Website Content : Avoid these costly errors

You already know that grammar and spelling errors can mar your online brand presence. As can inconsistency in sticking throughout to either British or American English. But there are other, more damaging errors, the main among which are:

Not focusing on the customer

An example would speak the best:

NO:  We are great designers who have fantastic achievements. Our insights will be valuable to your esteemed business.

YES:  We have designed sites for reputed  enterprises across domains and countries. We leverage this experience to provide you a design that effectively materializes your business vision.

Not describing  your services / products accurately

Consider the e commerce site that had to arrange for a reverse pickup and refund costs for an inexpensive earring just because the opaque glass shown in the photo was in reality transparent! A culture of poor copy throughout your content can lead to intense customer dissatisfaction and unforeseen expenditure. Imagine all your progress going to waste because of copy errors!

Not focusing on dynamic content

Brilliant static content on your site, when accompanied by poor quality blogs, press releases, product descriptions etc strongly reinforces reader opinion of you as a poor quality business that fooled people by hiring a great copywriter for a short while. Regular, consistently frequent quality dynamic content tells search engine crawlers that your site is up to date and in circulation. And it will more often be your dynamic content that is shown by search engines.

Plagiarized content

A common, but legally dangerous error happens when content is high-quality, but plagiarized.  As a business owner, all your good work can be unravelled by one unethical writer. Be sure to use plagiarism detecting software, even free ones, and not Google alone. Ensure you give credit for using someone’s idea as a small part of a write up. Using any single source as a major chunk of your write up is plain unethical. It’s better to link to the author’s content if permitted.

Copy that does not target your audience

The final purpose of all copy on your site should be to market your services or to create your brand reputation. Who would decide to buy your services? What is their technical level?  Why?  Who do you want to think well of you? Why? Making sure your copy is targeted to the 'who'  to effectively achieve the 'why'. The following examples will make it clearer:

• Service - Website building 

Who decides to buy it? CEO / Manager, Technical knowledge level - High 

Why? Increases Revenue / Easy to administer at the backend / Eases up workflow / Fewer delays / Less downtime

• Service - Online degree

Who decides to buy it? High school student / Parents, Technical knowledge level - Mostly low to medium

Why? Knowledge / Interest / Facilitates further studies / Jobs

Thinking high traffic equals good reputation

High traffic does mean high visibility. But two hundred people spending 5 minutes on your site for 6 months is far better for your business than a thousand of them leaving in 50 seconds! Analyse your traffic. While SEO and backlinks are vital for getting footfalls, it is the quality of your copy (and an impressive client list later on) that will ensure good footfall duration.

How to get affordable writers for your startup - Dos and Don'ts

Your primary need is to focus on your core business. You will probably not find time to focus on preventing the errors I’ve mentioned so far. Nor may you be able to hire an established writer as a long-term expense. Eliminate most problems at the initial hiring stage through these tips :

DO: Get great writers who value employer-flexibility over money. On social networking / freelancing groups such as ‘Put Me in Touch’ on Facebook, you may find experienced, quality writers who are working mothers / caretakers of sick people etc. They will often be very responsible, motivated and dedicated. Contact authorities in writing / technical writing institutes and ask them for good students who have to accommodate serious responsibilities. You will get employees who value the benefits more than the money.

DO: Ask for the writer’s blog URL (preferably) or writing samples. Check using a plagiarism checking software, and only then call them for a test / interview. You will save time.

DON’T: Worry if the candidate has little technical knowledge related to your product/service. Test the writer’s ability online/onsite to comprehend and edit a technical document. A fast and confident learner will be able to understand something at least. This will help you save costs.

DO: Give the candidate an onsite / online test to write quality content. Do ensure the video is on to prevent cheating for online tasks. Nowadays, we instinctively  refer to the net for everything without really being aware of it. So be explicit in refusing smartphone access during hiring tests.

DON’T: Give the task as homework. You will learn only later if they’ve got the task ghostwritten!

DO: Conduct psychometric tests that can be easily graded through software. This will improve the probability of  your writer being someone who can handle feedback, is mature, does not plagiarize and will stick on.

Warning - Great Copy and SEO alone do not increase footfall duration

The best writers, content and SEO will be of no use if your site is not easy to navigate, or your admin cannot work smoothly at the backend, or your site is bug ridden and hangs. Internet visitors are used to opening scores of sites in a mere span a minute. They will get irritated and instantly leave your site should they find it difficult to use. This is why choosing a site building software that works well despite being rapidly set up is so vital. 

Valuebound is a leading Drupal development company providing enterprise Drupal web solutions. For more information on Drupal development, contact us

Reputed businesses and strategists openly share strategy insights nowadays. After all, doing so gives them visibility that is directly proportional to the credibility of their insight. Yet, as the decision maker in a startup who cannot afford the time and resources needed to implement all the requirements these experts recommend, you have no choice but to start very small and strategize big as time goes by. 

Most entrepreneurs feel tempted to adopt the ‘If I jump in the pool I will learn to swim’ attitude despite knowing how much uncertainty this approach necessitates. In this series, we talk about how well-informed choices can give you a digital platform that can start off simple and lightweight, with minimal must-have strategy tools in place. And how to ensure this site can accommodate future strategic requirements of social media, online marketing, customer interaction across devices etc while removing, or at least mitigating the risks you so rightly fear.

You’ve got to think about big things while you’re doing small things, so that all the small things go in the right direction. ― Alvin Toffler

To be able to focus unhindered on your core business, it is essential to mitigate the following risks that arise with changes in your strategy:

• Loss of platform dependability and business reputation during major changes
• Inability of my initial platform to accommodate and adjust to major changes in strategy
• A sudden need for change I am ill-prepared for ( a major client out of the blue)
• Having to overhaul the system some time in the future, or to migrate to another CMS
• Repeated expenses and licensing fees

With the steps we recommend, you will be able to focus on your core business secure in the knowledge that your platform can accommodate not just planned changes, but even unforeseen contingencies and requirements that are imminent due to advances in ways enterprises do business. Tomorrow, we talk about the basics of planning out a site that creates a good first impression, no matter how small it is. We will be glad to keep you informed by continuing the series on subsequent days.

Valuebound is a leading Drupal development company providing enterprise Drupal web solutions. For more information on Drupal development, contact us

Google Analytics is an indispensable tool for business, and a must for every enterprise CMS platform. No search engine has yet been able to rival google as the immediate, instinctive choice of billions of users. Drupal, with it’s strictly vetted collection of modules, has thousands of contributed modules on Drupal.org that have been approved only after repeated revisions as stipulated by other developers and authorities on Drupal. This is done to ensure security, robustness and quality and perfect integrability with the Drupal core. These modules include a number that extend and enhance Google Analytics capabilities to make it much more powerful than its original form.

It’s only the person who fully uses the best system who  knows how much better it needs to be - Rakhee.S

Now, suppose, you want to specifically target China, the largest market in the world, and need something like Google analytics specifically for China. All you have to do is search for a Drupal module that can do this task - in this case, the Baidu Analytics module.  While Drupal does have a strong, frequently updated Google Analytics module, so does every other CMS, What sets Drupal apart is that every extra analytics need you have will never be limited by the Drupal framework in terms of fast, lean, upgradeable development. Just a quick couple of examples showing how a Drupal developer can enhance your Analytics capabilities:

Suppose you want to know something about people sending you emails. And you do not wish to have to search your web logs to retrieve information and IP address and what hits you’ve got from the latter. You can add a Drupal module that instantly appends all such information instantly to the footer of this email.

Now, Google prohibits sending personally identifiable information to their server, which can be problematic if you need to create a direct relationship between a specific conversion and the campaign associated with that conversion. Just choose a Drupal module made to capture detailed information about the conversion to a database which will display conversion data to web site managers in the administration screens . This conversion data is also available for you write custom reports.

Should you wish to tweak a Google Analytics module, or want something similar with a different benefit, all you have to do is find a Drupal developer who has had his or her modules approved and accepted by the community after their stringent vetting procedures, and rest reassured that you will gain a great product seamlessly merging with the Drupal core. The Drupal framework has been specially focussed towards facilitating innovation and enhancements of existing or impending  marketing tools. This is because the developer-oriented framework of Drupal accommodates the most advanced of development efforts to give you a cutting edge enterprise CMS platform.

Valuebound is a leading Drupal development company providing enterprise Drupal web solutions. For more information on Drupal development, contact us

Drupal - developer focussed and enterprise-friendly

Drupal has essentially been developed to be a developer’s dream. Drupal allows the developer unparalleled scope for building sites with thousands of pages, creating sites that can be cloned and redeployed by non-coding admins, wildly innovative displays of content that can fulfil almost all future needs of any enterprise domain. For highly specialized tasks, Drupal can fulfil your most intricate integration requirements.

