Services

Content Management

So what exactly is a content management system? and what can it offer you or your company? A content management system is essentially a web application allowing you to update your websites content at any time, from anywhere, with virtually any web browser. This not only nearly eliminates update fees, it also allows you to interact with the public in ways not previously possible.

Content Management System

A content management system or CMS can be as basic as simply allowing you to update page content, or we can extend functionality to have blogs, forums, custom applications, bookings, user accounts, and much more. This kind of functionality is made affordable by the use of modular programming from within the Drupal framework.

Is A CMS Right For Me?

In short, yes! more and more websites are beginning to use content management systems generally due to the need for users to collaborate on content, or to interact with the public in an effective, intuitive, and secure manor. Open source initiatives such as the Drupal content management system now allow for these websites to be cheaper than they have ever been before.

Why Droopia?

Not only are we one of the contributors to the Drupal content management system project, we have uniquely vast knowledge in all aspects of the web, providing design, development, maintenance, search engine optimization, internet marketing and more.

Drupal CMS

The Drupal Content Management System framework is essentially a 'base' set of common functionality such as user authentication, polls, forums and more. This framework greatly increases rapid development decreasing the time to get your website live, and decreasing your cost.

Drupal Development

Drupal is the leading open source content management system available on the web. Drupal allows for rapid production of web sites, web based applications, intranet solutions and much more.

Cost Effective

The modular aspect of Drupal not only speeds up the development process but this also greatly lowers cost. Where a company may have spend thousands of euros on a simple forum, this can now be done for a fraction of the price. Common modules includes functionality such as forums, polls, user authentication, website statistics, and more.

Developer Availability

As mentioned throughout our site, we value you as a client and hope to work with you on many projects. However a valid point to note about Drupal is developer availability, ensuring that if for any reason you feel a different developer should take over the project, that many qualified companies can pick up the project right away.

Open Source

Drupal is an open source project, essentially meaning that you do not pay any licensing fees for the framework its-self, or for contributed modules which cuts costs dramatically when compared to proprietary solutions.

Scalability

Drupal is scalable in both terms of functionality and performance so your company can rest easy knowing that future goals will not be obstructed by poor application infrastructure.

Drupal Performance

Drupal is well known for its vast community and modular functionality, however its major downfall is performance. Due to Drupal being so database dependent, and often executing nearly a thousand queries per empty-cache page load, Drupal's performance limitations will be apparent.

Having said this Drupal also has implemented a very flexible caching mechanism allowing for cached data to be saved via the filesystem, database, or in memory. Wither you are on a shared server, VPS, or dedicated machine, we can help your Drupal website perform faster.

To read more about performance techniques which can be used regardless of having a Drupal website visit our web performance page.

Drupal Theming

Arguably one of the best Drupal Theming firms in the industry, we can convert nearly any web design into a standards compliant, highly structured CSS based Drupal Theme.

Drupal Theme Design

The Drupal community is often criticized for producing relatively ugly websites, in turn leaving potential users wondering if they should in fact utilize Drupals unprecedented functionality in order to take a visual hit. The reality is that Drupal is extremely flexible in terms of theming with nearly no limitations.

Highly Structured Theme CSS

As Drupal developers as well as themers, we create themes with the future in mind. Our highly structured and documented XHTML markup and CSS allow for quick and easy changes when needed. Both our markup and CSS are W3C standards compliant and cross-browser compatible.

Maintenance Packages

At Droopia we value sustaining a long lasting relationship with our clients. Our website maintenance packages will ensure that your site is always functioning as desired. For more information regarding or maintenance packages, or to create a custom package for your project please contact us.

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is certainly not a simple science, many techniques used throughout the industry and simply trial and error as no firm can guarantee placement results. Droopia has had extensive experience with high ranking websites and will drastically increase organic search engine traffic for your website.

Indexing

Essentially a search engine is an indexing tool, mining the web searching site to site and storing a catalog of what it finds. Search engines do this by analyzing many factors of your website such as applying points to words wrapped in specific HTML tags, where these words are place among a page or section of content, page popularity, and much more. Each page should ideally target a single topic, and not attempt to target multiple as this will only dilute its meaning.

Point System

Words get rated based on many factors such as how high in an article section it appears, and what markup it is wrapped in. This again must be logical and cannot be an attempt to fool search engines or the page will only rank lower. HTML tags such as h1, h2, h3 should appear semantically correct and reflect the pages main topic and subtopics in logical order. You may notice that we keep mentioning the word logical, this is because search engines attempt to parse data as a human would.

