Many prospective clients ask for a website built on one of the "big three" content management system (CMS) platforms: Wordpress, Joomla, or Drupal. However, we prefer to use a web framework to build our clients websites, specifically the Django web framework.
Django is different from the big three CMS platforms because it is not a "turn-key" solution, but rather a powerful tool to create websites and web applications. Simply put, Django can be used to build Wordpress, Joomla, or Drupal from scratch. There are numerous benefits to building your website from the ground. We have the flexibility to make your business strategies and priorities the core features of your website. Whether you want a simple website to showcase your product or service, or a robust e-commerce website, we can do it all with Django. Better yet, we can do it quickly and without the extraneous "features" and complexity that come standard with Wordpress, Drupal, and Joomla.
Having said that, you might be surprised to find out that we don't start every website from scratch. We have built a set of reusable tools that allow us to create award-winning sites for our clients. With these tools, we can make a blog with social features and an RSS feed. We can build a website with a powerful and flexible CMS. We have advanced search tools that we can integrate into any aspect of the website. We have the capability to build a powerful eCommerce website allowing you to list products with unlimited variations, integrated shipping estimates, sales tax lookup and collection, and an easy to use and extensible discounts system to meet your business strategies. All of this is available to you while still integrating with your internal business applications and workflows.
Powerful, Flexible, Scalable, Reliable: these are all words we use to describe Django. We can build any web application with Django at the core, with any requirements, at any scale, and be confident that it will work for years to come. We're not just saying this, we know this. We created powerful websites 5+ years ago that continue to operate with large traffic volumes to this day and with little or no support from our team.
We custom design the admin interfaces in the websites and web applications that we build using the latest browser technologies to suit your needs. If you need color-coded sections on your admin dashboard to match internal processes, no problem. If you need to have business-crucial data exported in a specific format filtered by date ranges and other custom filters, we can do that. Have another business application that you need to import data from? We can build an admin interface to allow you to upload data, and our backend will import the data while showing you a progress bar. In addition to our easy to use backend admin, we have easy to use front-end editing tools. These front-end tools allow you to see your content as it will appear on the website and edit it directly when you are logged in. So you can fix spelling errors and display issues without going into the backend admin interface. While you and your team won't need much training, we're here to get you started and answer questions about the admin so you can unlock its full potential. When your team grows, our admin interface also includes a help section that goes over the basic knowledge needed to navigate and understand the admin interface.
Because we build to your business strategies, we can work to improve your internal workflows and make your employees more productive. We have created tools that range from the simple, such as presenting data in a user-friendly design, to the complex, such as a multiple-step form to create a custom product. For example, if you find that your employees are wasting valuable time with redundant client requests, we can build an application that will display this information and automate the request process. If this information is confidential, we can use Django's powerful and flexible user authentication and authorization modules to help define clearance levels for different users. If this information is downloadable, we have tools to protect those downloads and ensure only those users with clearance can access them. For a complex example, we can help to build a tool to visualize and create a quote for a custom-made product by allowing a customer to select between a multitude of variations with interdependencies. Whatever your business needs call for, we can build it for you with Django.
From the simple to the complex, no task is too small or too big for Django. If you can think of it, we can likely make it happen whether it is a site that defines a custom business application or a simple product showcase or blog. You don't have to migrate all your data and accumulated business logic from one CMS platform to another to build a more complex application. With Django, when your business grows or your strategies change, Django can grow and change with you.
Django is rock solid stable. It is reviewed for bugs and errors by hundreds of developers and used on some of the largest websites in the world. We leverage the latest versions of Django and best industry practices to create a reliable application that will function for years to come. And because we create websites with our client's core business strategies in mind, we rarely need to update or maintain any portion of the software. We test our software extensively for errors, but because we are human too, we have a 30-day guarantee in which we will fix any bugs that we introduce at no additional charge.
If your business grows (which many do because of our award-winning websites), Django's modular design allows us to scale your website at a minimal cost by adding more application servers (horizontal scaling) and changing a few lines of code. Scalability is mostly about the right hardware setup and Django provides all the tools we need to create a scalable infrastructure from the application layer all the way up the stack to the load balancer. Django is built for speed, and with a Nginx/uWSGI/Postgres web server stack running on industry best servers, we can get blazing fast response times that can make a huge difference to your user engagement and SEO.
We won't compare feature to feature for the "big three" (since we can build any feature you want with Django), but we have found that the following five categories are the ones that most concern our prospective clients:
Wordpress Joomla Drupal Django + Our tools Ease of Use
★★★★☆
Simple admin Interface.
★★★☆☆
Complex admin Interface.
★★☆☆☆
Very complex admin interface.
★★★★★
Custom admin interface to match your internal business processes and strategies.
Power
★☆☆☆☆
Used for blogs and simple corporate websites for small to medium businesses. Many plugins needed.
★★★☆☆
Used for medium to large businesses. Extensions needed to define custom logic.
★★★★☆
One size fits all. Hooks needed to defined custom logic.
★★★★★
One size fits all. Built to match your core business needs from the ground up. No plugins or extensions or hooks.
Flexibility
★★☆☆☆
Can only be used on simple to slightly complex websites.
★★★☆☆
Used to build complex websites, but generally specialized to a few areas.
★★★★☆
Used to build complex websites.
★★★★★
Can build anything. Can even be used to build a thing like Wordpress, or Joomla, or Drupal.
Reliability
★★☆☆☆
Requires many plugins to work reliable. Requires updates often.
★★★★☆
Has good reliability. Requires updates often.
★★★★☆
Has good reliability. Requires updates often.
★★★★★
Excellent reliability. Built to your specific requirements to meet your long-term business strategies. Updates when you need or want them.
Scalability
★★☆☆☆
Requires many plugins to work at scale.
★★★☆☆
Very large and complex CMS. Requires large server resources.
★★★★☆
Complex CMS but it is built to be small and efficient.
★★★★★
Easy and cheap to scale.
With the Django web framework, we can build a website to help your business succeed. When we are done, you can be confident that you have invested in a powerful website that can change and grow with your business. Whether the problem you need to solve is complex or simple, we love creating a solution custom-tailored from the ground up to serve your business needs. If this sounds like the type of website you need, get in touch with us.