Speed is by far the most critical metric to consider when re-designing an enterprise website – it won’t matter how beautiful your new site looks if nobody is going wait an extra millisecond for your homepage to load. In addition to providing a fast loading, responsive user experience – speed has a direct impact on your ability to optimize higher user engagement, conversion rates and SEO rankings – all of which drive better brand and marketing performance.

One of the primary signals Google’s algorithm uses to rank performance is site speed – but by extension it is really page speed that Google is measuring. According to Moz, page speed can be described as either “page load time” (the time it takes to fully display the content on a specific page) or “time to first byte” (how long it takes for your browser to receive the first byte of information from the web server).

Page speed is also vitally important to user experience – pages with longer load times tend to have higher bounce rates and lower average time on page that result in an immediate negative impact on conversions. According to Google, 53% of users will abandon a site or web page if it doesn’t load within 3 seconds. This also has a direct impact on search rankings – with less than half a second separating the first and third pages of Google search results.

So how do you measure site speed? Google introduced its own web-based tool, accessible via Google Labs, called Page Speed Online. It’s available as a web-based tool as well as a Chrome extension. With it, you can quickly get an overview of high priority, medium and low priority fixes that can help increase your page speed.

Here are the top 5 for your digital agency implement to add instant horsepower right out of the gate:

1. Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Technology – AMP is a new open framework built entirely out of existing web technologies to dramatically improve the performance of the mobile web by enabling code to work across multiple platforms and devices so that content can load instantaneously —no matter what type of phone, tablet or mobile device you’re using. With Google splitting its index into separate versions for mobile and desktop – the time has finally come to start prioritizing mobile
2. Wrangle Your Javascript and Stylesheets – Have your scripts and CSS load in external files instead of cramping up each and every web page. This way, only the browser has to load the files one time, rather than every time someone visits each page of your site. Ideally, put your external CSS in the portion of your site, and your external Javascript file as close to the tag as possible. As a result, the browser isn’t bogged down wading through all those requests for external files right from the start. The only time you won’t want to do this is if the Javascript needs to load near the top of the page – such as to display a name or load up an image carousel.
3. Optimize Your Images – In Photoshop or Fireworks, you can use the “Save for Web” option to drastically reduce image size. An image quality slider lets you see the visual trade-offs between graphic file size and crispness. Also – don’t rely on HTML to resize Images – while HTML makes it easy to create a smaller version of a larger graphic it doesn’t mean it’s taking up any less room on the server. The browser still has to go through the process of loading the entire image, checking the width and height you want and then resizing it accordingly.
4. Use GZIP compression – You’ll want to ask your web host if they use GZIP compression and deflation on their servers. These are two techniques that can significantly speed up a site, reducing file size by as much as 70% without degrading the quality of the images, video or the site itself.
5. Caching – Many content management systems now have plugins that will cache the latest version of your pages and display it to your users so that the browser isn’t forced to go back and dynamically generate that page every single time. Plugins like WP Super Cache can take a serious bite out of page load times.

You can also look beyond your website itself and consider a Content Delivery Network (CDN) that serves up pages depending on where the user is located. Faster access to a server near their geographical area translates into faster load times.

While speed is the most critical metric of any re-design effort – it’s not the only metric. Working with a smart digital agency to define KPIs for the re-design of your next generation website will significantly improve performance metrics across your digital marketing ecosystem right out of the gate.

Go the need for speed?  Contact us

 

The Bluetext Blog has been focusing on website design for the best user experience. In this post, we are examining five trends that companies need to understand as they examine the performance of their website design and whether it is delivering a successful user experience that is delivering results for the brand.

Cards are Taking Over. Card first became popular in consumer-focused social sharing sites such as Pinterest and Facebook for placing clusters of information – including text, photos, and links relating to one topic – in one place. For 2018, they are already gaining in popularity and offer a visually appealing way to organize and display larger data content in a smaller space. Cards also allow visitors to quickly assess the category of information and decide immediately whether they want to click on it or not. They are easy to manage and companies can select different arrangements and sizes to emphasize some types of content over others. Because of this obvious advantage, particularly on a smaller screen, cards are moving into the mainstream across all platforms.

