Hi,
It depends on your needs, budget, and longer term strategy.
As a die-hard open source advocate, I would say first of all pick one of the many fine Open Source alternatives -- it greatly reduces your risk of being able to get your data out should there be a problem, and by definition you can always find developers to help. You can hire an employee and let them learn it if nothing else.
If your budget is tight and all you need is a blog and a brochure site, it's hard to beat Word Press. Especially if your marketing/growth plan is not entirely based on needing a custom web application to manage your business.
If you have more sophisticated needs, we think Drupal is where it's at, as long as you have competent Drupal talent available. There are lots of horror stories about Drupal projects gone awry, built by people who did not know how to do it in a maintainable, upgradeable way, or by people incapable of properly planning and delivering a good result. But with good talent available, you can do pretty much anything in Drupal that can be done on the web.
We think Drupal's a great fit for a client extranet (a portal site for you to interact with your customers and vendors on a secure channel), a directory, e-commerce (when you need more than you can get from a simpler hosted platform like Shopify/Etsy/Amazon etc), event management, CRM, and a lot more. Especially when you want to consolidate several of these functions into a single system. It can certainly do everything Word Press can do, but for very simple sites, it will cost you more, largely because Drupal developers are in short supply compared to demand, and so competent ones charge quite a bit higher rates.
But basically it comes down to your developers. We see really nothing that can't be done in Drupal, but we totally recognize that Word Press has a well-deserved place in the market place. Between the two of them, we don't see a need to compare other systems -- at the low end, Word Press does everything you need, and at the high end, Drupal does. But if you have a great developer you trust to deliver an excellent result, go with their recommendation -- the skills and ability of the developer is far more important to the end result than the platform.
And remember that the launch of a web site is really the beginning of the project, not the end -- so when shopping around for somebody to build a site for you, be sure to discuss what happens after the site launches.
Hi,
Hi,
It depends on your needs, budget, and longer term strategy.
As a die-hard open source advocate, I would say first of all pick one of the many fine Open Source alternatives -- it greatly reduces your risk of being able to get your data out should there be a problem, and by definition you can always find developers to help. You can hire an employee and let them learn it if nothing else.
If your budget is tight and all you need is a blog and a brochure site, it's hard to beat Word Press. Especially if your marketing/growth plan is not entirely based on needing a custom web application to manage your business.
If you have more sophisticated needs, we think Drupal is where it's at, as long as you have competent Drupal talent available. There are lots of horror stories about Drupal projects gone awry, built by people who did not know how to do it in a maintainable, upgradeable way, or by people incapable of properly planning and delivering a good result. But with good talent available, you can do pretty much anything in Drupal that can be done on the web.
We think Drupal's a great fit for a client extranet (a portal site for you to interact with your customers and vendors on a secure channel), a directory, e-commerce (when you need more than you can get from a simpler hosted platform like Shopify/Etsy/Amazon etc), event management, CRM, and a lot more. Especially when you want to consolidate several of these functions into a single system. It can certainly do everything Word Press can do, but for very simple sites, it will cost you more, largely because Drupal developers are in short supply compared to demand, and so competent ones charge quite a bit higher rates.
But basically it comes down to your developers. We see really nothing that can't be done in Drupal, but we totally recognize that Word Press has a well-deserved place in the market place. Between the two of them, we don't see a need to compare other systems -- at the low end, Word Press does everything you need, and at the high end, Drupal does. But if you have a great developer you trust to deliver an excellent result, go with their recommendation -- the skills and ability of the developer is far more important to the end result than the platform.
And remember that the launch of a web site is really the beginning of the project, not the end -- so when shopping around for somebody to build a site for you, be sure to discuss what happens after the site launches.