal.announce() which creates an “aria-live” element on the page. Drupal.announce accepts a string to be read by an audio UA. Below is the example of aural alert.

Drupal.announce(
  Drupal.t('You look beautiful today.')
);

Text over images

Text over an image shouldn't be completely avoided, if required then make sure that the text is both legible and readable to users. To handle this, maximize the contrast on your pages among graphics, fonts, and backgrounds.

The removal of the blue background from the image is giving maximum contrast. The content is more clear and accessible to read.

CSS Display Options

None of your content hides completely by using the hidden attribute or setting display. Users can't see it and screen readers or search engines can't read it. To help with this, Drupal 8 has adopted three new display classes: (1) hidden, (2) visually-hidden (3) invisible.

Hidden: Hides an element visually and from screen readers
Visually-hidden: Hides an element visually but exposed to screen reader users
Invisible: Hides element visually and from screen readers. Also, it doesn’t affect the layout

Constrain tabbing

Drupal 8 introduced JavaScript feature, called tabbing manager, to guide a non-visual user to tabbing contextual links when the global edit mode is enabled. Use below code to invoke the tabbing manager.

var tabbingContext = Drupal.tabbingManager.constrain($('.contextual-toolbar-tab, .contextual'));

A set of elements is passed to the constrain method. Pressing the tabbing key will only move between the tab-able elements in this set of elements.

To remove the tabbing constrain, the release method must be called on the tabbing context object.

tabbingContext.release();

Drupal 8 Contributed Modules For Web Accessibility

Automatic Alt text

When a user doesn’t provide Alt text for images, Drupal 8 uses Microsoft Azure Cognitive services API to generate one.

Text Resize

This module generates block to quickly change the font size of text on your Drupal site.

CKEditor Accessibility Checker

This module provides the Accessibility Checker plugin in your WYSIWYG editor to inspect the accessibility level of content created in CKEditor and immediately solve any accessibility issues found.

Block ARIA Landmark Roles

This module adds additional elements to the block configuration forms that allow users to assign ARIA landmark role and/or ARIA labels to a block.

To sum up, web accessibility is all about making your site available to as many users as possible. There shouldn’t be any hindrance for disabled people in the digital world. This post focuses primarily on discussing the ways you can make your site accessible using Drupal 8 contribute modules.

We, at Valuebound - a Drupal web development company, help enterprises with Drupal migration, Drupal support, third-party integration, performance tuning, managed services and others. Get in touch with our Drupal experts to find out the ways you can use big data for your business.

Below given is a presentation on "web accessibility in Drupal 8"

 

Selling products online is not just about successful eCommerce, but managing data as well as customer engagement across the platform. Drupal integrated with Drupal commerce offers unprecedented results that are highly secure, stable, create engaging web experiences and drive website traffic. The combination also ensures that both users and customers have a seamless experience, reduced development time, easy maintenance, and control of SEO, CRO, and website analytics tool among others.

In this post, we have shared 10 great examples of websites (from different industries) built on Drupal commerce that are setting the benchmark. These will surely help you with the creative process. Read on the features, functionalities and 3rd party integration used by these companies.  

1. URBANY'S

When your website is all about fashion accessories, you need a site that draws people attention, offers seamless navigation and secured payment gateway. The Swiss e-commerce store leverages Drupal commerce as it was specifically designed to fit in with Drupal 7 using the latest features and APIs. However, the store leverage Drupal 8 for its improved loading speed, mobile toolbar and responsive theming.

 

Further, Bootstrap is used as a front-end framework due to its responsiveness, development speed, customization, simple integration and other. The site is integrated with analytics tools like Google Analytics and Matamo for measuring the success and utilizes the payment processing service of Visa, Mastercard, Paypal, American Express.

