How to Choose the Right Drupal Development Company

6 min

While looking for someone to provide you with web development services, you might find yourself overwhelmed with numerous different options, boasting about expertise level and low rates. Doing a thorough and deep research is not a thing to be ignored, especially if we are talking about technology like Drupal.

Doing some simple analysis to choose the right vendor  is a must. Switching one amidst the development process is painful even to explain, so picking a Drupal development company at random should be avoided.

Know the goals

Hire with a purpose, otherwise, you risk ending up with more difficulties

Thoroughly identifying your purposes on finding Drupal experts might get you rid of  tons of unneeded frustration. Whether you are a digital agency, a web development company representative or a business owner, finding the right Drupal developer lies on knowing what you aim for.

Web development companies often resort to Drupal outsourcing when they don’t have required resources in-house: hiring a developer or a team to build rich websites or apps from scratch on Drupal or implement some additional features to the existing ones seems to be the best solution in this case.

Being an entrepreneur of any kind in need of some basic website maintenance services might also make you consider hiring dedicated Drupal developer for your purposes. For example, significantly altering website’s appearance, transfering from web to app or building one from scratch.

Among the circumstances that require hiring a Drupal developer is  when a digital agency that offers mostly marketing and maintenance services, usually without some specialized developers in house, receives an order which involves development utilizing such technology. The worst thing that can happen to digital agencies is to disappoint the customer and lose the project. So the best way in this situation is to partner with the company with vast experience in Drupal.

Goals setting

Do your research

Basic directions on sorting out Drupal agencies in order to find the right one

There are plenty of places on the web to look for Drupal development services — however, finding the fitting candidate isn’t always a matter of few minutes or hours. If you start Googling or looking for them in regular places like freelancing and job portals or Drupal.org, you might find yourself overwhelmed with offers to take on your project — how in the name of everything shouldn’t you get lost?

Do your research and ask the candidates some typical questions, helping you to sort out unfitting and questionable ones and move closer to the expert Drupal developers.

Try paying attention to the following:

1. How good is the company’s website?

What information on the company can be accessed there? Spend some time investigating and browsing it — a website may tell a lot, same as clothing represents the personality. Hiring a web development company whose website is slow, not user-friendly and mobile-responsive or has some obvious troubles might not be the best option.

2. What is their experience?

For how long are they in the industry, how many and what kind of projects have they completed ? Companies with profound experience in diverse industries tend to be more qualified in delivering compelling and productive results for future web-based projects (you can make sure of ours by checking some of the stories of our clients). Five to six years of experience in industry surely tells about capability to deliver cutting-edge solutions.

Company research

3. Do they have a portfolio?

Pay attention to the kinds of projects the agency has delivered so far, and how they correlate with your particular needs.

For example, hiring a freelancer who is best with modules development to build an eCommerce store might not be the best, even with proven expertise. Freelancers doesn’t tend to be versatile in every sphere of Drupal development, so examining a portfolio in this case is a must to ensure that one’s skills and expertise match the project’s requirements. But when talking about a company, situation is a bit simpler, as most of the times company’s state is already staffed with required developers with proven expertise.

4. Can they share a reference?

Ask your Drupal web development company to share the contacts of a previous customer, who they delivered a similar project, to find out more about how they work.

Upon obtaining a contact with previous agency’s customers, mind asking them about:

- What was their project about?

- How long were they engaged with the company?

- What services have they provided?

- What was the ballpark budget they were working with?

- Was the project delivered both on time and on budget?

- Would you cooperate with this company again?

Client feedback

5. What do feedbacks tell?

Doing a bit of research about the developers on your own might get useful information too. For example, Clutch profiles or social media profiles might be as good as well as a simple Google request on the topic.

6. What about their activity in Drupal community?

Check your candidate’s page on Drupal.org — an official worldwide Drupal developers community, that can work as an indicator on what projects the company has contributed to, modules it utilizes and maintains, its  contributions and code commitments.

7. Effective Communication.

Establishing a comfortable communication with your development team and your presence as a customer in the project development process will let you stay up to date on progress in real time. Involving and updating the client often leads to an amazing finished product outcome. Consistent stand-up meetings with a project manager or a full team will keep you up to date on project and ensure you from missing some tiny yet extremely important details.

A thorough budget breakdown, where every feature has a price tag and delivery term will also prevent you from facing hidden pitfalls.

8. Support and maintenance.

Don’t forget about the time when you and developers are finished on the project, but some questions still remain. Do they provide maintenance services afterwards, and are they included initially or should be negotiated separately? What about the code, do you own it, or the company claims the ownership on it? Ignoring this question might turn all of the efforts on the project in vain, as for security reasons, Drupal websites should be updated regularly, and this is not something you can do on your own and on a venture, unlike home maintenance.

Qualified and professional companies tend to provide persistent support and maintenance services for their customer’s projects. Mind sticking to an option like this to ensure that your website works well and evolves constantly.

Rates for Drupal projects

Calculations

Some more miscellaneous recommendations in case it’s still hard to make a choice

Upon going through mentioned above moments and receiving all of the needed information, it is just about time to start comparing options available. Remember about the first rule — know your aims and goals on hiring web development company. Evaluate the approach to estimating process offered by each candidate and make a decision on what suits you best.

No one likes running out of budget too — most of the professional web developers residing in North America, UK and Western Europe usually have their rates (up to $200/h on Clutch.co) matching their country’s average income that tends to be higher in these regions, with expertise not so different from their colleagues from Eastern Europe (e.g. Poland, Ukraine, Bulgaria etc.)..

Most of the times, companies based in Eastern Europe have their level of performance and service matching ones offered by more high-priced competitors while being much less cost-intensive — average hourly rates range from $25 to $49 per hour. Also we’re comfortable to be kept in touch with — being based in Europe makes it easier to maintain day-to-day contact.

Drupal community is bold and flowered with talented vendors — finding one that fits you is only a matter of mutual confidence.

If you are looking for a reliable partner providing good value for money solutions, contact us at [email protected]; we have a deep expertise on the topic and ready to build  an outstanding website right away.

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