Why Drupal Helps Competitive Web Design Pricing

Web design can be an expensive business, especially if a Content
Management System (CMS) is required. Commercial CMS cost many
thousands of pounds, however open source CMS have been shown to be
just as good - if not better, which is why Drupal has been used by
large organisations; examples are NASA, The White House, MTV-UK and
Yahoo Research. A CMS application is used to create, edit, manage and
publish content in a consistently organised fashion.Drupal for Web
Design:It is ideal for web design as it is an award winning CMS with a
wide range of features such as multi-user administration, community
interactivity and news aggregation.The Drupal open source community
have made many other features available. It is modular, easy to adapt
to almost any situation and is well proven having been used by the
full spectrum of companies ranging from the very small to the very
large.Its progress can be seen by looking at the way it has been
winning awards:-2006 'Best Overall Open Source CMS' (2nd place)2007
'Best Overall Open Source CMS' (moved up to 1st place) and 'Best PHP
Open Source Content Management System' (2nd place)2008 'Best Overall
Open Source CMS' (still in 1st place) and ' Best PHP Open Source
Content Management System' (moved up to 1st place)2009 'Best PHP Open
Source Content Management System' (still in 1st place) and 'Open
Source CMS' Hall of FameHigh Profile Sites using DrupalThese include
Lime.com, Ubuntu.com, Yahoo Research,The New York Observer, Warner
Bros Records, Fast Company, (a business/technology magazine with over
200,000 pages). The web site of Popular Science (over 60,000 pages)
has been re-developed to move to Drupal and it is also used by many
universities.Drupal is highly modular and is a solid foundation for
web design.The building blocks are the open source modules which are
freely available and there are thousands of contributed modules which
cover virtually every requirement; new ones are being written all the
time. If a module does not exist, then it is not difficult to write a
new custom-designed one for a particular need.This allows Drupal to
have reduced development time and low maintenance costs; it is
supported by thousands of contributors and over 200,000 members.There
is a security team that ensures that Drupal installations are
completely secure, provided patches and updates are uploaded as they
become available.Features available to a web designer are
comprehensive and include a wide range of templates together with the
ability to easily embed flash animations and link to media on other
web sites, e.g. YouTube and Flickr.Content is well organised using
content types, for example products, news stories, and FAQs; the use
of templates make it easy to create new content.A problem with old
sites was that content became dated, offers expired and no one
noticed. Drupal allows content to be scheduled to become live and to
expire on a pre-set dates.ConclusionBecause it is free open source,
costs are lower and so web design prices are more competitive.Drupal
is SEO friendly if the web design company also specialises in SEO then
this powerful combination that is extremely hard to better.