Don’t neglect the touch. Mobile devices are physical objects that hit a number of our senses, most prominently sight and sound. But the feel is also important, and shouldn’t be neglected. Because of the small size of the screen, giving haptic feedback can be important and enhance the small-screen experience. Adding in well-tuned clicks as the viewer advances through a screen or a list of items also improves engagement. This is particularly true for sliders and similar types of horizontal navigation that takes viewers away from the downward scroll.

The sound and the fury. Some designers feel like sound should be an afterthought, and many find the auto-play functions that are so popular across Facebook and other social meid platforms more annoying than helpful. But when done right, sound layers will enhance the web design user experience on mobile devices. Subtle but pleasant sound layers can signal when a visitor is on the right page and can reinforce the buyer’s journey through the site. They can also add to the experience when a comment is placed, or even an emoji selected.

Video is replacing static images. We all know the appeal of video for communicating information about the brand and its products or services. As video and streaming capabilities continue to get more robust, and as screens themselves better display high-res video, it is quickly supplanting static images on mobile devices. It also better engages customers – after all, video clips are always visually more appealing than static images.

Colors and borderless display. As mobile screens, now including the Apple iPhone X, are moving their screens to be completely borderless, maximizing that display field is essential. To do that, vibrant colors are making a comeback. It was not too long ago that the trend was for muted and pale color combinations to accommodate the flat designs of mobile devices. Not only do more vibrant colors attract user attention, when used in combination with the borderless display, they allow website design to literally go outside the lines for a better user experience.

Looking to build a website design and user experience for your mobile applications? See how Bluetext can help.

WordPress and Drupal have been the leading open-source content management systems for the past 8+ years. During this time, both platforms have created strong reputations for themselves.

WordPress has been viewed as a user-friendly content management platform, built for bloggers who need to get their information out quickly and easily without having to worry about learning how to code. This made the barrier to entry onto the platform extremely small, resulting in the landscape we have today with more than 25 percent of all websites built in WordPress.

Drupal comes from the other side of the spectrum, designed for developers as a developers platform. With this developer-first mentality, Drupal offers many more features than WordPress to provide flexibility, scale-ability, and maintainability. While the learning curve for Drupal is significantly higher than that of WordPress – reducing the adoption rate by non-technical users –  this did make Drupal stand out in the enterprise by catering to larger applications with a more robust set of requirements. Yet, in the meantime, it acquired a reputation as a developers CMS that’s not as friendly for general users.

Drupal 8 changes the game for Drupal and highlights several core strategic initiatives to help break down the barriers and remove the developer-first stigma that the platform has acquired over the years. In this blog post, we will take a look at some of these core initiatives.

Fast-forward to today, with Drupal 8 in its prime

Drupal 8 opens up a new world for users. This is backed up by the fact that 5 out of 7 active strategic core initiatives for Drupal 8 relate to improving the content management experience. The goals of these initiatives are simple:

• Reduce the barriers of entry for non-technical users (Out-of-the-Box#, Outside-In#)
• Provide site builders with the tools they need without having to write code (Out-of-the-Box#, Layout#)
• Provide content managers the tools they need to be successful (Workflow#, Media#, Outside-In#)

Out-of-the-Box#  Out-of-the-Box# is a strategic core initiative for Drupal 8 which focuses on improving Drupal 8’s OOTB capabilities to provide a fully-featured CMS. Phase 1 of this initiative is to provide a fully baked example site into a core destination website for Food Network Magazine. The example will provide a rich and beautiful experience for users as they navigate through the website.

This example profile will also provide a framework for other developers to do the same thing and begin creating pre-packaged site templates, similar to what WordPress does, as a way of providing a near-plug-and-play experience.