Drupal is a developer’s Mount Everest, but an admin’s piece of cake - Rakhee.S

Why Drupal has been made tough to master

And the reason it’s been made this way is that complex, tough to master coding is needed to give you a hugely flexible, highly scalable site full of unbelievably intricate content interactivity which is secure, maximally lean in the backend and easy to administer. Think of it this way, to get a pilot to the moon in the easiest way, the creators of the space shuttle need to work much, much harder behind the scenes to make it possible. And the proof that Drupal is getting more and more enterprise respect is reflected in how rapidly the requirement for Drupal developers is shooting up.

Drupal Visibility - Whither enterprise-orientation? :-(

The first thing one notices when one enters the Drupal community is a very welcoming ‘hey members, get comfy’ attitude. Very charming, except for the fact this does not directly translate to, ‘hey enterprises, see the amazing stuff we can do’. Why on earth can we not have separate drupal smileys welcoming enterprises and developers / contributors to different parts of the site specifically oriented towards them?

It might be a little off-putting for an enterprise to see how many of the community’s efforts are completely focused on presenting the benefits of Drupal to Drupal members. Considering that the aim of a high quality open CMS is to ultimately meet the needs of startups envisioning huge expansion and all sizes of growing enterprises, there isn’t as much of an outward marketing effort geared at demonstrating what Drupal can do for enterprises, which it happens to do incredibly well.  It’s all great to target developers - but why can’t an association site that is the face of the best open source CMS for both rapidly growing and extremely large enterprises make marketing Drupal easier by having a portal for enterprise executives and decision makers with site demos et al?

Drupal does, nevertheless, sell itself

If, as the trends indicate, the intricate and futuristic possibilities of Drupal CMS, developed according to one of the most stringent OS standards of vetting are selling themselves so well, then imagine what a simple effort that is going to be much easier than making countless tutorials and complex documentation would do! Note the information below:          

around 70% of wordpress is blogs or news according to thevalueequation.typepad.com

For the year 2013, where the CMSs used by the top 10,000 sites are concerned,

Wordpress : 50.25%
Drupal : 19.75%
Joomla : 2.45%

Blogs and simple sites will form at least 50% of Wordpress chunk of top ten thousand sites, which are definitely wise in their choice of CMS if they don’t plan to become much more intricate later. Once we eliminate this number, it is clear that Drupal has risen very high to rival Wordpress as the chosen CMS of enterprises. But this trend also indicates that a lot of websites needing very complex content management have chosen Wordpress.

While it’s magical that anyone can set up a professional, light, inexpensive, yet fully functional site so easily through Wordpress and certainly not through Drupal, Drupal, is capable in it’s current form of creating visionary sites that can materialize cutting edge marketing innovation to produce hard-core revenue and reputation increases with so much less effort on the part of the enterprise.

Wordpress - Great lightweight CMS but unsuited for Drupal's niche

It’s an accepted view among CMS experts that Wordpress does not have many of the benefits Drupal’s development-accommodating framework provides in terms of UX/branding, traffic, social integration, visitor engagement, conversion, retention, process improvement, continual innovation, etc. Drupal has visionary enterprise social business orientation incorporated right inside its framework. It already offers way beyond standard tools for SEO, social media integration and mind-boggling content integration with a lean, mean backend. And all this complexity at a well-planned and effective level of security that’s so vital for an expanding enterprise.

Imagine the White House or NASA opting for a Wordpress site! Given the right information, enterprises very well know what they want. If the Drupal.org website were to have a separate section portraying the power of Drupal sites, busy decision makers would be really helped.

Marketing efforts put in place now would help later (Drupal 8)

A lot more people would be able to contribute towards this separate marketing portal at Drupal.org, as they would not all of them be required to be technically skilled. The need of the hour is to give a hard push to the community effort by helping to showcase and market the selfless contributions of thousands of developers and architects. We have a product that can be used for a much larger chunk of the enterprise market in its current form, and in another three-four years, when the usage of Drupal 8 picks up, if we market our Drupal right, we can benefit even the dynamic enterprises using the Drupal framework in numbers more reflective of Drupal’s tremendous capabilities.

credits : http://getlevelten.com/blog/tom/drupal-crisis-point-marketing-ice-eskimos (Tom McCracken)

Valuebound is a leading Drupal development company providing enterprise Drupal web solutions. For more information on Drupal development, contact us

Valuebound is pleased to announce that we are now Drupal support partners for Bangalore's renowned BMS college of engineering. The college has been rated as one of the top 25 Engineering Institutions in India by various media sources. We will be providing website monitoring, website maintenance and website troubleshooting for their Drupal CMS website. We welcome this opportunity to service our valued client and to establish yet another fruitful Drupal relationship.

