How IT Departments Can Create Better Websites and Manage Them More Efficiently

Over the past few years, businesses of all sizes have come to realize that a website needs to be much more than something attractive to the eye.  Stability and functionality are essential requirements, especially as demands on modern websites become increasingly varied and complicated.  DRUD Tech’s CEO Steven Grandchamp provides his thoughts on how IT departments can create better websites and manage them more efficiently and effectively.

Tell us about DRUD Tech.

DRUD Tech is provider of open source development tools that automate workflows and web application development with popular CMSes including Drupal and WordPress. Whether you’re an amateur designer just starting up or an experienced web developer managing thousands of sites, we have tools for you that will simplify the building and management of websites, and save up to 80% in cost and labor time.

For enterprises building and managing thousands of websites, what are the biggest challenges web developers face?

Unfortunately, anyone who has worked in website development knows the inefficiencies and cost overruns common in the industry.  Just for developing, deploying, and hosting a website, there are over a hundred categories or technologies to consider and review, not to mention the thousands of pages of documentation associated with each category. It’s not long before what seemed simple turns onerous.  Even for those experienced in website development, much time is required to build, maintain, and upgrade systems and tools or to retrofit fixes for websites that weren’t initially built to handle the dynamic demands of modern websites.

How will web development change in response to the continuing  focus on mobile experience?

According to Pew Research Center, 77% of Americans own smartphones and one in ten use only their phone for web access.  With cell phones positioned to capture more of the market, website designers and developers must balance usability, performance, functionality, and aesthetics.  While many companies choose to focus on aesthetics, there is no faster way to lose a potential customer than by having a slow-loading and unnecessarily complicated UI.  Smart companies will include development voices on the design and marketing teams to guarantee an end product that not only meets design demands, but is architecturally nimble.

What’s the value of open source in web development?  Is it just a cost issue?

Simply stated, open source lets the cream rise to the top. By giving the community the ability to organically contribute to and benefit from technologies, everybody wins.  Whether it’s a common solution that saves hours by building on the work of others, or a complicated one that links the mindshare of a few top specialists worldwide, open source capitalizes on the contributions of many, and communal work on common solutions.  While some companies see it as simply a cost-savings tool, open source delivers innovation and freedom so that IT teams can stay up-to-date with the newest developments while avoiding vendor lock-in.  DRUD Tech was founded by open source veterans and Drupal contributors, so as a company, we’re very much committed to open source principles.

What do you suggest for IT departments who are trying to budget for a growing web presence or more complicated websites?

The devil is in the details as anyone involved in budgeting knows. I would suggest that CIOs and heads of IT fully investigate tools that help glue together disparate pieces of otherwise great technology and make them easier and more accessible to adopt. This is similar to what many are doing in using something like Openshift (a Linux distribution that was built for Kubernetes) instead of running Kubernetes from scratch.” Pantheon, BuilderEngine, and DRUD Tech’s DDEV Community are a few such technologies but I’d encourage IT departments to explore the various options out there.

How do you see website and application development changing over the next twelve months?

With the move to mobile, designers and developers are going to be on the hook for building robust sites or find themselves under urgent pressure to fix a site that wasn’t built for modern site demands.  In addition to the move to mobile there are new technologies coming online that offer new capabilities for existing sites such as advanced searching and geo-locating services. Designers and developers will also be on the hook to quickly incorporate new technology services into existing sites to keep them fresh and up to date. Lastly, security is also an ever-increasing concern and having the ability to quickly update, modify, and harden existing sites is critical.

How does DRUD Tech’s solution DDEV Community improve the experience for web developers and designers, or whole web development departments?

DRUD Tech’s DDEV Community, which is part of the DRUD Tech platform, automates and simplifies website development processes with a centralized interface that’s easy to use. So whether it’s allowing designers who’ve never seen a command line to commit code within an hour, or eliminating hours wasted on tangential technologies for experienced developers, DDEV Community lets everyone from the novice to the expert save countless hours and dollars in website development.

Conclusion:

In order to keep up with growing demands on websites, IT departments would be smart to take advantage of the tools available to more efficiently create and manage their web presence.  With an eye on design and architecture, smart developers can use these tools to achieve cost and labor savings without sacrificing quality.