My name is Matt Wolfe and in my spare time I do freelance development and specialize in building CMS based websites. Specifically I've been building Drupal based websites because of its great facilities for optimizing SEO and its powerful modules. Through its taxonomy module, page title module, meta tag modules, every last detail of a site's content can be optimized for SEO without modifying any of the core system. Furthermore, Drupal provides the facilities for customers to manage their own websites without the need to know anything about programming, and typically very little to any knowledge of HTML. While pretty much any CMS provides the latter feature, I have yet to see any that provide the features of Drupal for managing content and optimizing SEO.
If you are interested in converting your current site to a CMS based site, or you are in need of a new Website, give me a call or Contact me and I can give you ideas for how to make the most of your business's web exposure.
I also provide web hosting for the sites I build for a very reasonable monthly or yearly price.
As an example, I'll explain a few things that can be done with the sites I build through the use of a CMS.
- Static Pages -Add/edit/delete basic, static pages. These pages contain mostly text but can be formatted with html to include images, links, etc.
- Blogs. You can have a blog system for authenticated users and configure how to use comments. They can be either automatic or manually accepted.
- Stories - Almost the same as static pages except that they can be setup in a hierarchical fashion. Thus you can have child and parent pages.
- Photo Galleries. Many different photo gallery modules exist for drupal, ranging from full fledged gallery software integration with gallery2 software, to basic galleries with Drupal's Image module.
- Custom Content Types - Custom content types are ones which the developer or user (if a very advanced user) can create. Essentially they define a set of fields and what type of values are associated with each field. Drupal has a ton of flexilibility in regard to how these are displayed. There are default settings and there are ways of overriding the node template file for specific content types such that the developer can customize the way they look. As an example of a custom content type, in a project I recently built for petitsoleislo.com, I had a custom content type of Room which included the name of the room, the number of beds, a set of images, and a few other fields. This allows the content owners the ability to edit/add/delete rooms themselves without programming, writing HTML, etc.
- Custom Views - Displays lists of content in a variety of ways, different layouts, etc. This is how I displayed the list of rooms for petitsoleilslo.com. Note that not a single line of programming on my end went into creating this view (except the CSS I had to write to customize the look). The view module allowed me to setup what data I wanted to display.
- Users and Permissions- Drupal always has a user module and a system implemented for managing your users, roles, and permissions. Content can be locked down such that only authenticated users, or an authenticated user in a given role has access to view/edit/delete/create content of that type.
- Shopping Cart - Through drupals UberCart module which is now compatible with Drupal 6, shopping cart systems can be built from drupal allowing the holy grail of web systems: a good interface for selling products and managing your websites content. At this point the module may not be suitable for large ecommerce systems, however it should suffice the average web business' objectives. Furthermore, as with drupal in general, SEO for your store is much easier to configure than that of other open source alternatives.
- More.... Well that wraps up this list, but there are certainly a huge list of other features drupal supports which I've left out here for the sake of brevity.
If your site has a design but needs the facilities of a content management system, such as user editable pages, blogs, reservations, calendars and other user updatable content, give me a call. CMS based sites start at $500 and shopping carts start at $800.*
* Prices will vary depending on project requirements, number of pages, number of products, etc.