Why start a website from scratch we all need roughly the same functionality. The key different that remains is the quality of your content and good images. With a few colour changes and a bit of personalised branding, it can be yours!
Drupal distributions collect together modules and configuration to provide a ready to use Drupal site with all the content and functionality you need. This means you can start out with a Drupal site that goes a long way towards what you need to do, without having to do that work.
You may want to add or disable a few modules to customise things, and this is perfectly possible to do. Drupal is open source with a large community ready to help if you have the time and the capacity to search.
By using the included theme as a base, you will also get a well tested, accessible, and responsive website.
At Code Enigma we can set you up with a trial of a Drupal distribution for 30 days on AWS for free. Play with it, and if you are happy, you can take it further and customise it yourself. You can even ask us for help or to customise the Drupal site to suit your needs.
We have offered 1 day support for in house teams that needed a leg up, all the way to two sprints to help and train the in-house lead dev to customise the theming and migrating the old site into the new.
Following the launch of their site, some customers user our support services on a pay as you go basis, whilst others have prepurchase a set number of hours that they make use of each month. Some customers go for purchasing days of development work to build new features.
Which distribution?
There are a few Drupal distrubutions we are familiar with and have installed for our customers. A lot of our clients are councils so Local Gov Drupal is the obvious choice for them, however we are open to help you identify the best fitted for you. Selecting a distribution could save you about 80% of the effort!
CodeEnigma have been very helpful and considerate into finding solutions for delivering a successful and complicated website migration to LocalGovDrupal. We can easily discuss in brief issues with the specialists in chat, identify which to log tickets for immediate or longer term fixes and have a dedicated day to action these per month.
GC - North Devon CouncilAs a platform/solution for our needs my experience of working with Code Enigma has been excellent. Having moved our corporate website over to use the LGD distribution, Code Enigma have made the hosting and working on this extremely painless. When we require it support is very easily accessed, with questions and issues addressed in a timely manner. This has been great when we have come up against anything that needed to be dealt with rapidly. For context I must add that the issues we have came up against have been pretty far and few between and I don’t recall any downtime. This reliability is fantastic for peace of mind.
DH - Canterbury City CouncilFrom Phil Norton, senior dev here at Code Enigma, here are some essential paradigms:
"Don’t hack core/Write once, use many/There’s a module for that!"
Here are a few modules we often add to our Drupal sites:
- mega-menus, generally hard to build and make work responsively
- Help-desk pop up
- Google analytics for web statistics tracking
- Security Kit for various security-hardening options
- Two-factor Authentication (TFA)