Outside-In#  The Outside-In initiative is one which strives to improve the in-line editing experience in Drupal 8. With today’s landscape of website building platforms, it only makes sense for Drupal to push for this. A key benefit to this type of editing experience is that it keeps content managers in-context of the work they are doing. Content managers are coming to expect these types of slick editing interfaces which are offered by other CMS platforms and website builders such as WordPress, WIX, and Shopify.

Drupal 8 now ships with basic inline-editing experiences across its core features. The foundation is available and the “contrib” space is catching up. Many of the “contrib” add-ons support the in-line editing experience, while Drupal is adding more every day.

Layout#  The Layout initiative is one which is focused more on the site-builders and power-users. The goal for layouts is to provide cookie-cutter like shells where users can drag and drop content and blocks to meet their content needs.

Workflow#  The Workflow initiative is focused on improving the workflow, preview and staging capabilities for content in Drupal. Every organization has slightly different requirements when it comes to publishing content to the web. The Workflow initiative helps to strengthen the core functionality of Drupal to allow for these varied requirements by providing configurable workflows on a per-content-type basis.

Content staging is extremely important to large organizations. Being able to preview a new version of a page before publishing is significant.

Media#  Drupal 8 has long struggled with reusable media assets. The objective of Phase 1 of the media initiative is to provide a simple media solution to make Drupal 8 easy to use for basic use cases. There is a focus on strengthening this feature and integrating it into the core components of Image Fields & WYSIWYG.

While Drupal 8 may not set the highest bar for a great content management experience, it is making significant strides to catch up to its competitors. This combined with the areas at which Drupal already excels, including Performance, Security, and Maintainability, make it an obvious choice for enterprise-level CMS implementations.

Looking to see how you can transform the way you manage your website? See how Bluetext can help!

 

Website migration – whether to a new version of your content management system or to an entirely new platform – is among the most stressful projects for an enterprise, one that will challenge the team on every assumption and analytics they have. Before starting down this path to a website migration, there are two key questions you will want to answer:

1. Does automating the process save me time?
2. Does automating the process save me money?

Below is our guide to go about answering these questions. Of course, every scenario is different and requires evaluation and analysis before the final decisions are made.

Determining an Approach

When determining the approach for migrating content, there are several factors that come into play when architecting out a solution to find out which one would be best.

How many pages are there? If your website is relatively simple, and there are a small number of pages (<500), it is likely going to be easier/faster/cheaper to copy/paste your content from one website to another. The number of pages will need to be determined by you, but we have found that migrating sites with more than 500 pages start to become more efficient with migrations scripts.

Importance of Site Crawls. Crawling the existing website is a critical step in determining the approach to take for a website migration. This will give you a quick summary of the volume of pages, images, and documents. Tools like Screaming Frog will allow you to export the list to a spreadsheet where you can create a more thorough inventory and conduct a ROT analysis (Redundant, Outdated, Trivial) on your content to determine how much of this content actually needs to be moved to the new platform.

Where do the current pages live? Is the content that you are migrating in a database somewhere or does it live in static HTML files on a server? Where the content lives is important because it limits the options available for importing and working with the content. It also determines the structure of the content.

Database Content. Content that is stored in a database is typically more structured and logically separated. This gives more flexibility when writing migration scripts because it is already in a consumable format. It is unlikely that this will be an “easy” 1:1 mapping from point A to point B, but the first step of getting the content into a consumable format is done.

Static HTML. Content that is in a static HTML format is going to be harder to work with. In these cases, you will likely need to use a web scraper tool to break apart your pages and get them into a consumable format for your migration to Drupal. You will be faced with numerous edge cases based on how each page is built. This process may require a lot of trial & error in order to get right.

How well are the static pages structured/formatted? In any website migration, consistency is key to making the process effective. You will want to determine if the pages follow consistent patterns so that you can create a repeatable process. If the pages have no uniform formatting or consistent markup, the task of creating a repeatable process of a migration script will be difficult and more time-consuming.

