Case Study

Folks often ask us, “What are the things that can make website redesign and rebuild projects more expensive?” The quick answer: things that take up a lot of time.

Last year, we at DevCollaborative became maintainers of the Maxlength Drupal module. Numerous usability tests, 32 commits and 35 contributors later we’ve reached a stable release for the project.

We knew through analytics that “Resources” on Bay Area Legal Services were not reaching as many people as they should be. We used usability testing to make small changes that greatly improved user engagement. 

We want our websites to be able to reach as many people as possible. If done right, your site’s visual design and theme will ensure that color contrasts work for the vast majority of people, that screen reader users and keyboard navigators can use your menus, and that other accessibility benchmarks are met. So, when all is said and done, remaining accessibility issues usually come down to the content that editors add to a site. This is where accessibility checkers prove useful. 

I stopped complaining about overly-complex Drupal 8 starter themes and, together with the DevCollab team, made our own ready-to-customize sub-theme of Classy. Our Drupal 8 starter theme is called LightShip, and we shared it on Drupal.org.

What gets me out of bed in the morning, day after day, to build websites for nonprofits is the idea that a well-built website can make an org’s work easier, save them time, or help them reach more people. Our client The Actors Fund (TAF) recently used their Drupal site to do all of those things, in response to the devastating 2017 hurricanes.