Creating a Corporate website using Drupal

There are zillions of companies who are in the web development - almost 80% (if not more) of them focus primarily on the static website development with maybe a very little dynamic content created using PHP, ASP, JSP pages. The other 10%-20% of the companies are into heavy dynamic website development, using the advanced Web 2.0 constructs, CMS backed platforms. Tekriti's main business is the latter.

However, being in the business that we are in, we get a lot of routine inquiries on the basic website development, where the customer primarily wants a site ranging from 5 pages to 20 pages with the ability to change the content from the backend and manage the various categories / menu-items under which they are assigned to. Traditionally, we have been letting go those projects as it is difficult to compete on price with even smaller units who are selling these services using the manpower with lesser overheads. This was something which was on my head for quite sometime and I thought of exploring an idea through which a lot of value could be provided to customers with very little overheads and reasonable pricing.

I have been a big fan of dogfooding stuff before I apply on others - which is why we chose to re-do our company website and create a framework in that process that be be re-used for potential customers in the future too. Here is what we did:

  • Chose Drupal 6.x as the platform on which a corporate website development framework is to be created.
  • The modules used are: CCK (content construction kit), blog, Path,Comment, Menu, Poll, Search, Taxonomy, Contact Forms, Global Redirect, couple of SEO modules, Token, and 1 custom module to help glue all these together in a better way. Different categories were created using Taxonomy and CCK modules, whereas menu items were created using menu module
  • We took a Drupal theme, and then re-wrote page.tpl.php, node.tpl.php, block.tpl.php. We also created menu.tpl.php for a menu which we wanted to look different from how the theme had exposed it to be. The Drupal theme has been written in such a way that applying a new corporate website design over this is a matter of just a few days, thereby decreasing the time to market drastically.

I plan to get the team to detail this even more in the form of a case-study sometime later but I hope others can also use this idea to build effective CMS backed corporate website in a very short duration. If nothing, Tekriti will definitely be working its customers on quickly designing, building and deploying robust, dynamic and scalable corporate websites from now on.



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