Drupal

You launched your Drupal site yesterday, and it's not on the front page of Google. What do you do now? One of our clients asked us about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) recently, so I thought I'd share some advice from our experience.

First of all, getting organic search results takes time. It doesn't happen overnight, and you're lucky if you're findable on popular terms within the first couple months. Why? Because...

URLs are a critical part of all web sites, not just Drupal. However, in Drupal, the URL of a page determines a lot about how the page is built.

Did you notice? The world's a different place. Rules for doing business have changed—there's new ways of getting hired, finding employees, reaching new customers, and (shudder) for them to reach you. Economies of scale have flipped—it's getting more expensive to do things on a huge scale, and far cheaper to do them at a micro scale. Mass market items have lost their appeal, and people yearn for authentic, individual connections in a world of franchise same-ness.

I have a confession to make. I'm absolutely terrible at making estimates. No matter how long I think something is going to take, it always takes longer. Even if I double, triple, or even quadruple my original guess.

And it's hurting my business. Why? Because I do everything I can to deliver what I promised. And I end up losing money, instead of making money. Instead of renegotiating with the client, I work nights, weekends, and pay my employees out of my own pocket to deliver. I go months without a paycheck, rarely get a day off. Does that sound like any way to run a business?

Planning a vacation is tough. Between the pain of finding a hotel or final destination, booking an airline, and locating information on things to do, one could spend days online surfing from website to website searching for items that may or may not be correct and/or relevant.

Isn't a vacation supposed to relaxing? Shouldn't planning and booking a vacation be as relaxing? 

I think so.

The Olympic Peninsula Tourism Board came to us in early 2009 to assist them in developing a visually stunning and highly functional website in a Content Management System. The site needed to be flexible enough to be managed by the 12 partners of the OPTC represented by local Chamber of Commerces. This meant the system needed to not only be able of handling complex permissions, but also easy to use and train new members. That being said, we recommended the use Drupal because of it highly flexible theme capabilities and content management superiority over platforms such as Joomla. 

I get this question all the time: What's the difference between Drupal and Ruby on Rails, or another framework?

Quite simply, Rails is something you build an application in. Drupal is an application. So chances are you're one major step closer to building a web site that does what you want it to do, if you start with Drupal.

When the Olympic Peninsula Tourism Commission came to Freelock Computing to convert their static HTML site into a newly designed, Drupal-driven CMS, I'm not going to lie, a few drops of drool fell from my mouth. We tend to label ourselves a little outdoorsy and most of us love to travel, so the opportunity to design and build a website in our neck of the woods that we could not only explore new methods such as Geo-mapping but also actually use as normal visitors was exciting.

This is a page to test block position