Universal Drupal Theme That Helped Reduce Development Costs Up To 10 Times

It is a well-known fact that some businesses out there today have more than one website to serve their goals. The issue these companies have is the recognition — if the user cannot recognise the brand, then the chances they leave the website are higher which eventually will affect behaviour, revenue and efficiency metrics.

HIMSS used to be one of these companies — they had more than 20 diverse websites and they wanted to achieve the point at which the design of each website would inspire confidence and be associated with the main website. To make this, the company presented the design guideline that contained all the visual components of the website that needed to be developed by us into a universal Drupal theme so all the parties could have access to it and could apply to any new website they had coming with minor updates from their side.

We decided to come out with a unique but universal approach at the same time — our team decided to develop just the only one theme with basic interactive widgets which would have been easily edited and applied to a new website. This theme was intended to be located in a separate repository so all the developers from HIMSS could have access to it to use whenever they needed it. As a result, all the website had the same structure and could be edited at any time in a simpler way. To make any adjustments, they simply had to create a new CSS file, using the special naming proposed by us, but theme components remained the same which eventually helped the company to reduce hours for websites development.

It is important to highlight the fact that it is quite impossible to create a universal theme from scratch at once — it takes time and user experience to identify all the components that has to be integrated in the solution. That is why we assigned a developer to this project — once they identified any new elements, we updated both theme and guidelines on Confluence right away so HIMMS had any new information and opportunities for their products development. The developer also made sure that all the new elements were compatible with the rest of them by conducting a range of tests.

As a result of developing a universal theme, we managed to help HIMSS to achieve the following:

1. The company now was able to develop a range of new websites with less hours. Basically, it all came down to the designer at that point — they just had to set up the color scheme and the new website was ready to go.

2. Annual redesign of all current website used to take several months of team work. With our solution they just needed to have one developer and one week of their time to do the same task which reduced the costs up to 10-12 times.

3. Sometimes the task was so easy so it was not even necessary to assign a developer. This allowed HIMSS to reassign their resources which eventually led the team to develop a multi-site instead of a range of separate ones. This made the development process even easier as the website now had the same code base and didn’t need a range of updates on a separate solutions.

In case you would like to optimise your current websites — feel free to send us a message by filling the form below. We have 10+ years of experience working with web and mobile development projects and will be happy to discuss your project in more details to provide you with some options that can help you to achieve the result you would like to have.