Web Development

If I had a dollar for every time a potential client told me how easy web development is, or asked me to estimate the re-development of a Facebook-like website after a ten minute phone call I could travel around the world for a couple months. It it was easy to estimate and develop web applications (or any IT project for that matter) over 60% of projects wouldn't fail.

Drupal is a highly favored CMS platform that alot of companies are using to build their own websites, forums, wikis and blogs. Here at LevelTen Interactive, it is our main CMS platform of choice and we have been building some great sites for our clients while at the same time we are continuing to learn new things from it. I have been doing alot research of all the available CMS platforms to build sites on and so far Drupal is ranked at the top but at the same time the learning curve is quite steep.

One of the reasons Drupal is so powerful and will continue to grow is the vision. The vision manifests itself in two primary ways: the code and the community. While I have worked with many open source projects, I have never seen one where the community drives the code and the code drives the community as much as it does with Drupal.

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.

As web browsing on mobile devices is increasing in frequency and ease of use, the need for mobile optimized websites is pressing. The Drupal community has picked up on this need and have developed modules specific to the display of mobile websites.

Hopefully, if you’re making a decision on re-designing or building a new website for your company at least one of the criteria for selecting an agency is; 1. “Doe's the agency’s own web site reflect the same kind of results that are being proposed for your new website?" In other words, doe's the website design company or agency practice what they preach?

I am currently on a project that requires a 2-level drop down navigation and a sidebar block that displays the pages in the current section. This is not the first or second time I have used this recipe so it's time to share. This block can be used to display other pages in a section.

As Drupal becomes more popular and grows its open-source development community, more websites are turning to it as a solution for creating extremely powerful online communities, allowing users to submit their own content to a community hub. The power of these hubs is obviously their users and creating an organized, easy to use interface can be the difference between failure and success.

Drupal, and its contributed social modules, is the perfect system to create a powerful, feature-rich, online social community or networking website, while limiting development expenses and time to get up and running. Here are the best Drupal modules, default and contributed, for social networking that LevelTen has utilized on our community websites: