At Kanopi Studios, we believe that Drupal is an especially strong choice, further validated by the fact that governments across more than 150 countries have turned to Drupal to power their digital experiences. This includes major sites in the United States like The White House and NASA.
What makes Drupal the best choice? Read on for our top 8 reasons why Drupal should be the content management system of choice for government websites.
1. Mobility
Website traffic from mobile devices surpassed desktop traffic years ago. In fact, according to Pew Research Center, one in five adults in America are smartphone-only internet users, and that number is likely to continue to grow. Government websites need to prioritize a superior mobile experience so they can meet the needs of citizens of all ages and economic levels and allow users to access critical information on the go.
Drupal can help. Drupal 8 was built to scale across devices, load mobile content at top speeds, provide a wide selection of responsive themes, and more. Drupal also allows content editors the ability to add or update site content via mobile, unlocking the ability to make emergency updates from anywhere.
2. Security
Offering a secure site that protects your content and sensitive user information is critical for maintaining your reputation and public trust. Drupal offers robust security capabilities, from regular patches to prominent notifications about updates to security modules you can install for additional peace of mind. Unlike other open source platforms, Drupal has a dedicated security council that keeps an eye out for potential issues and develops best practices to keep sites stable and secure.
3. Accessibility
A number of federal, state and local laws require government websites to serve the needs of all citizens, regardless of their abilities. Focusing on accessibility compliance from the very beginning of your website project can help your team avoid costly re-work and launch delays.
Drupal has accessibility baked in, with all features and functions built to conform to the World Wide Web Consortium (WCAG) and ADA guidelines, including the platform’s authoring experience. That means that people of all abilities can interact with your Drupal website, whether they are adding and editing content, reading news, filling out forms, or completing other tasks. Drupal allows screen readers to interpret text correctly, suggests accessible color contrast and intensity, builds accessible images and forms, supports skip navigation in core themes, and much more.
If you’re a content editor, we recently wrote about eight things you can do to make your site more accessible.
4. Simple content management
Drupal’s content editor helps busy government website administrators add posts, pages, and resources in an environment that’s nearly as simple and familiar as a Word document. The what you see is what you get (WYSIWYG) editing mode supports text formatting, links, embedded media, and more.
Drupal also enables administrators to set up customized roles, permissions, and content workflows. This allows any number of team members to contribute to the site while maintaining administrative control of the content that gets through to the public.
5. Ability to handle significant traffic and data
Many government websites store hefty data and resources and see significant spikes in traffic based on seasonal demand, news cycles, and many other factors. Drupal has the power to deal with large databases and intense site traffic with ease.
Drupal’s database capability includes a wide range of ways to sort and organize content via its module system, supporting the needs of almost any content library without the need to create custom code.
Drupal powers a number of heavily visited sites including NBC’s Olympics, The Grammy Awards, and Weather.com, keeping them going strong even when traffic levels are enormous.
6. Flexibility
The helpful features included in Drupal core are just the beginning. Many, many additional modules have been contributed and tested by the Drupal community and are ready to be added to your site as needed. How many? The Drupal community has contributed well over 40,000 modules, so it’s a safe bet that there’s something already out there that can help meet the needs of your project.
Modules can be added to your site at any time, like building blocks. A few popular examples include social sharing, image editing, calendars, metatags, and modules that support integrations with external systems, from email platforms to customer databases.
7. Affordability
Government budgets are often tight, with plenty of competing priorities for every dollar spent. With Drupal, you tap into a free, open-source system that’s supported by an enormous community of developers. Building your website on an open-source platform means you can focus your budget on creating an ideal experience for your citizens through professional services including content strategy, user experience, and design rather than dedicating funds to software licensing fees. And Drupal’s flexible modules reduce or even eliminate the need for custom code, helping you save even more.
8. Support for multiple sites in multiple languages
It’s not uncommon for government entities to have multiple websites. Whether your government maintains a few sites or hundreds, building each one individually would require an incredible amount of time and funds. Thankfully, Drupal’s multisite feature allows your site’s code base to be copied and adjusted to create as many new websites as you need, leveraging features that already exist without the need to build them from scratch. To meet language requirements, Drupal offers Content and Entity Translation modules that help content authors translate pages, individual elements, or specific fields into more than 100 languages.
Kanopi Studios loves government website projects
At Kanopi, we’re Drupal experts. We’ve harnessed its power to create citizen-focused sites for the San Francisco Police Department, San Francisco Health Service System and more. We’d love to hear from you, learn about the problems you are trying to solve, and share even more details about how you can put Drupal to work for your government website.
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