Does the content have references to media (images & files)? If your content contains references to media, this adds another step in the process. Your migration scripts will need to not only handle the migration of the assets but also alter the markup to replace the links/references to these assets.

What tools are available on the platform I am building the new website on? Most modern CMS platforms provide some level of migration support for getting content from point A to point B. A majority of the work that we do is in WordPress and Drupal, below is a quick list of migration options for each platform.

WordPress Migration Options

1. WordPress All Import Tool
2. WordPress Import Tool (Blogger, BlogRoll, LiveJournal, RSS, Tumblr, WordPress)
3. FG Drupal to WordPress
4. HTML Import 2

Drupal Migration Options

1. Drupal 8 Migrate
2. Drupal 7 Migrate
3. Feeds Module
4. Content Import

Other Useful (Platform Agnostic) Tools to help with content cleanup:

1. htmLawed
2. PHP DOM Manipulation
3. Site Sucker
4. Example Python Web Scraping

Determining the right solution

Now that you have all of the information you need, you can answer the two questions:

1. Does automating the process save me time?
2. Does automating the process save me money?

You are now equipped to make an informed decision on the approach you should be taking. You have a good grasp on what your source content looks like, how easy it is going to be to work with and what tools you have to give you a kickstart. Your next step is to crunch some numbers and get some high-level estimates on LoE for writing these migrations.

Trying to understand if website migration is the right approach for your organization? Bluetext can help.

Annual trade shows are often the biggest events of the year for brands hoping to make connections, network with players across their industry, identify new solutions for their business, and generate solid sales leads. The Bluetext team has vast experience with association conferences and trade shows, generating attention for our clients, arranging media interviews and coverage, crafting the creative approach for their floor space, and publicizing their successes.

For our trade association clients, we work with them to help market their shows, growing their attendance and revenues through sophisticated, multi-platform outreach campaigns. One of our premier clients, the National Retail Federal (known as NRF), has been holding The Big Show for more than a century. We have worked with NRF for several years, starting with its Big Show for 2017 and this week attended NRF 2018 in New York City to see how it came off.

 

The theme this year is “Transformation,” and speaker topics centered around the retail industry’s need to transform itself in the wake of the digital revolution in retail sales. We developed the creative approach for the show and the marketing activities generating attendance. It is the retail industry’s largest annual gathering, and as the agency partner responsible for generating registrations and revenue, we are proud to say that this year, the show attendance was bigger than ever – and exceeded NRF’s registration and attendance goals.

As part of the creative approach to this year’s event, Bluetext created a “Transformation Ribbon” of deep red that can fold and unfold with digital GIF video that works across the show website, and through static images on emails and signs. For The Big Show itself, we designed a three-dimensional version that would pop among the attendees at the Jacob Javitz Center in New York City.

On the other side of the continent, Las Vegas played host to the annual Consumer Electronics Show, which is a massive gathering of the industry to show off the latest electronic devices, ranging from big screen TVs to driverless cars to commercial and hobby drone to everything in-between. The Bluetext team was there to help several of our clients reach new audiences and get attention for their products and solutions. The one thing to say about CES is that it’s cool, and that was most evident in the variety of new consumer electronics that was on display.

Looking to make a splash at your next Industry Trade Show? Find out how Bluetext can help.

About Drupal 8 Migrate

The migrate module has been moved into the core in Drupal 8, showing the community dedicated to making the process of upgrading between versions or migrating into Drupal easier. The migrate module takes advantage of the Drupal 8 Plugin system, offering developers with several plugin types that they can implement: MigrateProcessPlugin, MigrateSourcePlugin, and MigrateDestinationPlugin.

Quick Recap of our previous blog:

1. Complete rewrite & moved into Drupal 8 core
2. Out of the box support for D6 -> D8 and D7 -> D8
   1. Nodes, Users, Comments, Profiles, Taxonomies
   2. Content & Configuration
3. Support for custom sources and destinations
4. Processors for working with/manipulating data

Series Mapping:

Part 1: Migration Setup & Mappings

Part 2: Working with Processors

Part 3: Coming soon!

