We provide a wide range of Drupal consulting services: architecture planning, project estimation, migration roadmapping, SEO review, performance analysis and more.
Whether you are looking to see what it is going to take you to implement a Drupal project or want to see how your vendor’s estimate and analysis depth stacks against that made by another team – we can help.
While doing so we also help you detect unclear requirements and consult you on the kind of communication that needs to happen and the deliverable you need to receive during discovery. At the bare minimum we include the following stages and deliverables:
Being an open source system with a wide gamut of functional modules along with vast customization capabilities at the end of the day Drupal development is boiled down to solving business challenges in the most rational way possible.
With this in mind we consult our customers and help them pick an approach to functionality design which is most suitable to each business requirement and process:
Be it a new feature or integration with a third-party solution, chances are Drupal Community has already developed a module that is a perfect fit to the task at hand. We study your requirements thoroughly and see whether there is a ready-made module that suits your needs well, thus cutting down on project development and maintenance costs.
On rare occasions where there is no contributed module capable of covering your needs fully or partially we assess the efforts required to build one from scratch. In doing so we also engage in multiple communication sessions with you where we discover the nuances that can be amended on your side to cut down on the total cost of ownership of the newly created module.
Oftentimes it so happens that the existing modules are more or less well-tailored to your requirements, but are missing a feature or two, or require modification to reflect the specifics of your workflow. If that’s the case then we analyze the resources it takes to customize the module in a way that it fits your requirements perfectly and provide you with an estimate.
Believe it or not, some things are better off not being developed at all. Throughout the years we’ve seen cases where project requirements included features that were either obsolete to the business or were included for the sake of just being done.
We do care. This is why our consulting services span a sanity check for each and every feature or request – by doing so we make sure that you are not wasting your time and money on the functionality that will become a burden for you, or one that you, and most importantly your business, will never require.
Contrary to a popular belief Drupal migration is not your regular update – the latter mostly happens at a click of a button while the former requires you to rebuild your entire solution from scratch on a newer Drupal version.
Contrary to a popular belief Drupal migration is not your regular update – the latter mostly happens at a click of a button while the former requires you to rebuild your entire solution from scratch on a newer Drupal version.
1
Functionality reviewWe analyze your existing modules, customizations and their configuration to see whether there is any functionality that is obsolete and whether there are new features that need to be developed. This entails the revision of your modules and affects the choice of an approach to functionality design.
2
Module revisionOur engineers take a look at the contributed, customized, and custom modules that you have and come up with an updated list that suits your needs better and reflects the most recent developments in the Drupal ecosystem.
3
Data analysisWe analyze the data that needs to be migrated to the new Drupal version spanning but not limited to users’ data and passwords, contact form data and its submissions, URLs, comments, meta tags, schema markups, SEO settings, and redirects. Our quality assurance engineers also perform a set of comprehensive checks to see whether some of it is corrupt.
4
Design assessmentWe assess the design mockups that you might already have to see whether they suffice to be used for further implementation and suggest the necessary edits and improvements. Alternatively, we provide assessment for the creation of a design system and mockups by our UI/UX engineers along with their implementation.
5
DeliverablesGiven the above, our analysts estimate the efforts required to execute the migration project, roadmap and time its stages, define the communication framework between you and the vendor and provide you with an accurate estimate should you decide to pursue this endeavor with our team.
When it comes to hosting your Drupal solution you have two options — managed and unmanaged hosting — and the choice between the two depends heavily on the setup of your project, as well as your expectations and requirements.
When it comes to hosting selection Attico International provides consulting services aimed at helping you pick the more suitable option and shed light on the implications of either of the choices.
We advise our customers on the wide range of managed secure, flexible, high velocity environments with up to a five-nines uptime and round the clock support with the caveat of coming at a price. Our DevOps engineers will assess and evaluate the pre-built development, integration, and test environments these hosting solutions come with and will check whether the automated deployment pipelines they have suit your solution.
We suggest an appropriate unmanaged hosting platform in scenarios that demand full control over the environment for security, transparency, performance, and scalability reasons. Our team analyzes the configuration of your system, its loads and technical requirements and suggests the most appropriate IaaS provider along with an estimate of what it will take to move your solution there and keep it running.
We counsel businesses on all aspects of Drupal performance that affect user experience, engagement, and conversion, as well as the general reliability and computational speed of their solutions.
Our team audits textual and media content and provides guidance on how to refine and optimize them to remove errors, improve their quality, and decrease clutter.
We study the assets and consult you on the appropriate caching strategy for proper storage of your app’s data at all architectural levels.
We analyze the efficiency of your current asset delivery and suggest improvements including but not limited to DOM mimization, CDN enablement, asset deferral, and fragmentation.
Our DevOps engineers review the configuration of your server environment and consult you on the actions you may take to improve the reliability, performance, and security of your Drupal solution.
Our developers thoroughly analyze the existing codebase of your solution and suggest improvements and changes to make it execute faster, consume less resources, as well as to make it more readable and maintainable.
We advise our customers on search engine optimization, providing either an at-a-glance overview of the current state of SEO health or an in-depth analysis that uncovers the most nuanced causes behind poor SERPs along with the development of a comprehensive SEO strategy to help you rank higher faster.
We engage into technical, structural, content, and competition analysis of varying complexity to identify the SEO pitfalls you are currently facing and assess the efforts required to eliminate them.
Our SEO experts craft a detailed long-term SEO strategy that will help you outrank your competition in the target markets and provide an estimate of the cost of its implementation.
Our UX engineers consult customers on the ways they can improve user engagement and enhance their experience by performing an in-depth niche research and industry analysis and coming up with an action plan for improvement including but not limited to:
It is vital for a Drupal user to fully know and understand its capabilities. With this in mind our trainers educate customers on how to use the our-of-the-box Drupal functionality and advise them on the specifics of any custom features it may have.
Given that we are currently engaged in a development project with you we also document all environments, flows, permissions, naming conventions, deploy and merge strategies, and write comprehensive instructions on how to use your new solution.
Here at Attico we believe that being agile in a Drupal project is key to its success. While agile has been arguably taken too far in the recent years at its core it is still an invaluable mindset that helps build better software faster.
Our certified experts will help you weave agile into your workflow and ensure that your Drupal project is evolving at a pace satisfactory to your end-users while remaining open to change at any time without going overboard with rituals and tools.
Attico’s DevOps team scrutinizes the current security setup of your Drupal installation to help you identify and eliminate security risks, and mitigate negative consequences, taking a close look at code security, permissions, firewall setup, server authentication, SSL configuration, backup settings, logging, patches, updates, and many more.