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Jul 30 2020
Jul 30

argument-open-source Over 500,000 businesses leverage Drupal to launch their websites and projects. From NASA to Tesla, public and private institutions regularly rely on Drupal to launch large-scale websites capable of handling their development and visual needs. But, starting a Drupal project doesn’t guarantee success. In fact, 14% of all IT projects outright fail, 43% exceed their initial budgets, and 31% fail to meet their original goals! In other words, if you want to create a successful Drupal project, you need to prepare. Don’t worry! We’ve got your back. Here are 5 things to keep in mind when starting a Drupal-based project.

1. GATHER REQUIREMENTS FROM STAKEHOLDERS EARLY AND OFTEN

According to PMI, 39% of projects fail due to inadequate requirements. Believe it or not, requirement gathering is the single most important stage of project development. In fact, it’s the first step Drupal itself takes when pushing out new projects (see this scope document for their technical document project). Gathering requirements may sound easy, but it can be a time-consuming process. We recommend using SMART (Specific, Measurable, Agreed Upon, Realistic, Time-based) to map out your specific needs. If possible, involve the end-user during this stage. Don’t assume you know what users want; ask them directly. Internally, requirements gathering should rally nearly every stakeholder with hefty amounts of cross-collaboration between departments. You want to lean heavily on data, establish your benchmarks and KPIs early, and try to involve everyone regularly. The single biggest project mistake is acting like requirements are set-in-stone. If you just follow the initial requirements to a “T,” you may push out a poor project. You want to regularly ask questions, communicate issues, and rely on guidance from stakeholders and subject matter experts (SMEs) to guide your project to completion.

2. PLAN YOUR SDLC/WORKFLOW PIPELINE

We all have different development strategies. You may leverage freelancers, a best-in-class agency, or internal devs to execute your Drupal projects. Typically, we see a combination of two of the above. Either way, you have to set some software development lifecycle and workflow standards. This gets complex. On the surface, you should think about coding standards, code flow, databases, and repositories, and all of the other development needs that should be in sync across devs. But there’s also the deeper, more holistic components to consider. Are you going to use agile? Do you have a DevOps strategy? Are you SCRUM-based? Do you practice design and dev sprints? At Mobomo, we use an agile-hybrid development cycle to fail early, iterate regularly, and deploy rapidly. But that’s how we do things. You need to figure out how you want to execute your project. We’ve seen successful Drupal projects using virtually every workflow system out there. The way you work matters, sure. But getting everyone aligned under a specific way of working is more important. You can use the “old-school” waterfall methodology and still push out great projects. However, to do that, you need everyone on the same page.

3. USE SHIFT-LEFT TESTING FOR BUG AND VULNERABILITY DETECTION

Drupal is a secure platform. Of the four most popular content management systems, Drupal is the least hacked. But that doesn’t mean it’s impenetrable. You want to shift-left test (i.e., automate testing early and often in the development cycle). Drupal 8+ has PHPUnit built-in — taking the place of SimpleTest. You can use this to quickly test out code. You can perform unit tests, kernel tests, and functional tests with and without JavaScript. You can also use Nightwatch.js to run tests. Of course, you may opt for third-party automation solutions (e.g., RUM, synthetic user monitoring, etc.) The important thing is that you test continuously. There are three primary reasons that shift-left testing needs to be part of your development arsenal.

  • It helps prevent vulnerabilities. The average cost of a data breach is over $3 million. And it takes around 300 days to identify and contain website breaches.
  • It bolsters the user experience. A 100-millisecond delay in page load speed drops conversions by 7%. Meanwhile, 75% of users judge your credibility by your website’s design and performance, and 39% of users will stop engaging with your website if your images take too long to load. In other words, simple glitches can result in massive issues.
  • It reduces development headaches. Nothing is worse than developing out completely new features only to discover an error that takes you back to step 1.

4. GET HYPER-FAMILIAR WITH DRUPAL’S API

If you want to build amazing Drupal projects, you need to familiarize yourself with the Drupal REST API. This may sound like obvious advice. But understanding how Drupal’s built-in features, architecture, and coding flow can help you minimize mistakes and maximize your time-to-launch. The last thing you want to do is code redundantly when Drupal may automate some of that coding on its end. For more information on Drupal’s API and taxonomy, see Drupal API. We know! If you’re using Drupal, you probably have a decent idea of what its API looks like. But make sure that you understand all of its core features to avoid headaches and redundancies.

5. SET STANDARDS

Every development project needs standards. There are a million ways to build a website or app. But you can’t use all of those million ways together. You don’t want half of your team using Drupal’s built-in content builder and the other half using Gutenberg. Everyone should be on the same page. This goes for blocks, taxonomy, and every other coding need and task you’re going to accomplish. You need coding standards, software standards, and process standards to align your team to a specific framework. You can develop standards incrementally, but they should be shared consistently across teams. Ideally, you’ll build a standard for everything. From communication to development, testing, launching, and patching, you should have set-in-stone processes. In the past, this was less of an issue. But, with every developer rushing to agile, sprint-driven methodologies, it can be easy to lose sight of standards in favor of speed. Don’t let that happen. Agile doesn’t mean “willy-nilly” coding and development for the fastest possible launch. It still has to be systematic. Standards allow you to execute faster and smarter across your development pipeline.

NEED SOME HELP?

At Mobomo, we build best-in-class Drupal projects for brands across the globe. From NASA to UGS, we’ve helped private, and public entities launch safe, secure, and exciting Drupal solutions. Are you looking for a partner with fresh strategies and best-of-breed agile-driven development practices?

Contact us. Let’s build your dream project — together.

Jul 10 2020
Jul 10

argument-open-source

When you first sit down to create your Drupal website, you have plenty of decisions to make. What are your first blog posts going to be? What kinds of marketing materials do you need to help your website convert? What is your SEO strategy to boost your SERP position? These are all important, and we highly recommend that you consider each point before you launch your first website.

But those are details. The most significant decision you’re going to make is what theme you’ll use. Think of your theme as the building block of your website. It’s how users are going to perceive your site, interpret your content, and engage with your products or services. You want a beautiful, interactive, intuitive, and easy-to-browse website that pushes customers to think, engage, and consume your rich creatives.

Here’s the problem: there are thousands of Drupal themes. When you first look through the avalanche of bright colors, minimal panes, and unique content configurations, it can be dizzying. How do you pick a theme with that certain something that sets you apart? 

Here are some criteria to help you sift through the tsunami of designs on the market.

How Important is Your Drupal Theme, Really?

At some point, you need to pull the trigger. But how soon should you go with your gut instinct? After all, is picking the “perfect” theme really that important? In today’s hyper-redundant theme ecosystem, it’s easy to think that website design is a secondary factor in your website build process. Many websites today have eerily similar themes, and you may be looking to copy-paste that minimalist, white-space-heavy style that your competitors probably use.

Don’t make the mistake of minimizing the importance of the theme. Your competitors may use cookie-cutter themes, but you shouldn’t. Here’s why:

  • 38% of people will flat out refuse to engage with a website if its looks aren’t appealing to them.
  • 88% of people won’t return to your website ever again after a single bad experience.
  • 75% of customers make a judgment call on your brand’s credibility based on your website design.
  • Given 15 minutes to read content, people would rather view something beautifully designed than something plain-looking.
  • 94% of negative feedback regarding your website will be design related.

In other words, your customers are going to judge the efficacy of your brand based on your website’s design. Remember the phrase, “first impressions are everything.” Well, 94% of first impressions are based on design—you want something stunning. Obviously, design is still a highly personal experience. Some people like quirky and weird, some like minimal and smooth, and others like aggressive and animation heavy. It depends on your end user and who you are as a brand.

So how do you go about picking the right one? After all, there’s a lot at stake. Your theme is going to be the first thing customers see when they click on your website. Here are the three core components of website themes you should consider before you make your choice.

1. Your Brand’s Identity

We all know that branding is a big deal. 89% of marketers say that branding is their top goal, and branding is the first thing that 89% of investors look at when deciding whether or not to open their wallets. So, when it comes to your design, brand should be front-of-mind. Who is your company? What does it stand for? And, most all, what does it look like?

Your Drupal theme is a powerful branding tool. Every single component of your website is an opportunity for branding. We could get overly complicated diving into website branding, but we’ll stick with the simple stuff. Let’s talk about color. Seems simple enough, right? Check this out:

  • Color alone improves brand recognition by 80%.
  • 93% of people focus on your brand’s color when buying products.
  • When people make subconscious decisions about your product, 90% of that decision is related to color.

