Drupal

I took part in a recent panel discussion as part of DrupalCamp WNY. "What's Drupal", you say? You can learn more here, although this post really is not about Drupal—it's about how marketers promote.

The topic was Selling Drupal with the idea that the audience, mainly Drupal developers, would learn how to do a better job selling Drupal to their clients and prospects.

In preparation for the discussion I spent some time thinking about how BWC typically sells Drupal and realized that we don't sell Drupal!

We never walk into a client or prospect meeting trying to figure out how we can sell one thing or another. We do, however, walk into every meeting with clients and prospects thinking about how we can understand their problem and how we can help them solve it.

And, sometimes, that includes Drupal.

I know this is simple stuff and that you already know marketing should be value-focused. All marketers are focused on solving a problem, meeting a need, scratching an itch, right? But, how often do you see, of have you succumbed to, marketing that hawks a product or service without any recognition of the value it provides it's targets?

If you feel like you've fallen into that trap think for a moment about what problems you solve. Forget your services, products and unique offerings for a minute and just focus on your prospects' needs. How does your company meet those needs? How does it solve those problems?

If you can answer those questions you've got the foundation for great messaging; you can stop trying to sell product and start solving problems.

Our own Mike Gastin and Jonathan Daggar recently presented at DrupalCamp WNY. The open-source content management system (CMS) was the focus during this 2-day informational event for Drupal users, designers, developers, and content pros.

Drupal powers millions of websites, including WhiteHouse.gov, Economist.com and Grammy.com. The CMS powers our own web creations as well, including the blog you're reading now (blog.bobwrightcreative.com), and client sites like MaplewoodNursingHome.com and KeiAdvisors.com.

Mike sat on the panel that presented "Selling Drupal". He focused on the strategic business issues that drive the planning, design and development of websites. His talk focused on the importance of understanding client needs first, before specifying the technology solution. You can read more of Mike's thoughts on understanding needs and solving problems here.

Jon presented "No, Seriously, I’m Just Getting Started With Drupal". Jon is anything but a Drupal beginner, so his depth of knowledge played a key role in helping attendees new to Drupal come away better equipped to leverage the web publishing platform.

With Mike and Jon in the house, Bob Wright Creative had a nice presence at DrupalCamp WNY. We're looking forward to the next Camp. Thanks guys, for helping make the world a better place one website at a time.

Bob Wright Creative is proud to announce that it has become a member of the Drupal Association.

We joined because the Drupal Association is the main organization dedicated to the support and growth of Drupal. The more we have been integrating Drupal into our web development offering the more important it is for us to get involved with the Drupal community. With thousands of members from all over the world we felt this is the place to be.

Drupal founder, Dries Buytaert, offered his view on future business models for Drupal in a recent blog post. He says he's seeing more Joomla theme developers starting to offer Drupal themes, creating new ways of monetizing Drupal other than custom enterprise deployments and Drupal training.

From his post:

In the Drupal community, today's business-model of choice seems to be providing implementation services for medium to large websites. The Joomla community, it seems, is very focused on the low-end of the market and most people make money by selling subscription services, usually either by selling commercial support for their GPL extensions or by selling access to template clubs

Dries thinks theme development for Drupal is a good thing and will only help it expand into more of the market.

Read the full post here.

We've used Media Temple's Grid Server (GS) product for years now to host our web site. They've been great. The cost has been reasonable and their customer service has been really good.

But, ever since we started using Drupal more we've noticed that their GS really struggles. I think it has to do with the MySQL database and the way it's stored remotely from the site, etc. Anyway, after doing some research for a better option we decided to stay with Media Temple, but to upgrade to their Dedicated Virtual (DV) server.

At 6 PM EST, Jon Daggar made the switch. It looks like everything went perfectly except for a minor email hic-up, which was my fault, and we lost one post: today's Monday Favorites. The email is sorted and we're working on getting that post back up. (It's up now!)

One thing I can say, the site works so much better on the DV! Drupal is running smoothly and loading much much quicker than it was before. Visitors should notice a big increase in speed and a decrease in load time. Thanks for hanging in there until we got this sorted out!

We've been integrating Drupal into our web development offering lately. It's really impressive!

If you don't already know, Drupal is an open-source content management system (CMS). It's amazingly friendly to development, which makes it perfect for creating custom-designed web sites with a non-proprietary CMS. Developers all over the world support it and it's the CMS of choice for sites like the London government, Mensa, Kofi Annan's foundation, Intel, the Grammys and the White House, too!

As designers and developers we love it because it's flexible enough that we can make it do almost anything. Clients love it because they don't have to buy it, pay licensing fees or get locked into one vendor for life while getting a powerful and capable CMS. Everybody wins.

The more we use it the more we love it and we're really loving what it can do for our clients.