Valuebound is a leading Drupal development company providing enterprise Drupal web solutions. For more information on Drupal development, contact us

Valuebound, in association with AMC Engineering College, Bangalore will be conducting a Drupal in a day training for the students of IT & related courses. This training will introduce Drupal as a content management system that is the leading choice of complex, large-scale, high-volume websites.

During this workshop you will learn

• Basic Drupal terminology (blocks, taxonomy, aliases, and more)
• Managing content and users
• Adding automatic image resizing
• Configuring popular Drupal modules
• Constructing a Drupal site

Through this interactive 8-hour session, we intend to give potential and beginning users a hands-on experience in configuring popular Drupal modules and in creating a Drupal site. We hope to create enough of an interest in Drupal among the students to help them visualize it as part of their educational and career aspirations.

Session Details:

Date: Feb 22, 2013
Timings: 9AM to 5PM
Location: AMC Engineering College
Phone:   +91 (808) 804-8711
Email: info@valuebound.com

Valuebound is a leading Drupal development company providing enterprise Drupal web solutions. For more information on Drupal development, contact us

Marketing automation involves reaching your clients online and making use of carefully implemented automation to target individual consumers with result-oriented sales efforts. The content of the target messages is often derived from automated analysis of consumer browsing and buying patterns.

Drupal integrates extremely well with reputable marketing automation tools such as Marketo, Eloqua and Genius. Selecting an experienced Drupal developer who is capable of complicated integration, while vital, is just not enough. This post talks about why it is of paramount importance that you and your development team / provider need to discuss and meticulously plan such integration to ensure your marketing automation efforts actually translate to increased sales.

Marketing automation, like cake-baking, needs the right ingredients and the right recipe to produce the right results - Rakhee.S

The best development efforts, even if wildly successful, will not translate to increased sales if you do prioritise the following:

Make your marketing automation effort an opportunity to review your sales and marketing processes.

Marketing automation is a very powerful way of both saving money by automating marketing, as well as increasing revenue due to increased sales. However, these benefits occur only when the customer feels benefitted by your marketing efforts. Highly targeted automated marketing is possible only if the processes of analysing consumer preferences are bug-free, logical and practicable. So revise your processes to make maximal use of your automated marketing facilities to increase revenue. This will ensure you don’t end up selling ice to eskimos or sea water to Tahiti.

Plan meticulously, plan jointly and plan expertly.

You need to plan extremely well how to derive the content that goes into the sales messages with which you inform your customer. Hire marketing experts who’ve succeeded in increasing online sales and social shopping. Ensure that your design and development team sits down with you at every juncture, for it is they who will have a direct effect on:

1. How well your ecommerce platform supports the dedicated marketing automation apps
2. Getting you the maximum revenue benefit with the leanest and most functional integration (think ease of workflow planning and implementation)
3. How the process of customer interaction that follows the targeted marketing effort is made smooth, empowering, transparent and enjoyable.

Create workflows for your CMS platform facilitating customer purchases after targeted marketing.

What happens after the marketing effort is the biggest factor that will make or break your marketing automation initiative. It is a complicated procedure to plan facilitation of consumer activity post targeted automated marketing even at the planning stage of your integration. If you botch this up, creating such processes after your marketing automation applications are integrated will be a patch up job at the best and a failure at the worst. Verify the credentials of the developer you hire, ensure they’re great strategists and consultants, too. Talk to their clients, especially those for whom intricate integrations have been successful.

Plan for the simple, the intricate, the futuristic.

Use your own expertise, industry insights, and expert analysis of trends to judge what efforts will get you dividends. Simple batch messages might be required on special occasions along with more narrowcasting efforts. Plan for both kinds. Nascent trends can become tomorrow’s must-haves, think relatively small sites driving disproportionate amounts of social shopping. Plan for all, especially if accommodating such possibilities is not prohibitively expensive and time consuming.

Consider what might go wrong, plan to prevent it.