2. Lush

British skincare and handmade cosmetics store Lush presents a clean astonishing website that features attractive colors and fonts. Built on Drupal 7, the website is complemented by a wide range of features such as a single page checkout to pay securely with Mastercard, PayPal, Visa, American Express and BitPay. Lush uses CloudFlare as a content delivery network as it automatically optimizes the delivery of web pages to reduce page load time.

The e-commerce store is integrated with Mautic to connect all of their digital properties and channels. Further, the site uses Varnish as a caching tool and Google Analytics as a digital analytics software to measure its success.

3. Olsson & Gerthel 

Olsson & Gerthel - a Sweden-based furniture store is well-known for features world-class designers on their Drupal Commerce website. The site stands due to its up-to-date style, seamless navigation and more importantly, a side panel makes it easier to filter the object as per our requirement. The e-commerce store uses Zendesk Chat for the live chatting feature, Google analytics, and CKEditor - a WYSIWYG text editor that allows the user to write content directly on web pages or online applications. 

4. Pam Kerr Designs  

New Zealand-based online jewelry store Pam Kerr designs uses Drupal commerce for their website to showcase the latest collections. A simple layout and clean design give an enchanting and smooth user experience. The e-commerce site is integrated with Stripe for payment processing. Built on Drupal 7, the site offers various payment options including PayPal, Visa, Mastercard, and American Express. Google PageSpeed has been utilized as a caching tool and Google Analytics for measuring the success. 

5. Fooda 

Fooda, an American meal services firm, partners with companies and office building to provide a restaurant-based meal. The website, which uses Drupal Commerce for a clean layout and easy navigation, uses Bootstrap as a front-end framework. Third-party APIs are also utilized throughout the site, including HubSpot marketing automation tool and analytics tool like Crazy Egg, Optimizely, Google Analytics, Matomo, Mixpanel. Further, AdRoll - an advertising network - is used to collect, analyze, and act on their customer data to deliver marketing campaigns.    

6. Eurocentres 

Switzerland-based Eurocentres is one of the leading organization that offers academic and professional English language courses for adults and juniors on six continents. Nearly, 13,000 students enroll every year from all over the world. Built using Drupal commerce, Eurocentres offer a rich experience, seamless navigation to search destinations, languages, and courses offered. The language learning site uses Visual Website Optimizer and New Relic for analytics and Varnish as a caching tool.

7. QDOS

The UK-based QDOS - an e-commerce store for phone screen protectors, cases & power products - is beautifully designed to offer seamless navigation and find a relevant product on the homepage itself. The online store, which is built on Drupal commerce, boasts different functionalities like multilingualism, 3rd party integration of various social media channels and accept payment in different currencies like EUR, GBP, and USD. QDOS also offers a great alternative to signing up with your Facebook account, in lieu of creating a new account.  

Third-party APIs are also utilized throughout the site, including MailChimp for marketing automation, LivePerson for live chat and Gauges & Google Analytics for measuring success.

8. Tuan Nguyen Photography 

Landscape photographer Tuan Nguyen uses Drupal commerce to develop to share high-resolution landscape photographs. The online store boasts an image carousel on the homepages segregated into different columns. Though the site looks very simple and elegant, it has fast page downloading, seamless navigation and integration with social media channels to promote the content and drive users back to the site. 

9. Muzeo 

French art gallery Muzeo offers a state-of-the-art experience with high-resolution pictures showcasing different categories that redirect to a specific landing page where you can filter the art pieces accordingly and purchase. Built on Drupal commerce, the homepage features a menu section on the top left side to redirect to different landing pages. The art store also allows users to narrow their search by filtering the pieces using header and side panel. Whereas the footer section features payment options, return policy, rating, comments, and third-party integration with social media channels. Users can also subscribe to the newsletter by just entering their email IDs.

10. Guerlain 

Founded in 1828, French perfume, cosmetics, and skincare house use Drupal commerce to feature its products online. The header houses different categories where you can find a list of products along with the new product available in that category. Each product has a dedicated landing page with product description, an option to add on the wishlist and zoom the product images to have detailed look. Landing pages also include point of sales option where you can find your nearest store and share button to share the products with your kith and kin.

