Keeping a website up-to-date is a struggle many companies have. It's important to add fresh content, news posts, and updates to your site to foster the perception that it is a legitimate, current means of communicating or gathering information about a company.
Generally, there are three options to keep a website current:
- Learn to program your own website
- Rely on an external company or contractor to make costly, periodic updates
- Incorporate an online content management system (CMS) into the website
A CMS allows the average non-Web developer to update their own website quickly and effortlessly without having to know anything more than they’d have to know to edit a Word document or order a book from Amazon. Cool Blue recognizes the value of placing the control in the site owner’s hands – for expedience, insider knowledge, and budgetary considerations - and strives to make routine site updates easy; this is why we recommend a CMS to all of our clients.
There are many different CMS tools available, and not all are created equal! Many require expensive, recurring licenses, and others are very limited in their functionality.
Cool Blue strongly recommends the Drupal CMS for many reasons:
- No licensing fees.
- Drupal is highly customizable. Every facet can be customized to meet the needs of every website.
- The CMS is very user friendly; edits and updates are a breeze!
- Drupal's "out-of-the-box" offering is fairly robust, allowing smaller sites to be set up quickly and within budget.
- With over 10,707 modules and 1,176 themes, Drupal is a robust tool that allows for future additions and modifications to your site.
- There is a wide community of users and developers. With thousands of people world-wide supporting Drupal, your tools are constantly being maintained and updated.
- The Drupal security team is dedicated to protecting you and your sites so there is never a need to worry about your company’s online safety.
Cool Blue has deployed dozens of Drupal websites - everything from small brochure-style websites to custom, complex systems, to e-commerce. Cool Blue’s own Senior Developer, Robert Bates, has taken a hand in creating two modules for Drupal, the ExactTarget API module and the Webform ExactTarget module.
In its seventh release, Drupal has been around for more than 10 years. Your site will be in good company with other popular Drupal sites, such as The White House and Popular Science.
With Cool Blue and the Drupal community combined, you are guaranteed to have a great support system for all of your online marketing demands.