Keep in mind there is a busy human being at the other end of your automated marketing. They think, and act, and most importantly feel. Use your marketing automation to make them feel nice, and you build your reputation which will ultimately lead to recommendations, site visits, great reviews and of course increased market share in the cutthroat ecommerce world. But misdirected, bug-ridden messages or simply a failure to read your customer’s pulse, or to ensure a great UX and customer service as well will cause even the most skilfully planned marketing automation to collapse. Play your own devil’s advocate; do not hire yes-men. Ensure you get expert planners and developers who are concerned enough for you to speak their minds on how to prevent strategy errors.

A mere decade ago, e commerce was a scary word for many customers. Today, even in developing countries, a huge number of consumers prefer online purchases for the discounts and time-saving. Yet, at a brick and mortar shop, it is much, much easier for the consumer to follow caveat emptor (let the buyer beware). Ecommerce stores have unique difficulties as a direct result of not being able to deal with customers face-to-face. For instance, a single unforeseeable error on your part, such as the inadvertent shipping of a defective product, launches your consumer on a tedious and expensive journey of phone calls and lost time. The very policies you create with ethical intentions to protect your consumer, cause them to spend time and money and lead to dissatisfaction.

It is important, therefore, to make up for these unavoidable difficulties with very, very strong efforts of enhancing customer experiences wherever possible. This is why it is vital to plan out your marketing automation efforts to be the very best in enhancing a helpful, desirable, smooth and pleasurable experience for your consumer. You must seriously consider what might go wrong and prevent it from happening. With the challenges specific to your being an online seller, ensuring a proper marketing automation will go a long way in mitigating your future anxieties.

Valuebound is a leading Drupal development company providing enterprise Drupal web solutions. For more information on Drupal development, contact us

Valuebound Interactive Solutions is pleased to announce the contribution of a brand new module to the prestigious open source Drupal community. The Content-Type Dependency module sponsored by BuKMarker and developed by the Valuebound team has now been approved by the community and is available for download on drupal.org/project/content_type_dependency.

This module has been enhanced and fine-tuned to incorporate feedback by the community. This process of approval through community participation has ensured that the module has passed strict Drupal quality standards. Issues and feature requests should be created at the community page, URL drupal.org/project/issues/content_type_dependency.

The Content-Type Dependency module allows admins to create rules. Each of these rules will prevent a user from adding one particular content type unless the user has finished adding a specified number of other content type. The number can be specified by the admin.

Some possible uses of this module are:

• A market analyst has to contribute industry insights (content type) before publishing his profile on a site.
• A seller has to add a company page for her to be able to start adding a products page
• A blogger needs to add his profile before he can start posting blogs

Please contact Valuebound for paid customization and additional features.

Business is never so healthy as when, like a chicken, it must do a certain amount of scratching around for what it gets.   (Henry Ford)

As things stand now, google keyword planner shows almost a million searches per year on the exact term ‘open source CMS’. Add search results for all other terms related to the same concept, and it remains no secret that clearly, millions of people have Drupal, Joomla and Wordpress on their minds. For the decision makers thinking of which CMS system to choose, this post aims to present an unbiased view of the pros and cons of the three major open source CMS players, Drupal, Wordpress and Joomla.

Getting credible CMS insights on the web (?)

The world wide web is full of articles, opinions and discussions on major CMSs, but as most enterprises would attest, it’s tough to verify the credentials of those authoring most of the insight you gain on the web about pretty much anything. This applies to open source CMSs in a big way, because

1. Open source CMSs have very passionate supporters who are also very vociferous .
2. Articles authored by those who are excellent writers can fool a reader into thinking they necessarily know their CMSs.
3. Those who have used a particular CMS might offer insight on some other CMS without having used it.
4. Open forums are often so open that absolutely anyone, including those who’ve never used a CMS, can offer various opinions.

As such, we recommend you get your information by communicating with companies that have direct experience of working with multiple CMSs.

Aim of this article

In this article, we offer you a contemporary perspective on the latest versions of Drupal, Joomla and Wordpress. Our views have come about through our use of different CMSs to service enterprises across domains and sizes. As enterprise-oriented PHP experts who’ve used Wordpress and Joomla as well, before settling to specialize on Drupal, we do have an astute awareness of situations which might be better served by Wordpress or Joomla, and do think that it is in our good interests to share what we know.