Drupal 8 Migrate Module Overview

The Drupal 8 migrate module that is shipped with core provides a set of API’s for setting up migrations. The module also provides extensible object-oriented base classes and interfaces for migration plugins including:

1. Source & Destination Plugins
2. Process Plugins
3. Config Migration Mappings

While the migrate module has been moved into core, the contributed space still provides significant value and I wouldn’t recommend trying to build a migration without it:

1. Migrate Plus: The Migrate Plus project provides extensions to core migration framework functionality as well as examples.
2. Migrate Tools: The Migrate Tools module provides tools for running and managing Drupal 8 migrations.

Creating Migration Mappings

In Drupal 8 all of your migration mappings are done through configuration files. In Drupal 7 these migration mappings would have been done in classes through the $this->addMapping() function.

Configuration files provide the blueprint for the migrations, and there are two main types of configuration files that we will need to define:

1. migrate_plus.migrate_group.<name>.yml
2. migrate_plus.migrate.<name>.yml

Migration Group

The migration group is a configuration file and is similar to the idea of hook_migrate_api in Drupal 7. This configuration file defines a group of migration classes and configures global configuration/settings to be shared across the classes.  

1. id – Unique identifier
2. shared_configuration – Defines shared configuration between all migration classes that are part of this group. **Example: setting the source database to use
3. dependencies – Sets the dependencies for this set of migration classes to function

Let’s see an example:

Migration Configuration File

The migration configuration file is similar to a migration class in Drupal 7. At a high level, the migration config file defines the metadata and field mappings for a particular migration in Drupal 8. There are 5 key concepts that you need to be aware of in the migration configuration file:

1. Definition – The definition of this migration class, its dependencies, and what migration_group it belongs to
2. Source – What migration source should be used for this migration when it is run (i.e. where am I migrating my content from?)
3. Destination – The destination for the migration (i.e. where am I migrating my content to?)
4. Field Mappings – The mappings from Source -> Destination
   1. Processors – The processing of the source data so that it can be consumed by the destination

Let’s see an example:

Stay tuned for our next blog post in our migration series on custom processors. In this post, we will dive into what it takes to create a custom processor for a WordPress to Drupal migration.

Would you like help to create a more detailed plan for migrating your website to Drupal 8?

Contact Us – We would be happy to help!

B2B website design that focuses on the user experience will continue to be a top priority for brands who thought UX was only for consumer and e-commerce sites. In a recent blog post, we offered some of the best practices for developing an effective user experience on a business-oriented website. In this post, we will explore some additional best practices for the B2B website design that puts the user first in its architecture.

Write the way your targets think.  When potential buyers visit your website, they will have a level of knowledge that most often is not as deep as you. Write content for who they think and eliminate jargon or text that won’t keep their attention. Use language, phrases, and concepts that are more likely to be familiar to them.

Make sure the text you include on your site appears in a logical order, but it should be natural as well. Confer with key customers and ask them to describe what your solution, services or products mean to them. What problems do they solve, and what were their pain points before working with you?

Let the buyer maintain control. Eliminate designs that override how a prospect might want to interact with the website. Autoplay videos, which have become ubiquitous across social media platforms and many news websites, can frustrate visitors who view these are a nuisance.

Don’t assume what the visitors want to do; let them play the video only if they want to. It should supplement, not be a substitution for, good content that is in text on the page.

Automatic carousels, once a common feature on many high-end websites, have also lost their allure, for the simple reason that they don’t work. Besides the fact that motion in carousels is distracting and rarely timed at the right intervals, it doesn’t present key messages to the visitor where they will be certain to see all of them. Layer information for your website in a way that makes it easy for your buyers to discover and explore instead of using an element that is less effective.

See how Bluetext can help your brand deliver an effective user experience.

