How Drupal Commerce Serves As the Best Extension for a Shopping Site?

There are myriads of CMS for an ecommerce website these days, say Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, Magento, Pretashop but what could be the best options for an online store with the most usage over the Internet?

Let’s take a little survey:

* Wordpress constitutes 61.1% of the CMS market share but known for blogging sites and not ecommerce. And that’s why developers don’t find it flexible to do than other CMS.

* Magento is an ecommerce platform built to serve the purpose of an online store. But not for those with a tight budget

* Drupal is a powerful and flexible platform, an open source CMS that is more extendable than Wordpress.

Whether a small & medium online business, here are a few reasons why the integrated platform Drupal Ecommerce - Drupal with Drupal Commerce or Ubercart is the best solution.

1. Every features of Drupal content management explains why your online store needs a CMS functions, elaborating marketing aspects as well.

2. Ecommerce platform like Magento requires installing another decent CMS to work with content whereas Drupal is so flexible to work with for both your shopping features and the content.

3. Drupal’s structure and extendability lets developers to embed any fields such as image, text, videos, link, and no limitation.

4. Known for its security terms, even the White House is built on Drupal.

5. If you need the extensions for your Drupal shopping site, free modules are there to support.

6. Drupal Commerce and Ubercart are integrated in the highest level with Drupal which brings in a magnificent experience for your shopping site.

7. Since Drupal 7 has been much easier to learn compared to earlier versions, the average hiring cost for developers is much cheaper than hiring a Magento developer.

8. If you consider your ecommerce website is more than an online store, there should be a content marketing plan with frequently updated contents, and a sophisticated SEO.

Summing up, if you treasure for any of the above mentioned reasons, then Drupal can’t be missed. 

Why Planning a Website Content Model Is Itself a Valuable Exercise

When building a complex Drupal site, be it mid to large-sized site, to have as many as a dozen content types, there's a lot that goes into keeping track of all of them.

Planning out how the entire site's content model and build will look is itself a valuable exercise. This not only reduces errors but also improves overall consistency and quality that we now use for all sites to aid in planning. When it comes to Drupal, it is extremely configurable step one of a new site is to start pushing buttons- so what we actually want to do? How does it work?

There are a number of ancillary benefits in planning to automate an entire Drupal website development.

• Allows easier identification of all possible custom modules required, starting from Field types, formatters, Views plugins, etc.

• Identifying hidden custom code early and factor into the budget or into design changes, as appropriate

• Allow the entire team to review the content model at-a-glance to see how all of the moving parts fit together besides checking the potential pitfalls

• Developers, those who are joining a project in the mid can get a clearer picture of the site they're inheriting, its development phase, and more importantly why.

• It’s harder to forget about the important UX details such as help text, field settings, and other little details in-your-face

• With proper planning strategy, the design and development greatly reducing "oh, we haven't built that part yet" problems avoiding too many context switches from "build headspace" to "code headspace" 

• Can be completed at once, showing the client early progress.

• Image style settings help to ensure that information is figured out early and in a consistent manner.

Summing up, this is actually the biggest benefit of this approach and therefore gives it a whirl on your next Drupal site making your life easier.

Why Do You Need Drupal Responsive Website

Depending on their ability, web designs can be broadly categorized into standard, adaptive and responsive designs. Generally, designing custom theme requires knowledge of HTML and CSS as Drupal websites is driven by themes. Google in its recent webmasters forum proclaimed that responsive web design as one of the best approaches for multi-device sites.

Having said so, here we shall see how Drupal Content Management System can implement responsive designs.

Why Drupal Responsive Web Design is a Necessity

All that matters in ecommerce website development are attractiveness, informative, and user-engaging in order to put its best foot forward in the online dimension, and enhance online visibility.

There is always a debate to building and maintaining separate desktop and mobile websites. From the online marketing and SEO point of view, it involves twice the efforts, cost and time investment. Plus, the different versions of tablets and smartphones in and around 200 screen sizes urges you to make it optimized for all which is notably not possible.

This is when Responsive Web Design becomes a necessity where one fluid design becomes the very notion of developing and maintaining over 200 websites suiting all present and future screen sizes. Moreover, Google encourages responsively designed sites to imply higher search rankings and provide uniformity to your website, irrespective of the device that it is being viewed from.

So...Identify Breakpoints

A breakpoint in Ecommerce Website Design refers to a point where the display changes based on the screen size. So, firstly you’ll need to identify your break points and have a design for each  breakpoint. Recommend having at least three different breakpoints to cater for notebook/desktop, tablets, and mobile phones. This goes a long way in creating a strong and consistent brand image in the minds of your customers.

 

To Sum up, the “fit to all” design sometimes becomes a constraint for ecommerce businesses but definitely it is a force to be reckoned with today.