Agaric adapts our approach to fit each project. Some building blocks to our approach are so fundamental that we use them on nearly every Drupal project we work on. These are those fundamental aspects to our approach.
Results-Driven Design
Design decisions will be made whether intentionally or not, so it pays to go in with a plan. Design can be a nebulous, subjective process. We give that process structure and purpose by focusing on the results. The design system we create speaks to your audience and meets your goals. We share our designs early, with real content, and in as interactive of a way as possible with your key stakeholders.
Content Strategy and Information Architecture Approach
We will work closely with your team to define an effective content strategy for your website and a clean, scalable information architecture. These will result in the following deliverables:
- Website goals
- User personas
- Content style guide
- Sitemap
- Technical architecture
Knowing that design is never truly done, we like to get the design "80% of the way there", and then apply it to the actual site. That way we can improve and refine along the way using the actual site, not static files open to misinterpretation.
We begin with a clean, responsive theme. We then identify and implement the customizations that will set your website apart and best tell your story, reflecting the unique voice and tone of your organization. By launch time your site will have a design that is:
- On-brand – speaks to your audience
- Results-driven – prioritizes the right content in the right contexts
- Secure – built on a theme covered by the Drupal security team and implementing security best practices
- Accessible – works with assistive devices and keyboard-only navigation
- Responsive – looks beautiful on any device
- Extensible – well organized templates to easily adjust or add new design components as your site evolves.
Development Approach
After defining the information architecture we will write user stories to clearly define the site's functionality. We use the agile methodology to prioritize together the critical functionality first, getting a functional site in your hands as soon as possible for review.
We continue this iterative and collaborative development cycle in two week sprints, always building the most relevant functionality.
Digital Commons Development
Drupal is a free software project built by thousands of designers and developers. As a result, your site benefits from security coverage and high quality code that follows best practices and ongoing maintenance and improvement.
As leaders in the Drupal community, we contribute to Drupal Core and maintain dozens of public modules (called "contributed modules" in the Drupalsphere) used by thousands of sites. For nonprofits in particular we are helping to build a Drupal 8 distribution putting together and providing ready-to-go configuration for key modules, many of which we also contribute to.
We draw from shared solutions whenever possible, tapping into and contributing back to this digital commons, because it saves time by not reinventing the wheel, and ensures your site continues to be maintainable and benefits from ongoing improvements from the community.
Accessibility
It is critical that your site be accessible to as many people as possible, including those using screen readers. To that end, all of our work is built to support compliance with W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0. The WCAG Guidelines, however, are not comprehensive and so we go beyond those guidelines to ensure high accessibility. Lastly, much of what makes a site accessible happens on the content entry and management side. We will provide resources for your content team so that after the site launches, you can rest assured that what you are creating is reaching as many people as possible.
Search Engine Optimization
Our developers will also follow SEO best-practice development and utilize Drupal’s range of SEO-related features that allow administrators to edit page titles, implement human-readable and editable URLs, enter meta tag information, and more. For further SEO-related services, we can also recommend SEO consultants.