We hope it will help you to make an informed decision, given the present scenario, with 2014 looming large on the CMS horizon. In this post, we discuss all three major open source CMSs of Drupal, Wordpress and Joomla, with a focus on you as a person intending to meet business and marketing requirements through a quality open source CMS.

When to use Wordpress

Considering Wordpress, it is more aimed at ‘consumers’ as opposed to enterprises, and is a great choice within that market. If you’re an individual or a small group of enthusiasts wanting to set up a blogging site, or a news site, Wordpress is going to suit you better than Drupal or Joomla. Now, if as a decision maker for a business, you need a simple, easy to operate, inexpensive site that will not need to become much more complex in the future, Wordpress will most certainly give you an efficient, lighter, faster, easy to operate and maintain site that does not require prolonged learning periods and coding expertise. For a simple, easy to maintain site that will not magnify in complexity later, or that meets temporary needs, Wordpress is a high quality offering that is popular as it is best suited to the purpose. You will not need to spend much money or time on development efforts either. Since there are millions of non-enterprise sites or simple enterprise sites set up on the net by those who do not want an intensive learning curve, you will find that Wordpress is used much more than Drupal or Joomla.

When Drupal and Joomla would be better than Wordpress

Wordpress, however, will let you down if complex workflows and multiple content types (blogs, news, product information, user details) that have to draw information from each other are going to be the norm, now or in the future. If you’re thinking of building a dynamic enterprise that’ll meet complex needs in future, even if your current needs remain simple, it is better to avoid the expensive and somewhat disruptive experience of having to migrate your precious data and processes to a different CMS because your initial CMS cannot keep up with your business needs. That brings us to complex sites, or sites that are going to get complex in the future even in ways that are currently unforeseeable.

Drupal or Joomla?

As PHP coders who have worked with recent versions of both Joomla and Drupal, we can say with assurance that both are good for building complex sites. Both have been around for long, and have passionate supporters who help and guide each other. The difference is that Drupal is created to be very very developer friendly. Once a developer masters Drupal, which is a very intensive effort due to the sophisticated options this CMF offers, he or she can build very intricate, futuristic and efficacious web sites. Joomla, on the other hand, can be used to build quite complex websites without that much of a learning curve. What does this mean to you as a decision maker?

Why Joomla

Now, should you require a site that for some reason does not require as much of learning for the developer to master, is still a quality offering meeting complex needs that do not really need to be too sophisticated, you could choose Joomla, provided you are not expecting future contingencies that are too intricate. Your choice would be dependent in that case on pricing, future plans/expectations for site functionalities and developer quality and availability as well. The process of settling on a good Joomla developer is, to be honest, easier than finding an expert Drupal developer, due to the tremendous skill, versatility and knowledge a Drupal expert just has to have.

Why Drupal

But then, if you want to introduce a lot of interaction between the various types of content on your site, or keep adding / trying new or futuristic business strategy ideas, you would need a site that lends itself to sophisticated development. Drupal, being developer oriented and developer friendly, would allow a skilled developer to implement more numerous, and more complex possibilities than Joomla would. Even as it currently stands, Drupal does allow for more advanced content manipulation and interaction and future innovation, accompanying significant scaling, enhancement and even fluctuations.

In this context, you might want to go through our recent post ‘Drupal - A powerhouse for evolving enterprise platforms’. In this post, also presented to accommodate your requirements as a decision-maker, we talk about Drupal’s suitability for growing enterprises, with a special discussion on Drupal 8, due to be released in 2014, and what it would mean for your business.

Things you should consider while choosing an open source CMS

Seamless integration with third party applications:

Often, there are highly specialized functionalities required by expanding enterprises, which no single CMS can achieve. Today’s multifunctional enterprise platforms necessarily need to integrate seamlessly with other specialized applications. Yet, often, integrating third party applications can be a complicated task. Your CMS should allow a developer oriented structured coding that is planned to accommodate the most complex integration requirements with efficiency. This consideration will prove invaluable as you develop and grow.

Thriving support environment:

Your platform can function well enough for you to concentrate on your core business only if there is extremely good support in place for your CMS. The open source community associated with your CMS should be capable of providing basic and advanced support in the form of chat, forums, documentation, FAQ’s. A thriving support culture will mean that almost all your problems will have been dealt with before, ensuring speedy resolution.

Established update systems:

Your chosen CMS should have a proven policy of improvements, updates and new releases with backward compatibility. The CMS community should maintain support to the earlier versions for a few years after releasing the latest version. There should have been a lot of community support during previous updates, version releases and porting situations.

