Building a new Drupal site

How we work

A lot of our development work here at ComputerMinds revolves around entire website builds, often with us being involved in the creation of the functional specification in some way beforehand and maybe even the design process!

Below we run through four key principles for our build process, which together bring our projects to true and measured success

Web design and development - line drawing of a computer screen with a ruler and pencil
Anything is possible

(but not everything is in budget!)

As we go through your plans together, we'll feed back honestly when we think there's a better way, or a more important priority.

Your success is our success!

There's a huge world that Drupal opens up, and it can take time to get used to the freedom that it brings. Rapid change, features that make a genuine different to the customer journey, editorial experiences that keep your team moving fast... and everything is customisable.

Ultimately, delivering change that drives your business goals is the most important thing, and we're here to support that journey.

Show me more

We've written up quick primers on a number of common features that people ask about, which you might want to read up on.

Check out some key topics below, or use our Knowledge Center to explore a wider range of functionality guides.

Build on the shoulders of giants

As Drupal is an open source CMS we do as much of the heavy lifting we can using code from the community. This has the huge advantage of reducing development overheads. We can then focus solely on your specific requirements, writing bespoke code to get things working just the way you want them!

We too are active contributors to the Drupal community, with regular fixes contributed to Drupal Core and Modules, and a regular stream of technical articles with advice and stories from our experiences.

Build together

We’ll have regular check-ins with your team, to review specs and to test out what we’ve built so far. Our rapid development process involves you - we won’t just disappear for six weeks and come back with something you didn’t want! Clear communication at all steps, combined with testing platforms where you can see and use your site from early on, means that we all complete the project happy with the results.

Our clients genuinely love working with us, and that's a huge part of what makes ComputerMinds special.

Build with confidence

Building together means celebrating the wins together, too.

With your team naturally included in validation and sign-off, not just the initial spec call, we all get confirmation that the build meets the requirements. It's not just another overhead - it makes sure that we're all happy when we conclude the project / sprint / build / fix.

Quality code builds trust

Quality - Line drawing of an award rosette

Quality code

All our code follows the well-established Drupal coding standards

Delivery - line drawing of a webpage with a big tick indicating success

Tried and tested

All changes can be tested on a Test platform before you approve them for Production

Code - line drawing of a desktop computer with a cog on the screen

It's your code

You retain full ownership of the code, with no vendor lock-in

Case Study

EDF Energy's seamless move to Drupal 10

Moving a multisite to Drupal 10 could have been fraught with pain and danger, but ComputerMinds' expertise and experience brought the new Site online on time and on budget (and we're still friends!)

Read the EDF Energy Case Study