Geotargeting (British Columbia, etc)

By targeting a specific location(s) that your company provides products or services will greatly increase the chance of ranking high. For instance "British Columbia SEO" is much easier to increase rankings for than "SEO" alone.

Content Popularity

Nothing trumps the power of popular content, your page can be fully optimized, but if no one visits or views the page for long then your hard work has gone nowhere. Content writers should be aware that search engines often penalize obvious attempts to heighten ranking with methods such as keyword stuffing, content should be genuine and logical.

Page Targeting

As mentioned previously, each page should ideally target one topic, such as this page targeting the key phrase "Search Engine Optimization". If we were to start branching off and talking about web performance then this web page would be diluted and when users type "Victoria Search Engine Optimization" into a search engine we simply appear lower.

Web Design

At Droopia we provide all of the products and services necessary in order to deliver you a stunning, intuitive, functional website or web application. The topics listed below cover our general web design and development process, ensuring that we can provide yourself or your company an affordable, reliable, website solution.

Requirements

The requirement analysis phase consists of determining initial, and future functionality, workflow, and overall look and feel to the website.

Architecture

This phase consists of mapping out various software requirements determined in the previous phase. This includes work flow diagrams, entity relationship schemas, content types, business logic layer, and more.

Web Design

The Design phase mainly refers to the Graphical User Interface or GUI. Once the web design is approved and signed off by the client we proceed to the web development phase.

Development

We proceed to the actual development of the website, depending on the scope of the project we will consult the client along the way ensuring that development is meeting expectations.

Testing

Once the development phase has been signed off one we will prepare a staging environment as well as testing the final web site ensuring that if any bugs are found they can be fixed immediately. For high end applications an automated testing architecture may also be implemented to speed up the testing phase.

Deployment

All aspects of the web site are backed up, and we carry out the remaining steps required to get the web site live for the public to access.

Maintenance

Many issues can occur to a web site after launch, even small things such as server updates can introduce security issues etc, for more information on maintenance recommendations and packages please contact us.

Web Performance

Website performance comes in many shapes and sizes which is commonly broken into server performance, database performance, and frontend performance. With these three aspects covered we can ensure that your website is serving pages as fast as possible and that no users get stuck waiting for content to load.

Server Performance

Server or system performance gains are typically achieved by decreasing CPU and RAM usage by system processes such as databases, disk I/O, HTTP server, and so on. Unneeded software can be removed, and beneficial software such as APC can be installed to increase performance.

Database Performance

Many of our applications are built with the Drupal content management system, which is highly database dependent. Pages and many other peices of content are fetched from a database rather than a static file which increases database overhead. We can determine if your performance bootleneck is the database, and if so then we will tune system variables and tables in order to squeeze every query possible.

Content Caching

Along with database tuning, many 'sections' or entire rendered pages can be cached in order to speed up page serving. Careful steps must be taken with this approch as users may end up viewing stale data if not properly configured.

Frontend Performance

This aspect of performance refers to the 'client' end, or the browser. Many developers ignore, or simply do not understand the benefits which can be achieved by focusing on the frontend portion. Targeting the browser for performance tuning is often the most cost effective aspect to tune, and has the potential to increase performance greatly.

eCommerce

Our eCommerce system is robust, secure, easy to use, and most of all, affordable! Its modular design allows us to provide you with an extremely large feature-set for prices never before available as writing similar eCommerce solutions from the ground up cannot be done for any acceptable price.

Droopia eCommerce Highlights

Secure

Utilizing the Secure Socket Layer communication protocol all personal information transfered between your website and the payment gateway chosen will be encrypted, keeping vulnerable data out of the hands of potential attackers.

Reports

Our eCommerce system reports on various aspects of your web store such as customers, sales, and products. These reports are extremely useful in determining which of your products are actually selling, who is buying them, and where these users originate.

Configurable Products

Each product may contain 'attributes' which parent multiple 'options'. These attributes would be aspects such as 'Shoe Color', or 'Pant Length', which allow users to customize their product. Every option may also contain an image which when selected will present users with an image reflecting the configuration they have made.

Easy to use

Each website we develop using our eCommerce system is configured and tuned to meet your needs. With every website we produce we will supply you with demonstration tailored specifically to your eCommerce implementation, which can be used to train future staff or yourself.

Order System

All orders placed throughout your website are stored within a database allowing multiple staff to moderate the order process from checkout to fulfillment. Administrators may view logs, payments, invoices, billing information, shipping information and more.