Ok! So color is obviously important. But what about all the other “stuff” on your website? Does the position of content boxes, navigation menu, and blog posts really matter? You bet! Consistent brand representation across content boosts bottom-line profits by 33% on average. And 80% of people think content is what drives them to really engage and build loyalty with brands.

In a nutshell, think about branding when you look at themes. 90% of users expect you to have consistent branding across all channels. If you can’t find a theme that screams, “you,” that’s ok! If you can’t find one, build one.

2. Performance

The theme you choose will have a direct impact on your website’s performance. Unnecessary components, visual clutter, and poor frontend coding can all increase load times and disrupt website accessibility. Obviously, some of your performance capabilities happen on the backend (e.g., caching, DB Query optimization, MySQL settings, etc.) But your theme still has a sizable effect on how your website performs.

Overly large CSS files, redundant coding for modules, blank spaces, and other issues can all increase time-to-load, create visual issues, and create stop-points for your users. To be clear, performance is a significant component in both lead generation and retention:

  • A 100-millisecond delay drops conversions by 7%.
  • Increasing the number of page elements from 400 to 6,000 drops conversion rates by 95%.
  • 79% of shoppers that encounter a website with poor performance will never return.

Always test out themes for performance. The aesthetic qualities of a website are important, but performance is a necessity.

3. UX

We like to call UX the “hidden performance.” It’s how your users will engage with and consume content throughout your website. The theme you pick will dictate a significant portion of your UX. Before you choose a theme, build out your information architecture strategy, create mockups for UI (or at least find UI examples that you enjoy), and plot out your broad content strategy. Then, choose a theme that compliments your strategy and information architecture.

Here’s the most important thing: always evolve your UX. Consider applying agile to your theme building and choosing practices. Even after you select the right theme, constantly make improvements to your UI/UX to breed consistency and customer-centricity. You can purchase a pre-made theme on the Drupal marketplace, but you still need to customize the theme to fit your brand and conform to your UX framework. You don’t want to choose a cookie-cutter theme on the marketplace and fail to maximize its value. Not only will your website look nearly identical to thousands of other Drupal sites, but you also won’t truly build an experience-driven website. Give your customers home-cooked steak and potatoes—not a microwaved frozen dinner.

Are You Looking for the Perfect Drupal Theme?

If you want a theme that’s hyper-branded, built for performance, and created using brand-specific information architecture, you won’t find it on a pre-built theme website. You need to create it. At Mobomo, we help public and private entities create breathtaking Drupal themes specifically for their brand and their users. Let’s build your brand something amazing.

Contact us to learn more.

Jul 08 2020
Jul 08

argument-open-source

Businesses and governments build websites for one reason: to provide value to their users. But what if your website was incapable of reaching millions of your users? 25% of Americans live with disabilities. For some of them, the simple act of navigating websites, digesting information, and understanding your content is difficult. Yet, despite brands increasing spending on web design and digital marketing, less than 10% of websites actually follow accessibility standards. Businesses are spending significant money to capture an audience, yet they’re not ensuring that their audience can engage with their website.

It’s a problem—a big one.

You don’t want to exclude customers. It’s bad for business, and it’s bad for your brand. Better yet, accessibility features help improve your SEO, reduce your website complexity, and increase your ability to connect with your loyal audience. But accessibility standards aren’t always baked into the architecture of websites.

Luckily, there are some content management systems (CMS) that let you create hyper-accessible websites without even trying. Drupal comes equipped with a variety of accessibility features — each of which helps make your website more accessible for your customers.

Understanding the Importance of Website Accessibility

Creating an accessible website may sound vague, but there’s already a worldwide standard you can follow. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) — which is maintained by The World Wide Web Consortium — is the global standard for web accessibility used by companies, governments, and merchants across the world.

Sure! Following the WCAG standard helps you reach a wider audience. But it also keeps you out of legal hot water. Not only has the ADA made it abundantly clear that compliance requires website accessibility. A United States District Court in Florida ruled that WCAG standards are the de facto standards of web accessibility. And there are already cases of businesses getting sued for failing to adhere to them.

  • The DOJ sues H&R Block over its website’s accessibility.
  • WinnDixie.com was sued for accessibility, and the judge required them to update their website.
  • The National Museum of Crime and Punishment was required to update its website accessibility.

The list goes on. Adhering to WCAG web accessibility standards helps protect your brand against litigation. But, more importantly, it opens doors to millions of customers who need accessibility to navigate and engage with your amazing content.

One-third of individuals over the age of 65 have hearing loss. Around 15% of Americans struggle with vision loss. And millions have issues with mobility. The CDC lists six forms of disability:

  • Mobility (difficulty walking or climbing)
  • Cognition (difficult remembering, making decisions, or concentrating)
  • Hearing (difficulty hearing)
  • Vision (difficulty seeing)
  • Independent living (difficulty doing basic errands)
  • Self-care (difficulty bathing, dressing, or taking care of yourself)

Web accessibility touches all of those types of disabilities. For those with trouble seeing, screen readers help them comprehend websites. But, screen readers strip away the CSS layer. Your core content has to be accessible for them to be able to comprehend it. Those with mobility issues may need to use keyboard shortcuts to help them navigate your website. Hearing-impaired individuals may require subtitles and captions. Those with cognitive issues may need your website to be built with focusable elements and good contrasting.

There are many disabilities. WCAG creates a unified guideline that helps government entities and businesses build websites that are hyper-accessible to people with a wide range of these disabilities.

Drupal is WCAG-compliant

WCAG is vast. A great starting point is the Accessibility Principles document. But, creating an accessible website doesn’t have to be a time-consuming and expensive process. Drupal has an entire team dedicated to ensuring that their platform is WCAG compliant. In fact, Drupal is both WCAG 2.0 compliant and Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG 2.0) compliant. The latter deals with the tools developers use to build websites. So, Drupal has accessibility compliance on both ends.

What Accessibility Features Does Drupal Have?

Drupal’s accessibility compliance comes in two forms:

  1. Drupal has built-in compliance features that are native to every install (7+).
  2. Drupal supports and enables the community to develop accessibility modules.

Drupal’s Built-in Compliance Features

Drupal 7+ comes native with semantic markup. To keep things simple, semantic markup helps clarify the context of content. At Mobomo, we employ some of the best designers and website developers on the planet. So, we could make bad HTML markup nearly invisible to the average user with rich CSS and superb visuals. But when people use screen readers or other assistive technology, that CSS goes out-of-the-window. They’re looking at the core HTML markup. And if it’s not semantic, they may have a difficult time navigating it. With Drupal, markup is automatically semantic — which breeds comprehension for translation engines, search engines, and screen readers.

Drupal’s accessibility page also notes some core changes made to increase accessibility. These include things such as color contrasting. WCAG requires that color contrasting be at least 4.5:1 for normal text and 7:1 for enhanced contrast. Drupal complies with those guidelines. Many other changes are on the developer side, such as drag and drop functions and automated navigation buttons.

Of course, Drupal also provides developer handbooks, theming guides, and instructional PDFs for developers. Some of the accessibility is done on the developer’s end, so it’s important to work with a developer who leverages accessibility during their design process.

Drupal’s Support for the Accessibility Community

In addition to following WCAG guidelines, Drupal supports community-driven modules that add additional accessibility support. Here are a few examples of Drupal modules that focus on accessibility:

There are hundreds. The main thing to remember is that Drupal supports both back-end, front-end, and community-driven accessibility. And they’ve committed to continuously improving their accessibility capabilities over time. Drupal’s most recent update — the heavily anticipated Drupal 9 — carries on this tradition. Drupal has even announced that Drupal 10 will continue to expand upon accessibility.

Do You Want to Build an Accessible Website

Drupal is on the cutting-edge of CMS accessibility. But they can’t make you accessible alone. You need to build your website from the ground up to comply with accessibility. A good chunk of the responsibility is in the hands of your developer. Are you looking to build a robust, functional, beautiful, and accessible website? 

Contact us. We’ll help you expand your reach.

About Drupal Sun

Drupal Sun is an Evolving Web project. It allows you to:

  • Do full-text search on all the articles in Drupal Planet (thanks to Apache Solr)
  • Facet based on tags, author, or feed
  • Flip through articles quickly (with j/k or arrow keys) to find what you're interested in
  • View the entire article text inline, or in the context of the site where it was created

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