Iron Chef Internet : Building Cross Platform Websites (with Drupal)

In past years, I really enjoyed watching the show Iron Chef. One, because I love food. And two, because I loved the challenge that each of the Iron Chefs faced-- having to serve up mouthwatering dishes of various sizes and flavours to an array of people, while keeping central the one main ingredient.

At this point you’re probably thinking, “Okay, cool. Other than the fact that now I’m hungry, what does this have to do with website development?” As it turns out, everything.

According to PewInternet, 34% of Americans over the age of 18 own a tablet computer. Comparatively, this is almost double the 18% who owned tablets a year ago. And Go-Gulf reports that 91.4 million Americans own smartphones, with 89% of these owners using their smartphones throughout the day.

And so, it is becoming apparent that to become truly successful in the world of the internet, you must be able to build cross-platform websites, providing an enjoyable service for your end users. Like Iron Chef, developers need to serve up the website; the main ingredient, to various end users of different environments, while upholding top quality across all “dishes”. Luckily, Iron Chefs must never traverse the challenge alone, and Drupal serves as an excellent sous-chef.

Alongside Drupal, the challenge can be tackled via either of the following:

Varied Taste: Optimized Site 

This option optimizes your site based on the form and the usage needs. Though the main ingredient is the same, the “flavour” of your site will change, dependent on what platform is being used. Contributed modules such as Mobile Plugin allow you to provide a mobile optimized view to your Drupal site.

Varied Portion: Responsive Design

Responsive design, on the contrary, allows your site’s flavour to remain consistent among all platforms, however, its portion size changes, as it responds to its environment. Grid layout systems, such as Foundation, or Twitter Bootstrap work fluently with Drupal to achieve this.

The ingredient and challenge have both been served. Do you have what it takes to be an Iron Chef?