Drupal Services: Developers, Designers, Hosting

Drupal Development Company

At Daymuse, we love Drupal. We are Drupal developers. What is Drupal? It's an open source content management system (CMS) widely used in enterprise, government, higher education, and non-profits. As a team of pro Drupal developers, we often utilize the system on our projects. In fact, more than half of our projects utilize the Drupal content management system. We've been working with Drupal since version 5.

Drupal Consulting

Through our dedicated project Discovery process, we offer Drupal consulting services covering all aspects of the Drupal development cycle.

Drupal Discovery Process Diagram

Project Planning

During Discovery, we'll analyze your use case, business goals, and requirements to decipher what features and functionality available through Drupal core and Drupal contributed modules will best support your needs. As we're the experts in the field, this is also the time we'll offer insight into areas which Drupal may strengthen your business without a significant cost. If we know of a certain set of features available through a contributed module or even custom development that would greatly enhance your Drupal implementation, we'll tell you. Having pro Drupal consultants on your side means that we're familiar with standard practices and can often identify areas of improvement for you. This strategy consultation can help add additional business value during the planning phase at little cost.

Custom Drupal Development

Our Discovery process will yield a project proposal which covers aspects like a build spec, prototype designs, an estimate, and a timeline. The Drupal build spec we produce will include all the Drupal-specific details of your content management system implementation.

Visual Drupal Theme

We offer Drupal theme development as a core part of our Drupal projects. If your organization has a specific visual design or style in mind you wish to see come alive as the look and feel on your Drupal site, we can do that. We utilize highly standardized code templates to support our frontend work. These are community-sponsored base themes for Drupal, our current favorite is Omega. These base themes don't actually provide any visual elements (they produce a literal blank white screen). Instead, they help create a best practice following set of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Leveraging these templates, Daymuse is able to translate visual designs to pixel-perfect displays within a custom Drupal theme. We do this by adding additional layers of frontend code to bring visual designs to life.

Mobile First

Mobile First, Responsive, Friendly Drupal Designs

Our Drupal theme development focuses on creating experiences which are mobile friendly from the first step. We build on top of these mobile designs to make them expand and remold themselves for larger and larger screens. We utilize a responsive design process to make sure that all of our design work is mobile friendly and functional across all screen sizes, whether a smartphone, tablet or large desktop workstation.

Visual Design

If you're interested in having us create the visual designs (graphics, layouts, and brand) itself, we offer professional design services, too. These aren't inherently tied to Drupal (designs should be system agnostic) and we approach them with an attitude of being unrelated to the Drupal implementation.

Functional Drupal Experience

Behind the look and feel of a Drupal site exists the underlying PHP-based platform. Drupal is widely, and rightly, considered an open platform on which to build varying functionality. It's often described the web system version of Lego. Drupal comes out of the box with very simplistic tools and doesn't natively offer the site owner the ability to do very much. The real power of Drupal, as a platform, becomes apparent when utilizing contributed modules. These modules (or plugins) are created from the community of Drupal developers worldwide. Many thousands of developers contribute code freely to these open source projects which extend the functionality of the core Drupal system.

We combine and configure these subsystems in order to create the core functionality needed in your project. We utilize the features inherit to these subsystems to implement the functional requirements of the project. There are thousands of Drupal modules available to us that cover nearly every sort of functionality that could be imagined on the web. We can even utilize these tools to create processes independent of the traditional browser-based web that interact with other services (through APIs) and deliver data to native apps on Smartphones, your backend application, or internal systems and private data collections. The variety of Drupal modules we can leverage means we can rapidly prototype new websites or services, but it also means you need a cognizant development team: Drupal modules come in every level of quality and support. We thoroughly test all modules we utilize on projects to be sure they match the expectations our client's professional needs.

Whether you're interested in building an e-commerce site around Drupal, an informational website, or an interactive experience, we have the expertise with Drupal to create the platform you need.

Drupal System Administration

As you'll understand from our explanation of content management systems, a large part of Drupal's functionality exists within the content management application: the administration interface. Out of the box, the Drupal administration interface is geared for very simple site administration. There's no form of content moderation. It can be rather slow performing. It lacks the ability to perform bulk actions across content. Its usability is general weak. As most Drupal sites rely on version 7, it's important to consider Drupal 7 was in Beta release about five years ago. Much has changed since then with the web. How do we as a professional Drupal development firm improve things?

Content State Management

We can utilize a combination of modules that provide the ability to internally moderate content. For example, some of your site users will need the ability to create content, but not publish it. Perhaps another user should be notified about this new content and have the ability to then publish the content or mark it for revision. We can do that.

Mobile Administration

Perhaps you manage a site which has thousands of authenticated users who are able to add content to the site. The default Drupal content administration interface will not work well with mobile device screen sizes. We utilize a well-supported combination of contributed administration theme and modules to make the administration experience fully mobile friendly. Even site administrators will be able to handle system tasks from a smartphone.

Usability

Part of the Drupal project's focus is on improving the system administration usability over time. We're working hard to keep with the changing Drupal environment and bring those usability enhancements back to existing Drupal versions through a combination of modules and custom code. This means that, when your site does transition to the latest Drupal, you'll have less of a ramp-up and training time for your users.

Drupal Support Services

Retainer

Our Drupal projects are built with the purpose of being extensible. We create Drupal projects which are ready to be added to, remolded, and further developed. Your Drupal site should continue to adjust with your business growth and industry trends. They're not static sites. If you'd like to keep us on retainer, we offer Drupal support through a contracted monthly retainer.

Training

If your organization will be supporting your Drupal sites on its own, we strongly recommend Drupal-specific training for your staff. While most developers and IT staff will be able to handle the basics, we're able to offer insight into Drupal nuance like caching and performance, backend systems integration, and environment maintenance. Our blog also provides insight through in-depth walkthroughs on technical Drupal topics.

If your organization will have non-technical site users managing content, adding content, and editing content who are not familiar with Drupal or CMS, we offer editor-specific training. We can teach your users how to properly utilize the content editing tools available to them through Drupal as well as best practices for creating content. We can help your users take into consideration search engine optimization when creating content, too. Our blog also offers tutorials and guides that are useful to Drupal site editors.

We offer training services through our guided training regimen on location or through the web.

Managed Drupal Hosting

Drupal Tailored Host

Our managed hosting service is available for the Drupal content management system. Aside from our standard managed hosting practice of securing and maintaing the server software, our Managed Hosting for Drupal provides Drupal-specific configuration and performance boosting integration with Drupal modules. For example, all of our Managed Hosting Drupal sites include integration with Memcache and Varnish at no additional cost; whether your site already supports Memcache and Varnish or not. We also offer additional enhancements like Apache Solr Enterprise Search integration with Drupal. We utilize Amazon EC2 for our managed hosted Drupal cloud service.

Multisite

We support Drupal multisite installations through our Managed Hosting platform.

Site Review

All existing Drupal sites must be audited before we accept hosting and managing them. Be sure to review our Managed Hosting service data for more general information.

Experienced Drupal Professional Consultants

We've been leveraging Drupal for a long time, and we love it. Aside from the tremendous number of portfolio projects we have utilizing Drupal, we're also a Drupal.org listed managed hosting provider. Drupal.org also lists us as a Drupal service provider and as a Marketplace company. We love supporting our home city of Richmond, Virginia, too!

Is your organization ready to use our Drupal developers on its next project?

Help Us Implement Drupal