We, at Valuebound - a Drupal web development company based out of New York, help enterprises with Drupal migration, Drupal support, third-party integration, performance tuning, managed services, and others. Get in touch with our Drupal experts to find out how you can enhance user experience and increase engagement on your site.

Suggested Readings:

• Getting Started With Drupal Commerce 2.x - Part 1

• Getting Started With Drupal Commerce 2.x - Part 2

• Add a Product Programmatically to Drupal Commerce Cart

• Manipulate pricing using Order Processor in Commerce 2.x

• Hide Order ID from commerce checkout process in Drupal 8

• Split a package into multiple shipments using Packer & PackerManager
  
   

 

In the traditional pharmaceutical business model, it seems like all the efforts were put into addressing the physicians needs to boost sales. However, the scenario has changed drastically in the past few years and the focus is more inclined towards customers alongside physicians and payers.

Current business model driven by advanced technology is giving patients an opportunity to have a say and become more and more involved in their healthcare issues. This is especially true when it comes to millennials, who are not very satisfied with the information provided by their healthcare experts. Hence, people are leveraging the power of wearables to measure and track their fitness and vital signs like blood pressure and heart rate.

On these premises, it’s not difficult to agree with the growing importance of online presence and building credibility to boost sale. Having said that CMS provides medical practitioners space to share the know-how of new and upcoming medical devices. As a result, information sharing is becoming a critical part of the marketing strategy. So let’s dive straight into the basics of CMS, what does it manage and why does it matter for your industry.

What is CMS?

A CMS is a software application that is used to create and manage digital content. Using this, medical device makers can handle a vast amount of product information that is required to bring to market. It can be also used to present medical device information to a diverse set of stakeholders as a means of increasing quality management and regulatory compliance while reducing risk.

While selecting a CMS for pharmaceutical products, you need to look at different aspects such as ease and speed of setting up a user friendly website, performance optimization, security, what can be done if there are unexpected changes, volume variations, demands for major workflow changes, and other problems specific to the medical device industry.

Regulatory compliance, website performance, personalization, and SEO are the other key components you need to look at. Here are the 5 reasons why a business needs to invest in a web CMS:

• Facilitates frequent content updates on the web properties
• Aids in effective content management & collaboration
• Ensures device & platform compatibility for the web properties
• Effortless customization options at your fingertips
• Web experience management

What does CMS manage?

In the medical device industry, consistency is the key to brand awareness. Undoubtedly, due to the rising competition and concerns, the approval of new drugs and medical devices has been marginally declined by the US FDA. To overcome these factors, pharmaceutical companies are investing in their brands. After all, increasing brand awareness is an important strategy to boost a company’s competitiveness.

An easy to use medical device CMS lets your content developers and marketers engage with a prospect, maintain the consistency throughout different collaterals such as blogs, news, product pages, corporate content, industry analysis, announcements, testimonial, and others.

In the medical devices industry, such components could be company information, product information, training materials, investors information, news, press release et cetera. 

Here making an informed open source CMS choice is of utmost importance as it enables technical as well as non-technical personnel to have full control over the website including editing and organization of the website. 

Drupal is one such open source CMS that follows a modular, building block approach, allowing unlimited customization. It also allows organizations to build flexible solutions that fit their unique business needs, resulting in a tailored solution specific to their requirement.

Why does it matter?

Indeed, pharmaceutical companies don’t make changes too often in a website. But what if it is company’s information, manufacturing address, representative’s name, regulatory changes or adding new information. Such changes happen as and when required. Therefore, it is pertinent to understand what a good CMS is. 

The benefits of a CMS is manifold and leveraging it rightly can be one of the major wins. In a medical device company, there are different stakeholders and they have their own perspective. 

Stakeholders involved in the CMS decision

Content Authors - Typically, content developers and consumers are likely to have a different user experience. A medical CMS offers different functionalities to different stakeholders. For authors, it has drag and drops editing, granular content editing, in-place editing, grouping content, sitemap generation, and layout management.

Marketers - For marketers, maintaining a marketing strategy and website goes hand in hand. An effective pharmaceutical website and marketing strategy is always relevant and should be up-to-date. In order to streamline to strategy, marketers make changes too often as per the requirements. 

An easy to CMS offers a wealth of undiscovered value far beyond just allowing them to create, distribute and monitor content across the business. The best healthcare CMS is the one that seamlessly integrates with your existing marketing technology stack and overall marketing automation plan.

Business - Evaluating whether your medical device CMS’s feature meets functional and nonfunctional needs is just one thing. Being a decision-makers/business owner you also need to assess the ROI whilst making the decision. Therefore, it's equally important to know how your CMS makes a good business sense. Here are the few questions you should ask yourself before making a decision:

• Does your business require a flexible website
• Do you need to share some common contents on specific or all pages of your website
• Do you need to build connections and stay connected with your customers
• Does your business require your website to be mobile-first 
• Do you need to establish and maintain a heavily trafficked site

By identifying these and other issues, you can use your business plan to create a roadmap for a more accurate content strategy. 

Developers and IT - When it comes to developing a medical device/healthcare website, it covers a wide area of disciplines. More importantly, you need to look at it from the perspective of development and comparison. Have a look at some of the skills your in-house Drupal developers should have. 

Having an in-house team has its own benefit, however, hiring an external support team to have several advantages. A specialized vendor can provide talented individuals, access to technical expertise and scalability, which means the flexibility to scale up and scale down as and when required.

Community - While selecting an open source, it's crucial to look into the community that builds and maintains your medical device CMS of choice. Are they maintaining software quality? Is the CMS viable? Here is our take on why should we contribute back to the community. Also, read why Drupal is a market leader. 

What do you get

You can build your brand. Your customers are likely to be loyal, so your employees. You can build a credibility in the market and win the trust of your new customers.

If you want our Drupal team to take a look at your website and provide you with personalized insights. Get in touch.

This post is the second in a series of our blog posts covering buyer persona and how to leverage it to enhance customer experience and boost user engagement on your website.

In a B2B or a B2C business, a buyer is not just an abstract idea, but a living being that comes to the marketplace to do business. In order to drive your business in the right order, you need an efficient buyer persona that defines your customer base. You might be wondering what is the role of persona? How it helps in enhancing the digital experience and boost user engagement on the website. 

Simply put, a buyer/user persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers. A detailed buyer persona offers you significant insight for your company and helps you determine where to focus your time, guide product development, and allow for alignment across the organization. 

Well, creating user personas is one of the most important steps in building your Drupal website. They help all stakeholders to make better decisions. Let's delve into the process of leveraging buyer persona to make sure we have a fair idea of what is a persona, why do we use it, how does the persona help in marketing strategy and finally, how to create it. We have summarized all of the aforementioned questions so that you should not spend more time googling. Here's everything about user persona.

So how can you leverage buyer persona to enhance the customer experience

Putting your personas to work entirely depends on the concerned authority such as webmaster and web content managers can use it for behavioral tracking to better refine personas based on visitor behavior and activity. It also helps to collect feedback from customer service teams to refresh profiled, and keep them update.

Whereas content marketers can leverage buyer persona to audit and tag their marketing content to analyze where it fits into the buyer journey for various segments.

Using persona insights, marketing leaders can enable programmatic marketing to determine the right content for the right channel at the right stage of the buying process.

A sales rep can use it for sales enablement and understand the various members of the buying committee - what they care about? how to build consensus to close the deal?

Importance of leveraging buyer persona

Personas Cultivate Relationship 

Developing a customer-centric design is a must for any business. Here persona acts as a guide, giving you an invaluable information. A detailed persona also helps you cultivate empathy for your clients that lead to a stronger understanding of what they are looking for. Knowing your customers' goal, motivation and behaviors ease your works eventually.

