Imagine standing in the center of the highway with an 18 wheeler barreling directly towards you at 70 miles per hour; would covering your eyes and acting as though you where impervious make the truck go away? Of course not; in-fact, you'd be steam rolled and blasted all over the highway.
Open Source, a phrase that many years made IT Managers cringe at the thought of fighting unsupported and poorly developed code. True, there are ton's of those types of applications still out there; however, Drupal has really made a strong effort to erase that mentality with an ever maturing core code base. In addition, more and more developers are creating and submitting modules to provide advanced functionality at a pace which licensed platforms simply can't keep up.
In case you've been hiding under a rock somewhere the past year, Drupal really exploded onto the mainstream in 2009. Numerous large and very well respected agencies, companies and educational institutions made the decision that we at LevelTen have know for years; Drupal is the best platform if you need rapid deployment, a stable and secure scaleable solution and numerous site features. I know. I know.
During my tenure at LevelTen I would estimate that I’ve fielded over 10,000 phone calls or emails from companies and individuals who are looking for some assistance with their web project.
I received an interesting sales call this morning from a gentleman whose company offers the service of helping to make your website, or client’s websites, Section 508 compliant. After the call I really got to thinking about our clients and how arduous the task is of having a completely compliant website. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying that it isn’t important, Target found out the hard way; all I’m saying is that if done properly it’s most likely won't be easy.
Everyone in the office always asks me how i make money with Drupal; the simple answer is find a niche, test every form of revenue stream possible, wash, rinse and repeat.
Last night Conner and I had to make a quick stop into the Walmart in Hurst and I was amazed at how beautiful the inside of the store appeared. It was quite evident that they had invested some time and energy researching the competition (Target) and found that bright stores with wide isles do make for a better shopping experience and most likely more repeat business.
Time and time again, we get the horror stories from companies who have started a web project with the best of intentions only to see it end in disaster. A successful project is not something that can just be lucked into; it takes various components that all must be managed properly for execution. No matter what the size of the organization, everyone struggles with the same problems; using our internal team or hiring a partner, how much budget is there for the project, when can we expect to see the end product, and array of other questions that all have to be answered.
Tom gave a presentation yesterday on some of the problems that some SEO companies make great stuff it you were unable to make www.meetup.com/knowcamp!
Instead of a full written blog post I figured I'd do a little vlogging and created a short clip with some of my thoughs around web design for mobile devices. While I think that bigger brands probably need to really consider it, for most site owners the use will probably never out weight the cost; in fact, the mobile Drupal site only gets about 2.5% of their views through mobile. One complaint I hear a lot is that designers no longer want to support IE6, even though it is still about 10% of the browser market, yet mobile probably constitutes less than 1%.
