Small Businesses Benefit from Drupal
Websites for Small and Midsize Companies
Small businesses today are quickly recognizing the power of content management systems and website platforms that allow you to interact with your customers. The days of an old static website that simply lists your phone number are long gone. Today, your website visitors demand that you engage them in dialogue, provide resources at their fingertips, and give them an easy way of understanding what you do and how to buy it from you.
This might seem difficult or expensive, but it doesn't have to be. Orchestra provides Drupal, a leading open source Content Management System, to our clients for a price and timeline built for small business. Drupal is free and open source, so we're able to offer an enterprise level website solution for a very affordable price.
As you'll see below, Orchestra has crafted a solution for small and midsize companies to take advantage of web 2.0 and the growth in internet marketing. And it's not just B2C that benefits, one of the fastest growing sectors of the web is B2B. For small businesses in the B2B space, having an engaging website that positions your company as a market leader and thought driver is imperative.
So, lets get right into the "meat and potatoes" as they say:
What is Drupal?
Drupal is a web platform (known as a CMS) used to power thousands of websites, from enterprise websites to small blogs. It is free open source software that can be downloaded by anyone, but is serviced by professional Drupal firms (like Orchestra).
Drupal has some pretty famous customers, including Popular Science Magazine and the Whitehouse. But there's also small companies running Drupal, such as yours truly. Everything you see on our site here is on Drupal and we love it.
What does Drupal do?
Drupal runs your entire website, from the creation and management of content to controlling security and user permissions. It includes modules that can be used for specific tasks, such as setting up a blog, and has access to thousands more modules as needed.
For the end user, Drupal puts your website at your fingertips. I've had a website for all my companies, but never before have I had a website that I could control, until we built Orchestra's site in Drupal. Now I can create new pages, change content, add images, and optimize the site for SEO, all myself with no HTML knowledge at all.
Drupal makes it easy to create new content on your site, all online. There is no Dreamweaver or other program needed to write the HTML. You go to the website, login, press "create content" and bam, you are creating a new page.
Here is a short video Orchestra created for one of our clients. This video shows how easy and streamlined it is to create a new page in Drupal.
What is the Drupal Small Business Edition?
Orchestra created the Drupal SBE to make it simple and quick for small and midsize companies to get online with a powerful CMS system like Drupal. Platforms like Drupal can do a lot and grow to manage huge websites, so there's a lot of flexibility and configuration needed. Orchestra took the base Drupal (known as Drupal Core) and crafted a complete package specifically for small businesses. We've made Drupal easier to install and setup, easier to use, and cheaper to own, all to allow small businesses to take advantage of this enterprise level solution.
What does the Drupal Small Business Edition Include?
The Drupal SBE comes with all the features needed for a small business website in the 21st century. Included are:
- Administration Module to manage the site
- Standard business website pages (Home, About Us, etc.)
- Company Blog & Social Media Page
- SEO Optimization
- Advanced Contact Form to convert traffic to leads
- Security & Permissions
- Analytics Module for traffic reporting
The Drupal Small Business Edition is also ready for quick setup of additional functionality for progressive businesses, such as:
- Web Video
- Forums
- Online Service Call Tracking
- Online Calendar of Events
- User Management (allow visitors to create users)
Benefits of the Drupal Small Business Edition by Orchestra
It's FREE: Best part about Drupal is that it is free and open source. When you are ready to expend your website to have a forum, or online support tickets, there is no software to buy. The modules needed are all open source and free, just like everything else with Drupal. The only thing you pay for is the expertise to get it all setup and supported for you by professionals that you can rely on (such as Orchestra).
Take Control of Your Website: With Drupal SBE, you can create all your own content, when you need to. This means that if a new product is released, you can quickly create a new page on your website for the product. If you are having a sale, it is easy to create a new page and display it on the front of your website for everyone to see.
Engage you Visitors: Companies that blog have better brand awareness and recognition than their competitors that don't blog, period. Engaging your customers, prospects, and suppliers in active two way conversation is critical in today's business world. Drupal allows you to easily run a company blog, with multiple contributors within your company.
A great story about how a small business has benefited from blogging can be found here. It's about a fencing supply company that never thought a website was important, until they started the "Fence Post Blog" and saw their traffic and their revenue spike big time.
Optimize for Search Engines: Google, Yahoo, and Bing are changing what they do, and they are changing fast. The days of having a site ranked well and then leaving it alone are long gone. Drupal is highly optimized for search engines, and brings huge improvements just by switching a site to Drupal.
How do I get started?
The first step is to contact Orchestra. You can call us at 877-683-2648 or you can send us an email here on our Contact Form.
We'll listen to your needs and take a look at your current website. Once we have an idea of what you need, we'll provide you with a demo of the Drupal Small Business Edition and later a proposal. We break everything out in the proposal, so you can see exactly what you are buying, how much it will cost, and how long it will take.
Orchestra is dedicated to bringing big enterprise level technology down to small business, and we think the Drupal Small Business Edition does just that.
Give us a call today and we'll help your website take the next step and start working for you.
