125 University Avenue Ste 205
Palo Alto, CA 94301
(650) 323-3800
contact@dragil.com
125 University Avenue Ste 205
Palo Alto, CA 94301
(650) 323-3800
contact@dragil.com
Depending on the website project objectives and the launch strategy, Dragil then decides to incorporate an “out of the box” solution or a “from scratch” solution. At times, your needs might be better served by combining these two methods. The overall paradigm is simple: the solution should be as cost-efficient as possible while remaining as extendable as possible for future additions or changes to the website.
From a cost perspective, it is fair to say the initial investment is higher when choosing a custom solution; however, the overall costs for website maintenance and changes are usually much lower than those systems based on an existing open source solution. Further, those “from scratch” solutions allow us to implement the entire solution in stages according to the launch strategy. Often, it is imperative the body and extent of the website project remains confidential with only those modules of the project required to further grow the business allowed to go online.
Custom Web Development is Dragil’s primary discipline since this is what allows us to custom-tailor solutions the website project requires while incorporating our services to our client’s advantage. Further, this allows us to bring our full website planning capabilities to the table as we can better identify and address risks to the website project during the project’s infancy. This increases the success rate and ultimately is far more cost efficient.
For E-commerce shopping cart implementations, we focus our attention on including online shopping carts with the open source e-commerce web application Magento. For the past two years, this has been the fastest growing open source shopping cart product and is expected to become the preferred product with the most e-commerce websites hosted with its capabilities in the very near future.
The implementation of online shopping carts also includes the integration of one of various online payment gateways that allow the website owner to receive online payments directly to his merchant account. We encourage and recommend the use of Authorize.net for accepting online payments; however, we have extensive experience with PayPal, Website Payments Pro (a PayPal subsidiary), RBS, WorldPay, Braintree, US Epay, CCBill and many others.
The ultimate objective of setting up a content management system is to allow the website owner or webmaster to easily create, edit and delete web content on the website. This is especially important in regards to search engine optimization as consistently updated websites that offer fresh web content are rewarded with good search rankings, whereas those websites with stale web content are quickly shuffled to the bottom of the rankings.
Because of Dragil’s access to a variety of open source content management systems, it is customary to wait until the website project nears the end of the planning phase to decide which CMS best suits the project and the client’s needs.
Some of the more popular open source content management systems Dragil has worked with include WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, DotNetNuke and TYPO3.
For social networking website projects, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, etc., we typically choose between BuddyPress, based on the popular open source blog engine WordPress MU and a custom solution based on the Zend framework, another open source object-oriented web application framework implemented in PHP5.
For smaller and more generic social networking websites, we encourage you to opt for BuddyPress and customize the web design as much as possible while not modifying its core. This allows us to upgrade the backend and add new features as they become available through BuddyPress.
For those social networking websites that contain more uncommon features and modules, Dragil recommends the option of a completely custom solution since customizing BuddyPress’s core can be more expensive than building it from scratch using existing Zend modules.
