professional Drupal
If Drupal is "free", what are professional Drupal development budgets based on?
With Drupal being an open source software and having such a great set of features right out-of-the-box, people may wonder what they pay for when going to an expert Drupal developer or shop for their Drupal install.
A good Drupal site may cost thousands of dollars. For an enterprise level site the budget may be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. What’s that all about? I thought Drupal was “free”. The following is a bit of explanation.
Most web site features are already built into Drupal and ready to be configured. With professional Drupal development you are not paying for features, but rather expertise. What expertise?
Professional Drupal developers and shops offer expertise in Drupal site:
- branding and visual design
- theming (to be defined below),
- feature integration,
- architecture,
- scaling,
- optimization,
- and security.
What are professional Drupal development budgets based on?
Not Just Features
As Drupal’s base install already has a large feature set which will meet many site’s needs, it is important to note that there are actually very little features lost or gained at budget levels past a certain point (the cost of install, setup, and deployment). What budget levels do affect, that is, what is lost or gained are levels of feature integration (interaction) and design implementation (theming).
Theming
To meet real business branding and marketing objectives, companies need their professional visual design developed into Drupal in a way that effectively and successfully communicates their brand.