Your Website Is Not For You

Since our focus is clearly on customer needs, developing a design that has them at its core makes more sense. Learning how prospects engage with your brand through its lifecycle gives you perfect metrics to figure out what is working for you and what not. 

Before developing a website, try to figure out whether your design reflects the customer’s experience or the company’s operations. Clearly, focused persona designs highlight the road your customers will travel within your business and give you the chance to improve upon them.

Attain Targeted Marketing

Buyer persona helps you to get familiar with your targeted customers. As a result, you will learn stuff, possibly, you don’t know about your customer, gain insights into their perception of your company. 

Knowing your prospects helps you in producing market assets using the language they resonate in order to convert them into leads. Perhaps targeted marketing will help you to outperform your competitors.

Gain a Competitive Advantage

Customer-centric web designs are most likely to outperform the generic one. Furthermore, it assists in designing a more captivating website than your competitor, who is using the same generic messaging for everyone.

Evaluate your's as well as your competitor's site through the eyes of a buyer to develop an understanding of competitive positioning. Talk to your digital marketing personnel to do the competitive analysis for your current website.

Futureproof Your Project

For sure, no individual or an organization build website almost every other day but improvise it, enhance it and upgrade it. If you are planning to build a new Drupal website or upgrade it, consider persona research and documentation well before designs are created or your Drupal developer starts working on it.

Identifying customer base will help every stakeholder involved in the project make better decisions. Note that you can never know your customer too well. Once you have a vivid idea of your targets, you can apply that to the product creation, marketing, and business development.

Now go ahead. Design your buyer persona. Let your imagination run.

We, at Valuebound - a Drupal web development company, help enterprises with Drupal migration, Drupal support, third-party integration, performance tuning, managed services and others.

Get in touch with our Drupal experts to have personalized insights on how to enhance user experience and increase engagement on a Drupal website.

We, at Valuebound - a Drupal web development company, are excited to conduct a free “Drupal in a day” training session on 1st September 2018, Saturday. The session is an initiative of Drupal Association to introduce beginners to the world of open source platform.

Learn and design your own live Drupal website. The session will be presented by our Drupal 8 expert practitioners and senior Drupal consultants, having years of experience in delivering successful projects. The session will help you in understanding the ways CMS can help you build your career.

Difficulty level: Introductory

Duration: 1 Day

Proposed Session for Drupal in a day training

Drupal in a day will comprise of various sessions that span over the different stages of developing a full-fledged live Drupal Website. The session will focus on teaching the main features and concepts of Drupal with live practice sessions, terminologies associated with it and developing custom modules. 

When you will complete this, you will have a moderate-level knowledge of Drupal in designing live websites and selecting modules to get the functionality you want with maximum benefit.

Ideal for...

Whether you're an established professional or new to the Drupal world, this session will give you an expertise you need in building a live website. 

• If you are PHP/Web developers, then you would never like to miss this opportunity as it will give an edge to your career with an additional insight. 
• Fresh Graduates can have the technical know-how of CMS development to give a boost start to their IT career path as a developer. Drupal is widely used by Fortune 500 companies, governments, start-ups and more.
• If you are a career switcher and planning to change your domain then it is the best time to learn what more is there for you in the IT industry.

The Drupal Training session is for everyone, who is interested in knowing what Drupal is and evaluating or implementing it.

Prerequisite, but not mandate

Starting from scratch may be difficult, but a little knowledge of CMS would be an added advantage. If you have a hand on experience in WordPress, Joomla or HTML, and CSS then it would be great. Else no worries! The session is aimed to train and encourage newcomers and polish the fresh graduates. This session will give you an outline of Drupal concepts.

