We've finally converted our own web site to Drupal, and not a nanosecond too soon.

We hadn't discovered the power of Drupal until the Summer of 2008, but once we did we quickly adopted it as our CMS platform of choice, and in the months since have become super true believers.

There's nothing like getting a shiny new toy and then seeing a shinier one. You know how that goes. Well, just a few months after we had launched a major overhaul of a client's website, we finally got our hands on Drupal 6. My first thought was, "@#*!#, why didn't we discover this 6 months ago!"

After a few weeks spent on some learning curve, getting familiar with what Drupal is, what it does, and how simply—compared to the old way of doing things—it can be extended with so many great contributed modules, we simply couldn't ignore the fact that it would be the perfect approach to the outstanding items that had been set aside for our client's future wish list. Of course, the site we had just delivered was not a Drupal powered site, but we went ahead and created a "do-over" site in a development sandbox and duplicated all of the client's current live content, and then we kept it up to date by mirroring all of their additions. Then we got to work and added their wish list items, without having to re-invent any wheels.

There simply was no denying that, overall, the Content Management features alone would greatly simplify our client's needs and efforts to keep their site fresh and up to date, often with weekly additions and changes that, in order to save money on maintenance, they were determined to doing themselves, but being a small restaurant and retail business, they kept falling behind because they always had plenty of better things to do other than learning HTML.

In the end we decided it would be mutually beneficial — experience for us and new feature benefits for the them — if we offered to overhaul their website again, in Drupal, for the price of showing them how to use it. It really was a no-brainer for both of us.

The transition was very smooth, and it took only a little time and training to show our client how easy it was going to be for them to add fresh content whenever they got the urge.

But that's not even the best part. The best part is how Drupal kicked our search engine optimization efforts into overdrive. Using a number of contributed modules, including modules for Meta Tags and Sitemap generation, keyword optimization and updating site crawlers for discovery of new content becomes as routine as updating the content itself. In other words, all you do is update the content, the modules will handle the rest.

In the Spring of 2008, our client's original home grown web site had been operating for 5 years, but was still nearly invisible to Google, and about the only way anyone ever found them on the web was by searching them out by name — which of course means the searcher had to already know that much.

It's now one year later, and Google now has about 30 pages worth of cached links to our client's web site, including links to very fresh content that has only been up for a matter of days. Any web seeker in the North Carolina Inner Banks area who is seeking a good restaurant or some French Raclette or Royal Blue Stilton cheese will have no trouble at all finding what they're looking for at Wine & Words, in Belhaven, NC.

Meanwhile, while we've been working on getting more of our client's converted to using Drupal, we hadn't found the time to practice what we preach and take advantage of our own tools for our own use.

But now we're finally Drupal-ized, and that changes everything.