Our friends at Queen City Yacht Club approached us in April of 2015 regarding their Drupal 5 website. It was at the end of life and they wanted to upgrade. Their motivations were that they wanted a website that was mobile responsive, yet similar to their old design. We decided to do a straight upgrade/migration to Drupal 7 instead of 8, because Drupal 8 wasn't yet released.
After careful planning before diving in, we began developing off of our Base Business Site installation, which is a pre-built distribution we curate. Just a few of the great features we were able to give them out-of-the-box were:
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Mobile-friendly, responsive theme based on Omega 4
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Greatly improved media management, with media libraries, YouTube/Vimeo video embedding, Javascript galleries and slideshows
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“Panels” layout engine for particular landing pages to facilitate highlighting what you want users to find on those pages
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Big usability improvements for administrators and content editors, including in-site linking, automatic scaling of embedded images, “paste from Word” functionality
We then added custom organizational features such as forums, events, meeting reports and article management… then we configured the content types to match their current site, adding fields and views as appropriate.
Finally, we created migration objects that mapped the data in their current site to the new site, and migrated the data over. Using the “migrate” module, we built this in a way that allowed us to pull content over, and update it right before going live – the two sites existed in parallel during development, with a final migration done right at launch!