At NetManageIT we make all of our websites using the Drupal CMS or content management system. If you've heard of Drupal, that's great, you've probably heard what a powerful framework Drupal is for building truly interactive, web 2.0 sites that can grow and adapt with your business.
If you're like most everyone else, however, you probably haven't heard of Drupal or even Content Management Systems before, this is how it works. Drupal is an open-source (and free) software that's been designed by an international community of programmers. It's purpose is to offer a huge range of functionality which can be controlled by the average user and intricately customized by an experienced developer. This is a big paradigm shift from the old school way of writing websites. Before dynamic websites, all the pages were hard coded and static and any changes required an experienced web developer or an intrepid DIY'er to dive into the code. With Drupal, changes are made through a simple web-interface much like filling out a form. And if that sounds cool, that's only the tip of the iceberg: Drupal enables your website to quickly and easily integrate complex functionality like blogs, forums, podcasts, newsfeeds, shopping carts, and just about anything else you can think of.
We've hard coded sites in the past, but the truth is, we can't see any reason why we would ever make a site that way again.
Here are some of the key reasons why we chose Drupal in the first place, and even why we chose it over other CMS systems: it boasts search engine friendliness right out of the box...after a few tweaks that is, there's a huge community of developers adding new capabilities each day, it's easy for anyone to update and use, the coding is clean and standards compliant, it allows functionality totally unmatched by static sites, and at a fraction of the cost of reinventing a complex solution, and of course, the most important reason: we like saying "drupal."