User experience and personalization was the top trend for website development, and it will continue to be for 2018. Designing and executing the best architecture for a website engagement and conversion, while offering the right content at the right time to improve SEO and move prospects through the sales funnel, needs to be every marketing executive’s top priority. It remains a process of emotional transformation for many organizations, as top executives push still need to be convinced that creative design alone isn’t going to make their website the business tool that it needs to be.

With that in mind, here are our top tips for creating websites with user design as the first and foremost priority:

1. Personas are evolving. It’s easy to look at personas as a type of user who fits into certain common demographic categories. In the political arena, for example, a typical persona might be the “soccer mom,” shorthand for suburban mothers in the 30-45 age range whose main concerns are focused on their children. That makes sense for political purposes, but it gives little insight into how people actually engage with a website. We are recommending grouping personas into categories according to what they want to do on the site. Is it browsing, comparison shopping, or looking for specific content in order to make a decision. Recognizing these groupings offers more useful insights about what they want from their experience, and how best to deliver that content when they want it.
2. Less is more. It’s easy to clutter up a website with tons of promo boxes and fly-out menus. But the goal is to make it easy for visitors to find what they are looking for and take the actions that we want them to take. Instead, design the home and landing pages to reduce the tasks required of users to the bare minimum. Make it simple, and get rid of all the clutter that doesn’t add value or that serves as a distraction.
3. Design the user experience. Remember that designers are always working on large monitors with the best resolution. Unfortunately, most users are on laptops, tablets or mobile devices. User design for that reality shouldn’t be an afterthought. Visual hierarchy, spacing, content grouping, positioning, and size should be solved in the wireframe process before a visual designer is passed the assignment.
4. Take a field trip. There’s an old adage in real estate that says the more houses a homebuyer visits, the more likely they are to know the one they want when they see it. That’s why one of the early steps in our design process is an extensive virtual field trip to explore design elements in scores of websites across multiple industries. The idea is to show the client team the wide range of user designs that are out there on the web and to react to the design elements and functionality in multiple settings. We watch their faces closely during this exercise to see what they respond to, and to give them the confidence of knowing it when they see it.
5. It’s all about the user. It’s easy to gravitate to what you like for the website based on your own preferences. But it’s not about you, it’s about your customer and the user experience. While tempting to select design elements with your own preferences and tastes in mind, that won’t help engage your target audiences if they have a whole different set of preferences and needs. Always remember that it’s about what users want to do. Our job is to help them to get the content and take the actions they want in the easiest and most intuitive way possible.

See how Bluetext can help design a website with a great user experience. 

Many companies turn to Bluetext for a rebrand to increase visibility and market share, to better compete against other major challengers, and to enter new markets with a compelling message. In the case of some of our clients, the goal is to launch their product or service into the market with a look and feel that will attract attention and result in an acquisition. It’s always gratifying when our work pays off for our clients.

So we like to brag just a little when our rebrand clients succeed in a transaction that takes them to the next level. That’s the case with NetWatcher, a mid-market cyber-security service, that was just acquired by Qualsys, a cloud security provider that has been making a lot of noise in the market.

Our client came to us two years with a service that presented a new approach to the mid-market cyber challenge facing many medium-sized businesses: How to protect against threats such as weak passwords, unsecured assets, unsafe employee behavior, and outdated software that leave their networks vulnerable to attack. Their solution was a network appliance that monitors traffic inside the firewalls for anomalies that could spell trouble.

As the main focus of the rebrand, Bluetext developed a brand look and feel and name – NetWatcher – to reach the large mid-market audience the company was targeting for growth. We designed and built a new website designed to help customers and MSPs – managed service providers who are key channel partners for the business – understand the benefits of the solution to their organizations. And we launched this new brand at the MSP World Conference in Las Vegas. During the awards portion of the conference, NetWatcher was honored with the “Best in Show” award for its innovative and promising solution designed specifically to address the security needs of small and medium-size businesses.

