Want to Develop Your Website in Phases? Choose Drupal Over WordPress

If you do a Google search for Drupal vs. WordPress, Drupal vs. Joomla, or Drupal vs. whatever-other-CMS-you-can-think-of, you'll find plenty of results that will all give you a different story. The most popular of those queries is Drupal vs. WordPress, and most of your results will come from WordPress developers. Understandably, they will contain plenty of bias leaning toward WordPress.

Naturally, as a Drupal developer, I am very biased toward Drupal. But I have very good reasons to be so.

From a developer's point of view, I'll admit that Drupal has a steeper learning curve. From a webmaster's point of view, Drupal has a clumsy administration interface out of the box (even though it actually does make logical sense). From a user's point of view, there is no difference.

However, from your accounting department's point of view, Drupal can prove to be a money saver over the long term. This is especially true if you cannot afford to implement all of the features you desire at once. Yes, WordPress has many plugins available that can make it a little bit easier along the way, but if you want true scalability then Drupal wins hands-down.

Let's consider the common scenario of a small retail store. This store has big plans of offering their merchandise for sale on their website. However, like many small retail stores, they are very strapped for cash.

In their situation, the best option would be to increase awareness in their local community first. By increasing awareness, they will likely drive up their sales. With an increase in revenue, they can devote the proper resources later to realize their plan.

So how does Drupal help here? This small retail store can have a simple website built with Drupal. Their site can easily include a blogging feature so they can keep their website updated with fresh content. With a presence on the Internet, they can begin submitting their website to Google-trusted directories so that they show up on the map — literally — when people search for them or their products.

Okay. WordPress can do that just as well. And at that point, WordPress can be much simpler (and a little cheaper) to set up. But if this is all that you are seeing, then you are losing sight of the big picture.

Our small retail store has established its presence online (consistent with its brick-and-mortar branding), began ranking highly on search engine result pages, is able to effectively promote itself through social media, and has subsequently seen an increase in revenue. They can now move on to Phase II: building their online store.

This is where Drupal really wins, in my opinion. While there are many e-commerce plugins available for WordPress, I've never come across a site where it was executed well. Most WordPress websites that I've seen that incorporate e-commerce use a separate platform for that. From your accounting department's point of view, this is not ideal because you will basically be developing two separate websites.

With Drupal's Ubercart module, your developer can put together an e-commerce solution for your website using your pre-existing infrastructure. While there will likely be some fine-tuning that needs to be done to your existing theme, you won't be having to redevelop it over again. Additionally, if you do choose to redesign your website later, you won't have to develop themes for separate applications. Again, this will probably reduce expenses here for the small retail store in our example.

There are many other scenarios like this where a Drupal website will save you money over other solutions in the long term. Drupal is a very powerful framework.

As for the "aesthetics" argument that I see come up everywhere against Drupal, that is plain hogwash. You can theme Drupal the same way you can theme WordPress. It's just that a lot of very talented designers have gravitated toward WordPress. If you want to see an example of a great design on a Drupal powered site, check out http://www.whitehouse.gov.

So go ahead, have your website built on Drupal. You will not be disappointed!