A winning strategy for achieving success with Drupal design requires a consistent process that can be divided into several stages. Each stage has its own requirements and engages a different set of resources. A simple web design project to a complex web application such as a social network all must go through a structured lifecycle in order to achieve excellence. At Creative Stride, our work is highly process-driven to ensure that your project will be executed using a proven project management and design methodology. Our Drupal web design process can be divided into three discrete phases.


Drupal Information Architecture During the Information Architecture phase, Creative Stride documents the content and organization of the Drupal website that is being designed. In the case of site redesign, we create an inventory of existing content, along with documenting the inventory of new content. This allows us to create a content architecture. Using site prototypes and wireframes, we begin to articulate a navigational structure and a user interface for the site. The content prototypes allow us to engage users to test the site’s navigation and how it works with the site’s content. This process allows our graphic designers to develop relations between how the site looks and how the navigation interface supports the information design. Good prototyping demands that it is flexible, especially in its early stages: the low level of complexity in the site prototype prevents that the Creative Stride’s interactive design team to become too invested in one design at the expense of exploring better alternatives.


Drupal Web Design During this stage, we take the wireframes developed in the information architecture phase and begin to create a visual design of the Drupal system that will be aesthetically pleasing and functional at the same time. Illustrations, photography, graphics and video content for the website are commissioned and created here at our Boston office. Once the initial mockups are created, they are given to the client for comment and feedback. Once the feedback is received, the design goes through several iterations to achieve perfection.


Drupal Theming The design is translated into Drupal templates in the theming phase. Because Creative Stride provides interactive design solutions to government agencies and educational institutions, we strive for web accessibility. This means that the templates that we create are Section 508 compliant. Section 508 is an important federal standard to measure the accessibility of a website. We validate our pages and the content throughout the development process to ensure that the pages are accessible to all users. We use the guidelines and techniques developed and maintained by the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).


Drupal Development/Coding Starting with the Drupal core, the Creative Stride Drupal development team begins to add contributed module and write custom modules to meet your specific requirements. The modular approach enables us to build the site with ease.


Quality Assurance and Performance Tuning Each site we build goes through a rigorous quality assurance process. Using both functional and load testing, we arrive at insights that enable us to ensure that your system will deliver the highest performance. Our performance assessment, optimization and tuning service covers Drupal and the entire LAMP stack: Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP.