NMC has launched quite a few new websites recently, including a rebuilt website for Houses and Barns by John Libby, and new sites for Leslie Evans Designs, The Pickup CSA and Zagnoli Trading Company. You could say we have been around the block a few times when it comes to best practices for website development. Here are four important things that you should check for when building a website.

Easy Maintenance

No matter how cutting edge your website is the day it is launched, you will need to perform some housekeeping to keep it up-to-date and relevant to your audience. Nothing is worse for a customer experience than visiting your website which hasn’t been touched in two years and has outdated information.

Owning a website that is easy to maintain takes all of the pain out of keeping it updated. When NMC builds a website, we use either the Drupal or WordPress content management systems (CMS) because they allow our clients to securely log in and make updates to site content.

We recently re-launched a website for Houses and Barns by John Libby after migrating it into the Drupal CMS. The Houses and Barns website contains dozens of gorgeous portfolio homes and buildings. They needed a way to easily add and manage portfolio items and portfolio images without wasting time editing code.

The Houses and Barns site has easy-to-use forms that automatically publish portfolio items to correct categories, resize images, and build out menu structures, making updating and maintaining the site a breeze.

Future Expandability

If you are trying to grow your business, you probably want a website that can grow with it. That’s another reason why NMC uses the Drupal and WordPress content management systems. Their developer communities support a plethora of turn-key and highly customizable functionality-enhancing modules that allow a site to effortlessly grow in size and functionality without becoming bloated, complex or hard to manage.

When Leslie Evans of Leslie Evans Designs partnered with us to build her new site, she wanted to be sure that it would be easy to expand and add custom functionality to in the future. The Drupal platform was perfect for her situation. Its flexible and powerful nature includes capabilities for e-commerce, photo galleries, custom content types, content sorting, mobile optimization, video, social media integration—the list goes on.

Freedom

Drupal and WordPress are open source, meaning that these platforms are free to use. There are no contracts to sign and no ongoing payments to get locked into. By using open source technologies, you only pay for the work that goes into developing your website’s content and design (the part your visitors see), not the system that powers it. 

WordPress was a great choice for The Pickup CSA. They were looking for an economical solution to help improve their online brand presence. They also wanted an easy way for people to sign up to become members online.

Stability & Security

There are a LOT of content management systems out there, many are expensive and proprietary, many of them are junk. NMC only uses Drupal and WordPress because they are mature, powerful and highly supported by enormous developer communities.

By using these open source and popular content management systems, our clients can rest assured knowing that their websites will be supported with stability, functionality and security enhancements well into the future.

Many web companies use their own proprietary CMS. Our philosophy is that by using well developed open source platforms, we spend less time re-inventing the wheel and more time developing your cutting edge website using tried and tested technologies.

Our sister company Carrabassett Marketing & Printing recently launched a website for the Zagnoli Trading Company using the WordPress platform. This was economical for the client because their entire budget went towards creating a brand experience for their visitors, and not towards maintaining proprietary technology.

Click here to browse our online website portfolio.