Congratulations to the NetWatcher team for building a successful new brand in the crowded cybersecurity space, and for achieving your goal of an acquisition by a major player, taking your solution to an even larger audience. Bluetext is proud to have been a part of your success.

Looking to rebrand so you can rise to the next level? Learn how Bluetext can help.

Are you still on Drupal 6?

Whether you operate a blog, a small business page, or a large corporate website, if you are still operating on Drupal 6 it is past time for you to consider upgrading your operations. Drupal 6 officially reached End-of-Life on February 24th, 2016. Since then, the Drupal community has largely abandoned support for this version of Drupal.

Why does this impact me?

Anyone running their business on a Drupal 6 version should be concerned because the Drupal community has moved on. As an open source platform, the vitality of Drupal depends on contributors adding new components, modules, features and more. When the community moves on to new versions of Drupal, the older versions are no longer receiving the care and attention required to maintain modern content platforms.

By not adopting Drupal 8, you no longer have the community actively working on modules, bugfixes, improvements, and most importantly, security updates and improvements. The Security team is no longer providing Advisory updates for Drupal 6, and the majority of modules are no longer supported by the maintainers. The bottom line? If you are still operating on an old version of Drupal, you are exposing your site to unnecessary security risk.

Uh oh…so how do I make the switch to Drupal 8?

It’s easy! Upgrading your Drupal site using a migration approach. The first step is to decide how you want to handle your upgrade. Use these questions to help you get started:

1. Am I happy with how my website functions and how it looks?
2. Does my website/brand need a refresh or update?
3. Do I want to refresh my content as part of this upgrade?
4. What are the key functions that my website needs to perform?

Based on your answers to the questions above, you will likely fall into one of two categories: Lift & Shift or Website Rebuild.

Lift & Shift: As is migrations

Drupal 8 has made significant strides to make the upgrade process from Drupal 6 to Drupal 8 as smooth as possible. Mike Ryan and others have made a huge impact in this space, rewriting the migrate module from the ground up and including it in the Drupal 8 core. The fact that this was added as a Drupal core initiative speaks volumes of the importance that has been placed on this by the community.

If your site is mainly brochureware, the upgrade process from Drupal 6 to Drupal 8 should be quick and relatively painless. The new migrate module not only migrates content, but it will also migrate data structures through a configuration migration tool. Wait, what? I can migrate my content types and taxonomy terms so that I don’t need to rebuild them!? The answer is YES! (…with some caveats of course).

For more information about the Drupal 8 migrate initiatives and upgrade documentation, check out the “Upgrading from Drupal 6 or 7 to Drupal 8” section on Drupal.org.

Website Refresh: Rebuild Content, UI and UX

So, I don’t have a basic brochureware site but I really need to refresh my brand. Can I still use these tools to take some of the load off of my shoulders? The answer is yes, but in a more limited fashion.

Depending on the size of your website, utilizing the D6 to D8 migration tools may still save you time and money. This will ultimately depend on how significant the changes to your information architecture and content will be.

If you have a large number of pages (let’s say >1000) and some percentage of these pages will remain relatively in-tact from an information architecture perspective (Blogs, Resources, Press), then you will likely still benefit from investing time in migration scripts.

If you are planning to refresh/rewrite all of your content AND provide a new UI/UX on your website, the effort to create a migration script may be higher than handling the process manually.

So, how do I get started?

If you are planning to move forward with an upgrade, it will be useful to check out the following links before you start:

• Upgrading from Drupal 6 or 7 to Drupal 8
• Upgrade using Drush
• Known Issues when migrating from Drupal 6 or 7 to Drupal 8

While the idea of being able to be generic enough to meet a wide variety of peoples needs, it is unlikely that your migration to Drupal 8 will be handled out-of-the-box. In the likely case that you will need to customize, here are some more useful links:

• Migrate Process Overview (Processor Plugins)
• Webinar – Migrating to Drupal 8
• Carlyle Example Migrate Project

Would you like help creating a more detailed plan for migrating your website to Drupal 8? Contact Us – We would be happy to help!