Architecting Long-Term Solutions

It takes mere moments for a prospective customer to evaluate you and your business. Every interaction is important and critical to help establish a long term relationship.

It is now common for the first interaction between you and a prospective customer to be via your website. Choosing an organization to help represent you is often the first step to developing this relationship.

Making the investment

While there are millions of developers and designers out there, picking a good one can often be difficult. One option is to use one of the several point and click solutions on the market today. Unfortunately, you typically get what you pay for with these solutions.

Professional, feature-rich sites often require investments of time and money and a good solution will typically provide benefits far beyond the initial investment. So how do you find the right development partner to help you succeed?

Know your requirements

Knowing what your own expectations are before you begin your search will help you find a development partner who is prepared to help you meet them. While many organizations think about the expectations they have for their potential customers, they often forget to evaluate the requirements of their internal teams.

This typically leads to a poor internal experience for managing their website and eventually leads to a failed investment when they choose to use a different solution. When evalutaing potential organizations, you should look for organizations who ask about the end user expectations and the internal team requirements to ensure that your investment is not wasted.

Eating soup with a fork

While many shops, including ours, tend to focus their efforts on specific skill sets, it is important to choose the right tool for the job. Eating soup with a fork tends to be fairly counter-productive.

When evaluating potential organizations, it is important that you ask questions about the tools they recommend and why. Every tool should have been chosen for a specific reason, whether that be for budget, ease-of-use or avoiding the re-invention of the wheel.

Why Drupal?

I have personally answered this question many times over the last five years and it almost always boils down to this:

Budget, Ease-of-use, Re-invention of the wheel

Using Drupal allows for the development of complex solutions quickly without the need to re-invent the wheel. The internal interfaces continue to improve with each release and the admin interface can be tailored to the needs of most internal teams.

Community

The Drupal Community has invested countless hours to make Drupal what it is today. This investment typically means that someone has likely already developed a solution for nearly any problem that may need to be solved for and can save both time and money.

What about you?

How do you architect long term solutions? Does your development process account for internal team requirements and end user usability? What else do you look for either in potential clients or potential organizations?

Looking for a long-term solution?

Are you looking for someone who is prepared to provide you with a Long Term Solution? The Digett team is staffed with smart, friendly, and passionate individuals who are ready to help you meet your goals.

Get Started Now

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