The role of agencies
The role played by a web agency is key to the success of a company's digital strategy.
The agency will guide its clients in the creation, design and evolution of their website in order to provide them with the best possible visibility and offer an optimal digital experience to the end user. This support requires agility and flexibility to meet customer needs.
To do this, the agency supports all stages of a web project: exploration, conception, design, technical architecture, development, management of portals and ecosystems, training, product launch, maintenance and hosting. At each of these stages, the agency will call on many resources and expertise.
One of the key resources is the content management system (CMS), namely the tool for designing and updating websites dynamically. The more agile the CMS will be, the more efficient and personalized will be the development of the site by the agency.
It is therefore to provide the best service to our customers that, at WebstanZ, we have distinguished ourselves by opting for the Drupal CMS. By integrating it into each step of the web development lifecycle, it contributes to the creation of ambitious digital experiences.
Drupal: WebstanZ’s choice
We will try to explain to you in this article all the benefits that you and your customers can derive from Drupal. It will facilitate your website’s management as much as it will allow you to address its complexities thanks to the tool’s constantly evolving technical functionalities. Drupal continues to progress, evolving from a web content management tool to an innovative platform for creating digital experiences.
The community of developers and users behind this open source tool has just gathered at DrupalCon Portland 2022, their annual international conference. At the end of it, a whole series of upgrades for ambitious web developers were announced. This continuous evolution of the Drupal tool aligns perfectly with WebstanZ's strategy: "create ambitious and creative websites with Drupal", for the benefit of our customers of course!
What is Drupal ?
Whether it is to create simple or complex content, manage different languages, authorize several levels of access, customize a design, or even integrate API (third-party systems)... Drupal is an agile, flexible and above all oriented tool solution. We explain it to you in the article 'What is Drupal'.
At WebstanZ, as a Drupal certified agency, our developers master the tool and will therefore apply themselves to defining the features that will best meet your needs. Our ability to personalize the digital experience and to support you throughout its development with the Drupal tool is a strong point appreciated by our customers.
It is not for nothing that WebstanZ, which now has 25 employees, is one of the top agencies dedicated to Drupal in Belgium.
Drupal : the advantages
In a previous article (8 good reasons to choose Drupal) we explained to you precisely how the Drupal interface helps you create, structure and enhance your business content in an optimal way... where a classic CMS can hardly adapt.
Renowned organizations such as NASA, DHL, Tesla, Harvard, Twitter... use Drupal. Without knowing it, you have already consulted a site operated by this solution. Worldwide, 1 in 30 websites works with Drupal.
The Drupal tool is open source, that is to say that it is developed by a worldwide community of more than 100,000 contributors who make it accessible to everyone for free, to date 1.3 million users on Drupal.org.
WebstanZ benefits from the interactions of this community and actively contributes to it on a daily basis. We take part in community activities to obtain Drupal updates, always with the aim of improving the web experience. The ability to mobilize this Drupal community is an asset for WebstanZ when it comes to optimizing functionalities.
By using Drupal, we guarantee you a reliable, robust, long-lasting solution as well as safe interactions focused on data security and confidentiality. This security aspect is essential at the present time.
Drupal: the perspectives
Our WebstanZ developers closely followed DrupalCon Portland 2022, the annual Drupal community event which brought together, from April 25 to 28, web developers, content creators, designers, managers…
We find it interesting to share with you the keynote of the founder of Drupal, Dries Buytaert. He presented Drupal's vision and strategy for the next few years.
Numerous technical improvements will make it possible to automate the functionalities of the tool and further simplify content management. Drupal 10 will be released in December 2022 with the developments at different levels:
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User experience for content management (new basic theme, new backoffice theme, new text editor);
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Site building (Starterkit);
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Maintenance (automatic updates);
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Infrastructure (upgrade to Symfony 6.2, update to PHP 8.1).
This is where WebstanZ can take advantage of these updates to help you improve sites developed on earlier versions of Drupal and increase their performance.
Drupal and the Open Web
A panel of experts, including Dries, debated the role of open source in the future well-being of the internet. They were all unanimous on the fact that the web must remain a global public resource that is decentralized, open, secure and accessible to all. Given that Drupal operates in a distributed and community-based way internationally, developments can have a big impact on the future of a decentralized Internet. An open management (open source) makes indeed visible the way information is shared and disseminated without having to rely on huge centralized companies (eg Facebook) which operate as black boxes.
Encouraging the development of open source tools like Drupal should therefore help the web to remain a place offering millions of unique and safe experiences... which echoes WebstanZ's values and commitments in terms of deploying digital experiences with and for customers like you.
WebstanZ at the DrupalCon in Prague
To continue to follow and contribute to the evolutions of Drupal in this objective of continuous improvement of our services, WebstanZ will participate in the DrupalCon Prague in September 2022.
We have just submitted proposals for intervention. Our developers intend on the one hand to draw attention to the management of the last 20% of a website’s development on Drupal. On the other hand, based on a case study, they will explain how to target larger projects with less budget by optimizing development and maintenance costs. Fingers crossed that they are accepted!
As the activities of our agency are not limited to CMS, stay tuned for future Blog articles to learn more about all the expertise that WebstanZ can bring to your digital projects.
And for any specific questions about Drupal and/or our services, contact us!
