zero-dev.co.uk

Drupal - community plumber

Currently I'm specialising in Drupal including theme development, interface implementation, custom modules, multi-language sites and Ubercart e-commerce sites.

Since 2007 I've been working almost exclusively with Drupal doing complete installs and configuration of Drupal 5 and 6 and became enamoured with it's modular structure, the community and its vision and the speed with which you can create powerful websites.

Drupal is a developer favourite as it has a very open architecture allowing anything that can be written in PHP to be integrated through custom modules and themes.

See my portfolio for some examples of my old freelance work. Please contact me for a CV of more recent work.

Interfaces

Without proper information architecture and well designed interfaces any information or services provided by websites are compromised. Websites should be simple and easily navigable. Phrases like 'user journey' sound like stupid jargon until, as we all do, you try to use sites where the user experience is compromised by the architecture or worse where it simply hasn't been prioritised.

Drupal sites often have a good front end that has been designed and thought out but a terrible admin interface. This is often because there is no money for it because people don't realise that the admin interface is part of a framework rather than a defined system, so, unlike Joomla or Wordpress there isn't an obvious dashboard or anything. There are a few good attempts in Drupal 7 like the admin project and various admin themes like rootcandy. Drupal 7 is changing a lot of that with it's new admin UX and shortcut system.

Ubercart

Ubercart is one of two e-commerce options for Drupal and integrates fully and smoothly with Drupal. It is widely supported with a range of sub modules available for it providing a range of payment gateways and enhancements to the core system.

It has great integration with Google Analytics, making full use of e-commerce reporting there, including repeat customer tracking, conversion rates etc.

I confess to being pretty excited by developments in Drupal 7 around the entity system and how that will work with the D7 Drupal Commerce project which is a re-build of Ubercart along D7 principles with a marginally less silly name and hopefully a lot more flexibility (ever tried to implement multi-currency in Ubercart? I have and I didn't like it one bit!)

Search Engine Optimisation

I do not provide SEO as such, but I have a good deal of experience of making Drupal as SEO friendly as possible, as there are several modules that need to be added and configured correctly I have used them all and know how to configure those hard to reach pager titles that other developers can't reach'

This means that when it comes time to try and push your site up the rankings in various search engines you will have all the tools - clean URLS, flexible meta tags, page titles - that you or your SEO expert will need.

Drupal is also easy to make standards compliant, which means that your site will be accessible, search engine friendly and easy to re-theme and upgrade.