When you will complete the session, you: 

• Will have your own live Drupal website.
• Will be able to install and configure modules and themes from Drupal.org.
• Can create content and configure content types as well as create listings of content.
• Can easily manage user roles and accounts, as well as aliases and URL paths.
• Can create blocks and place them in the layout

Why this training session is free

We believe the best way to contribute to the Drupal community is by sharing the knowledge within its community and newcomers. Valuebound is an active contributor to the Drupal Community. The modules supported by Valuebound is used by more than 50,000 websites

As a Drupal specialist, Valuebound is dedicated to helping organizations and individuals to adopt the platform in their operations effectively. And we believe in giving result oriented training sessions that help you build the perfect websites you are looking for.

Come and join us! Be part of our Global Community. Get in touch if you have any queries regarding the session.

RSVP now!

Face it. Your website isn’t for you but for your customers.

You create your website to attract prospects that you can market to and later convert them into leads and then a customer. Everything from call-to-action to the visual design is inspired by the users’ behavior.

So, don’t you think it is important to develop a customer-centric website that offers seamless navigation, enhanced user experience and boost user engagement significantly.

This is the reasons why you should craft your website's design, content, and experience with your user personas in mind. Also, talk to different stakeholders involved to gather input from all levels of the organization.

You might be wondering what is persona or what is a persona in web experience?

Simply put, a user persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer, based on user research and incorporates the needs, goals, and observed behavior patterns of your target audience.

So why do we use persona?

The persona allows the company to design a better user experience for it's at all touch points, essentially, increasing average revenue per user (ARPU) and subscription - a key factor in today’s business landscape.

Also, a website that resonates with customers/audience, motivates content sharing and converts more email subscribers. 

Furthermore, using a persona, you can better optimize the site for search as you have a better understanding of the keywords your audience is looking for in search engines.

How does the persona help in marketing strategy?

No matter what business you have, an emotional marketing strategy can be as effective as any other strategy.

Personas offer a purpose for all your marketing strategy be it web content or marketing collateral. Contents based on persona allows you to address the specific concerns customers struggle with before taking the desired action. 

Undoubtedly, personas are extremely helpful when it comes to figuring out the interest area of our prospects. There are chances that different segments of your audience will be interested in the product for different reasons. 

Also, it is pertinent to speak to them directly to increase the chance of conversion.

Let’s cut the clutter and see -

How to create a persona?

In order to create an effective user/buyer persona, consider defining your segments, demographics, articulate personas’ values & beliefs and define the value they get from your organization. In the end, give them a face and a name to make it look more realistic. 

Follow the below steps to create a persona for your upcoming projects:

Defining Segments & Demographics

Begin with a list of different segments that you deal with. Email subscribers, social media fans, inactive members, donors, volunteers, activists and others.

While defining demographics, consider asking yourself a few questions on their address, gender, education, income, marital status, and kids.

Articulating Values and Beliefs

Learning about your customers’ values, opinions and beliefs give you a handle on what will be going on in their heads when they visit your website.

For this, you can ask questions about their passions and interests, dreams and goals, political thoughts and personality characteristics.

Articulate What Motivates Them

Start by asking some of the questions like their worries and goals, ways they try to create a meaningful life and behavioral traits.

Values They Get From Your Firm

Understanding your personas belief will help you to figure out exactly what they care for and why would they be your subscriber, volunteer or donate you. 

Realistic Name and Face

It's always suggested to give your persona a name and a realistic face to help them become more real.

Well, by now, we have a better understanding of creating a user persona/buyer persona. And why it is important for any business. Now, it’s time to explore the best practices. Since this blog has already become detailed we will share best practices to leverage the power of a user persona in the next installment of this series. 

To conclude why you should create a website-specific user persona?

To put it simply, a website designed, developed and marketed on assumption is often misguided and don’t show the results what we are expecting and ultimately it's underachieving. 

We need to understand users are different and they have different goals than you. They don’t care as you do. Here persona helps every stakeholder involved make a better decision, create one shared vision and make user research come to life.

Developing persona may take dedicated time and effort, but try not to be concerned with the additional time to create as it will help your business in the long run.

