Troutreach Technologies has elected to concentrate solely upon building websites using the Drupal Content Management System. We don't do WordPress; we don't do Joomla (although we once fixed a client's old Joomla website before we built their new one with Drupal). There are many reasons.
Among the "Big 3" of CMSs (WordPress, Joomla and Drupal), Drupal is generally considered to be the most powerful. What does that mean? Either inherently, or with contributed modules, and with suitable configuration, we can do just about anything a client needs.
There were a number of other things that we feel were important in our selection of Drupal:
- The Drupal community is vibrant. There are thousands of people working with Drupal around the world. Brochure websites are easy for us to create.
- Drupal is flexible. We can add features like events, calendars, automatically generated maps, lists of board members or employees (with bios and pictures), photo galleries etc., to meet a client's specific needs.
- Drupal is easily hosted on low cost shared hosting accounts. There are probably thousands of companies offering such services. We've found a few that we particularly like (see Affiliates).
- We can make websites where our clients can maintain their own content. They don't need to call us to add a page, or a product, or change existing text.
Unfortunately, Drupal has gained a reputation as a tool that is difficult to learn, i.e., it has a steep learning curve. We agree. However, when we, as Drupal website developers, do our job well, this point becomes moot. We make websites where our clients can easily maintain their own content. We always employ a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) text editor for text areas when appropriate, as it is in most pages. We use other tools to make more complex page layouts, e.g., staff member listings, photo galleries, or sermon podcasts, what we like to call "Fill in the blanks simple."
The story continues here: Troutreach is Born