Drupal

How to Choose a Drupal Website Development Firm

How to Choose a Drupal Website Development Firm

Choosing a website development company is a tricky business. Businesses can be helped, or hindered, significantly by a functional website that makes it easy for their audience to connect with them.

5 Tips for Choosing a Drupal Web Development Firm

  1. Hire with purpose: Know what you want. The scope of the project is important. Prospective partners need to know exactly what you want, what features you need, what you’re starting with and how you’ll measure success. The Request for Proposal (RFP) is one of the two primary ingredients in the Secret Recipe for a Successful Drupal Site. Meet with your team and iron out a solid RFP before taking any steps to hire a development firm.
  2. Hire for personality: How compatible is the web development firm with your organization? Research their background and examine early communication exchanges to make that assessment. Pay particular attention to compatibility during website discovery, the first stage of the partnership process.
  3. Hire for aptitude: Tech moves fast. That’s why Nelly Yusupova, founder of Techspeak for Entrepreneurs, recommends hiring a developer who learns quickly. Drupal core updates are usually released once a month, and the best development firms create, follow and provide feedback on those updates. Ask questions about how much time the prospective development firm spends on professional development, training and independent study.
  4. Hire for priority: The best development firms prioritize the user experience (UX) because it’s a basic requirement for any website. UX is crucial to delighting visitors who come to a website, meeting their needs and keeping them coming back. Look at the user reviews for websites that your potential partner has created, and ask questions about what the development firm does to create the best possible user experience.
  5. Hire for Communication: You have a solid website RFP. The teams really hit it off. The organization is passionate about UX and keeping ahead of the technological curve. Now, can you really communicate? The greatest challenge facing collaborating teams with different expertise is effective communication. Without making the effort to ensure clear understanding of unanimous goals and the collective journey to meet them, it’s a near certainty that neither organization’s goals will be met.

Thinkbean is a Boston Drupal industry leader and contributor to Drupal 8. Talk to a web development expert today about what Thinkbean can do for you.

Choose a Drupal Web Development Firm Wisely

Websites are far more than an indicator of a company’s presence in the digital space. Thousands of businesses provide a significant amount of their service offerings online. Rather than just providing up-to-date information, websites are now places where consumers take classes, schedule appointments, pay bills, file claims and register for services. Many of these services require personally identifiable information and have to be protected by layers of up-to-date security protocols, as a best practice and by law.

The City of Boston recently chose Drupal to launch Boston.gov, a site that provides an unprecedented number of services to Boston residents through local government. The core programming used in the most up-to-date version of Drupal is contributed to by programmers sponsored by industry leaders like Thinkbean.

Whether you require the aforementioned features or not, there are still many questions to be asked before hiring your Drupal web development firm. Before the beginning of the vetting process, consider the following:

  • Do you need to hire a Boston Drupal development firm? There are a lot of advantages to hiring locally. Not only does it support the local business community, it also gives your organization the opportunity for more face-to-face communication with the new web developer.
  • What worked for other organizations? Get a feel for the kind of work and partner you’ll need by exploring the experiences of similar organizations. Use your network to learn about what worked for industry peers during this process.
  • Do I really know what I need? Is the first part of your recipe solid? Have you got your website RFP ready to release? Meet internally as many times as necessary to avoid rework and renegotiation in the future.

It’s essential to find the right Drupal development firm the first time. Thinkbean’s advanced Drupal development skills allow businesses to establish a user-friendly web presence, achieve business goals, and exceed the needs and expectations of their clients.

Read case studies of our most interesting Drupal 8 projects to discover how we can help you reach your goals, or talk to a Drupal expert today.

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