That’s it! I believe this was quite a ride, but a necessary one.

Now go ahead and start working on a persona for your new, upcoming project. 

In case you need any assistance with web development services, get in touch with our Drupal experts to find out how you can enhance user experience and increase engagement on your site. 

We, at Valuebound - a Drupal web development company, help enterprises with Drupal migration, Drupal support, third-party integration, performance tuning, managed services and others.

As a business owner or decision maker, it’s critical to take decisive action and revisit content strategy plan from scratch to help the business grow exponentially. A well-designed content strategy often goes beyond the scope of a content marketing strategy as it helps businesses increase audience engagement. 

Not only this, decision-makers also need to focus on measures to enhance user experience. Drupal is one such framework that offers deep capabilities and endless flexibility in developing a responsive, multilingual website. 

As we explore more about audience engagement, we will also define and contextualize omnichannel content strategy, and examine the value proposition they hold for it. Let’s begin.

Omnichannel content strategy

In the fast-paced digital economy, it’s important for enterprises to devise an omnichannel content strategy that can help boost their business online presence. Note that implementing omnichannel on the site requires a thoughtful digital strategy. 

Consider your own objectives first and kickstart the process by identifying the ways your current content strategy supports the estimated goals. 

Furthermore, you would also like to consider user persona. Try to know their goal. What is your unique value proposition to them? How to ensure they are aware of it? 

As a Drupal services provider, we have worked alongside several well-known media & publishing enterprises in the US and other parts of the world to help them enhance UX and increase audience engagement. Here are the few features you might like to consider for your current or new project. Have a look:

Now that you know the basic of omnichannel content strategy, it’s time to decide the integrations for your site to boost audience engagement. 

Drupal has been a go-to-CMS for simplified authoring, personalization, localization, responsive designs and more. Here integration with third-party applications plays a crucial role.

Web services: Integration with APIs

APIs are a set of tools that are used to build a software application. Drupal was designed to create and publish content through APIs as an optional feature to make it easier to alter, extend and help the developer with common tasks. 

Drupal 8’s latest feature such as REST API in core helps you leverage a range of integration such as social media channels, Google Analytics, payment gateways and ERP solution like Salesforce.

Personalization 

Personalization is crucial for any Drupal website. It accounts for a range of factors, such as on the devices your site is being accessed on, where your prospects are in the buying journey, specific interests or need your visitors to indicate while visiting the site. 

It is one of the best features when you need to determine what a user is interested in. And according to the data collected, you can make improvements in the user experience or the content available on the site.

Responsive web design

Drupal 8 has been designed with responsiveness in mind. With the rapid increase in the adoption of smartphone and tablets, it has become a necessity for businesses to develop mobile-friendly websites as most of the contents are consumed with hand-held devices.

Responsive web design is a technique that helps to keep website content, images, and structure same and work seamlessly on any device. Supported by a community of thousands, Drupal’s new feature is designed to work on all the Internet-enabled devices coming in near future. 

Subscription

Integration of Drupal with subscription services enables users to be notified of changes to node pages or taxonomies, such as additions to some category of the blog. Once enabled or activated, all nodes will have an additional link that will allow users to change their subscriptions. Users can also create automated subscription portal and manage their own subscription from the tab on their screen.

Localization

Having a multilingual website is must to grow business globally. A multilingual website demonstrates your thought, work and how you deal globally. Drupal allows the user to translate any component of the software, be it a taxonomy, comments, configuration, image styles, and more. 

Further, the framework automatically downloads the latest interface translation in your native language when you install the CMS in any language other than English.

If you are a decision maker then it's important to have a basic understanding of the frameworks on which you can migrate or build a new project. Successful businesses always have a strategy to take advantage of updated technologies that best suites to their business needs. Drupal 8 comes up with major upgrades that have potential to fulfill your unique business requirements and add value to it. 

Talking about the release of Drupal 9, Drupal creator Dries Buytaert in his blog, titled When should we release Drupal 9? said, “Nothing has been decided yet, but the current thinking is that we have to move Drupal to Symfony 4 or later, release that as Drupal 9, and allow enough time for everyone to upgrade to Drupal 9 by November 2021.”

We, at Valuebound, keep a tab on the latest trends, upgrades and regulatory compliance to provide you with enterprise level web solutions to boost your online presence. Get in touch with our Drupal experts for more information on our service offerings.

I recently read a medium post where the author claimed that using async-await is better than using promises. While this might hold good in general cases, I think that generalisation was too broad and doesn’t do justice to either async-await or promises. For somebody who is new to Javascript making sense of these and decide which one to use can be a challenge. In this post I will list down things that I have learnt about these and how I decide when to use what.

I read somewhere that async-await is syntactical sugar for using promises. So before getting to know async-await or deciding on which approach to you use make sure that you have a better understanding of promises. I captured my learnings in the post Understanding promises in Javascript. If you do not have time to go through the full article checkout the thumb rules that I follow.

Thumb Rules for using Promises

1. Use promises whenever you are using asynchronous or blocking code.
2. resolve maps to then and reject maps to catch for all practical purposes.
3. Make sure to write both .catch and .then methods for all the promises.
4. If something needs to be done in both the cases use .finally
5. We only get one shot at mutating each promise.
6. We can add multiple handlers to a single promise.
7. The return type of all the methods in Promise object whether they are static methods or prototype methods is again a Promise
8. In Promise.all the order of the promises are maintained in values variable irrespective of which promise was first resolved.

---

Once you have wrapped your head around promises checkout async await.It helps you to write code that is much more readable. When not used properly it has its downsides. You can read Understanding async-await in Javascript to checkout my learnings. If you do not have time to read the full article checkout my thumb rules.

Thumb Rules for async-await

Here are a list of thumb rules I use to keep my head sane around using asyncand await

1. aync functions returns a promise.
2. async functions use an implicit Promise to return its result. Even if you don’t return a promise explicitly async function makes sure that your code is passed through a promise.
3. await blocks the code execution within the async function, of which it(await statement) is a part.
4. There can be multiple await statements within a single async function.
5. When using async await make sure to use try catch for error handling.
6. Be extra careful when using await within loops and iterators. You might fall into the trap of writing sequentially executing code when it could have been easily done in parallel.
7. await is always for a single promise.
8. Promise creation starts the execution of asynchronous functionality.
9. await only blocks the code execution within the async function. It only makes sure that next line is executed when the promise resolves. So if an asynchronous activity has already started then await will not have an effect on it.

---

So should I use promises or async-await

The answer is that we will use both. Following are the thumb rules I use to decide when to use promises and when to use async await

1. async function returns a promise. The converse is also true. Every function that returns a promise can be considered as async function
2. await is used for calling an async function and wait for it to resolve or reject.
3. await blocks the execution of the code within the async function in which it is located.
4. If the output of function2 is dependent on output of function1 then I use await.
5. If two functions can be run in parallel create two different async functions and then run them in parallel.
6. Two run promises in parallel create an array of promises and then use Promise.all(promisesArray)
7. Every time you use await remember that you are writing blocking code. Over the time we tend to neglect this.
8. Instead of creating huge async functions with many await asyncFunction() in it, it is better to create smaller async functions. This way we will be aware of not writing too much of blocking code.
9. Another advantage of using smaller async functions is that you force yourself to think what are the async functions that can be run in parallel.
10. If your code contains blocking code it is better to make it an asyncfunction. By doing this you are making sure that somebody else can use your function asynchronously.
11. By making async functions out of blocking code, you are enabling the user who will call your function to decide on the level of asynhronicity he wants.

Hope this helps you decide easily when to use promises and when to use promises and when to use async-await

Originally published on https://hackernoon.com/should-i-use-promises-or-async-await-126ab5c98789