For onsite drupal training, drupal development and drupal consulting in London
Do you want to
- build a website in drupal?
- modify an existing website in drupal?
- learn drupal?
If the answer to any of these questions is yes, then you've probably looked into hiring contractors, going on a training course, or paying for a drupal consultancy.
There is a more cost effective way to learn drupal, build or modify your drupal website, and make the most out of existing drupal modules.
Drupal for Publishing
Drupal is ideal for publishing based websites. Many of the requirements of a publishing based website, such as content workflow, large volumes of content, image manipulation and user submitted data are available out of the box.
By using contributed modules such as CCK, Views, Features and Context, pretty much any page layout is possible. The addition of custom modules can then easily fulfil any requirements not readily available by contributed modules.
I am a specialist in the field of using drupal for publishing, having worked for 3 of the largest publishers in the UK, IPC Media, Bauer Publishing and Hachette Fillipacci.
Onsite drupal development and training
- Develop high quality web sites using drupal, whilst learning drupal at the same time.
- Ensure full time staff retain quality drupal skills.
- Use prebuilt modules to help meet common business requirements.
- Develop custom built modules to make your websites do exactly what you want.
- Use the power of drupal according to your understanding of php.
- Build customised themes, or use off the shelf themes for your website.
- London based for onsite work
I can train employees on-site, and as a method of training, build / modify your website in drupal. This means you effectively receive training, and develop your drupal site concurrently.This can result in a significant cost saving.
The use of Drupal has increased massively in recent years, and while it offers more useful modules than ever before; getting hold of someone to develop, or consult on how to build these sites has become increasingly difficult, and expensive.
The main difference between paying a contractor to work on a drupal site, and myself is that as an option you, or your colleagues will help to do the actual work, thus retaining drupal skills in house, whilst meeting your business requirements.
The resulting process means that you effectively go on a training course which matches your exact requirements, your website will meet its' objectives, and your website will be maintainable for future requirements.
Drupal and Continuous Integration, your business, and Agile Development
To make the most out of drupal, it is important to fit drupal within your business processes. Typically, using drupal is an excellent way of achieving the objectives of a websites. However with a good understanding of drupal, it can be used to further your business by opening new opportunities with it's out of the box functionality, and contributed modules.
When I work with companies, the primary objective is to meet the immediate requirements of a website, while also enabling long term stability. During this process, I will identify other opportunities for quick wins, and feed these back appropriately.
Using drupal fits well into an Agile development environment, an environment with which I am experienced and can work with effective effectively.
A common question is how to fit drupal into a continuous integration environment, or use within development teams, and SVN. The simple answer is, to use whatever solution is appropriate for the size of the project. I am experienced in setting these up, an if they do not exist, I can help implement them, and train people in how to use drupal in teams.
Using drupal for enterprise level websites
There are frequent debates on whether drupal an be used for enterprise level websites. The simple answer is yes it can, there are many methods of fine tuning performance appropriate to the functionality of the site.
Methods used to build functionality can often differ depending on the performance required, and volume of traffic expected.
Good performance is also achieved through load testing, server tuning, caching layers, and module refinement.
Such clients that I have developed for enterprise level websites for include Endemol, Sugar Magazine, Intel, Intercontinental Hotel Group, Nuts magazine and NME.
