5 reasons to build your company website with Droopler

Choosing the right technology to build your business website is always difficult since you always have to find the sweet spot between the cost of deployment, quality and ease of subsequent updates. In order to meet the needs of small and large enterprises, we embarked to design a Drupal 8-based Droopler distribution. Why is it worth taking it for a spin?

1. Cost optimisation

Developing websites can be a very repetitive process. Being a Drupal web development agency, we know that all too well. Despite the fact that there are many ready-made solutions – including Drupal and Bootstrap, getting them to work together always takes a lot of time. When designing Droopler, we decided to shift the focus from coding and development work to customisation.

The main benefit resulting from this approach is a different cost structure of the website. Why? Because the client pays mostly for customisation of a working solution to their explicit needs. This approach also enables splitting web development into several phases, comprising content development and deployment of a minimal version first, followed by customisation. This is a perfect choice for companies that cannot afford any major investments at a given time.

2. Customisation options

Droopler is based on Bootstrap – a toolkit for building websites. Because of this, you don’t have to design frontend from scratch, just use some of the available components. The default Bootstrap style is very recognisable, especially when it comes to forms. This makes many company websites very similar to each other. This impression is made more apparent by the fact that according to BuiltWith estimates, Bootstrap is used by 20% of the million most popular websites in the world. 

Despite that, large companies often go with Bootstrap due to its very flexible architecture, the main feature of which is a set of parameters in SCSS sheets, used to control the colours and behaviour of the website. In a word, a couple of variables is all you need to completely alter what the website looks and works like. This might remind some of the butterfly effect, where a small, seemingly insignificant modification might have some spectacular effects rippling throughout the website. Droopler takes advantage of this concept and expands it with its own elements. Manipulating colours and fonts is no problem for this distribution. 

3. Updating with ease

Drupal 8 has its own built-in update interface; however, Composer is what’s truly powerful in terms of updates. Composer is a package manager that enables users to control project updates using a CLI. What might seem to be very complicated for new users is an enormous boon for website administrators. Thanks to Composer, you can easily and quickly act on the published security fixes, minimising the risks and threats, while avoiding possible additional costs.

Droopler expands the default update process with its own administration panel that facilitates migration between successive versions. 

4. Editing flexibility

Modern-day websites are very demanding, which means that their editing process might sometimes be daunting and difficult. Banner carousels, videos, sliders and dynamic elements constitute a challenge for developers and designers working on content creation forms. In Droopler, we tackled this issue using the Paragraphs module, which introduces a very interesting concept of paragraphs – arranged on top of each other, they constitute all the pages. There is a paragraph with a banner, a carousel displaying is elements one by one, photo gallery paragraph, another one acting as a video container… These are just some of the elements included in our distribution.

Such an approach to content creation is both convenient and logical, and what is more, it does not require any knowledge of HTML from the user.

5. Innovative and modern technology

Online technologies are very quick to age. What was the next big thing a couple of years ago might be long forgotten today. Choosing an outdated or obsolete framework for your website can make it very cheap to deploy, but potentially very expensive to maintain. Choosing a modern framework means that your deployment may be far more expensive, but this is offset by longer support from the developers. 

Droopler is a great example of a modern and easily accessible solution. It is based on Drupal, modified in such a way as to speed up the work of developers and content editors. Using the latest Bootstrap 4 library is another boon – by going with this solution, you make sure that your Droopler pages will stay relevant for a long time.

You can download Droopler at http://droopler.com