Conclusion

The best open source CMSs are today supported by thousands of extremely talented developers who have created websites for organizations as high profile as the White House and NASA. Open source CMSs are capable of fulfilling multiple enterprise functions due to the sheer number and advanced expertise of their contributors. You do not have to pay costly licensing fees, or be locked in to a vendor when you choose open source. With a judicious choice of open source CMS, you can be sure you will keep getting updates and new releases that enhance your platform or add / suggest new capabilities. Choose your CMS very carefully, as choosing an appropriate CMS capable of meeting current and future goals will ensure that at least for the next ten years, you can focus on using your CMS to grow and mould your business instead of having to worry about migrating all your precious data, functions and workflows to a better CMS.

Do go through our article : ‘Drupal - A powerhouse for evolving enterprise platforms’.

Valuebound is a leading Drupal development company providing enterprise Drupal web solutions. For more information on Drupal development, contact us

If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable.   (Lucius Annaeus Seneca)

CMS - Indispensable part of enterprise strategy

The enterprise domain today, is extremely competitive. And it is hugely so because of the web. Clients flock to the provider offering the latest innovation, and excellence in customer service works only when combined with an impressive digital experience. You necessarily need to keep scaling, changing workflows and backend processes, and creating sophisticated functionalities as a result of innovations or improvements or your changing needs and changes in your market / clientele. The CMS platform you choose needs to be highly adaptable while being very stable and secure. As things stand now, the reason we at Valuebound have shifted our focus to Drupal is that it empowers us to guarantee our clients a huge degree of stability and security while facilitating major and complex changes or enhancements to meet their evolving business and marketing needs.

Drupal - Developer-friendly is enterprise-friendly

Drupal was conceptualized to be more developer-oriented than the other open source CMSs. Even the most brilliant and innovative development initiatives using the best of developers can fail should the CMS itself not provide the structure to facilitate that effort. Choosing Drupal for your enterprise increases the functional possibilities of your platform. Once you hire a Drupal master, you can be sure their expertise and skill will be fully accommodated by the Drupal development framework. Thinking more from a business vision point of view, Drupal will give you very advanced sites and take care of complex contingencies better than other open source CMSs as things stand now and in the near future.

Drupal - Strict standards of module (plugin) development

Drupal’s strict quality and security guidelines subject development efforts to a very rigorous screening process in which the entire community participates. This ensures that a highly effective security mechanism is already in place now and throughout adaptation. The Drupal community consists of volunteer developers who have contributed to sites such as the White House, NASA, Grammy, The Economist to name just a few, and they are part of the quality Drupal effort in a significant way. 

This community spirit is why Drupal has come up with plugins that are capable of meeting the very latest business functionalities and strategies. These plugins will have a huge beneficial impact on your platform during scaling, enhancing and changing. Implementing and creating these versatile plugins, however, makes the existence of developer-friendliness highly desirable in a CMS.

Drupal - Facilitates complex integration and coding (Focus: Drupal 8)

Increasingly, enterprises are finding it necessary to adopt dedicated applications for highly specialized domain functions.  Thus, enterprise platforms need to integrate seamlessly with other paid or open source specialized applications. Yet, integrating third party applications can often be a complicated task. Drupal’s developer oriented structured coding is planned to accommodate the most complicated of integration requirements.

Drupal is soon releasing its latest version to integrate with Symfony, a coding-focussed content management framework that offers a great programming structure for integrating other apps. What does this translate to for your business goals? Well, the Drupal experts you hire will have more numerous and complex options for coding and integration with vital business applications meeting your highly specialized domain requirements.  This means they can materialize your most complex requirements and provide you even more options than before. Your business domain-specific needs will get met and even strategized in a way more aligned to enhance revenue and brand presence. You will be able to stand out from the competition, interest clients, and grow in a way that produces the results you want though such growth. All through an expertly strategized and built enterprise platform that remains leading-edge throughout.

Necessary enterprise requirement - Drupal expertise across versions

As already discussed, the integration of Symfony with Drupal 8 will make more intricate coding options available that will directly translate into increased efficiency, enhancement and innovation for your revenue and branding efforts. So, now’s the time to ensure you hire the right firm for a carefully thought out advanced and holistic Drupal solution.

Valuebound is a leading Drupal development company providing enterprise Drupal web solutions. For more information on Drupal development, contact us at info@valuebound.com