What is Drupal?

Drupal is an open-source content management system. It's certainly not the only one out there, and you could certainly argue that others are a better fit for certain kinds of projects, but Drupal works really well for small-to-medium businesses and organizations, for several major reasons.

Separating content from presentation: This is a goal for most site developers, but Drupal enforces it pretty elegantly. All the visual design elements of your site are contained within a "theme." The content is independent of the look and feel elements, and if your site is well-designed, it's entirely possible to change the theme completely -- acquire a completely new look and feel -- without modifying a single item of content. So you can give your site a "facelift," as people love to say, without spending months recoding. And when you're creating content, you don't have to worry about breaking the page layout.

Distributed content creation: Basically, that's a jargon-y way to say that many people within your organization can contribute content independently of each other. We can define different roles for your product marketing managers, your assistant marketing director, and the guy in product development who wants to run a blog. And more sophisticated workflows can exist, too: like, each of these roles gets to create content, but it's not published until it's approved by legal, then marketing. And none of them have to know HTML!

Smart content filters: When you add a new product, you shouldn't have to remember the six different spots on your Web site that need to link to that product. When content is properly classified and described, a good CMS-backed site will automatically insert references to that content in the right places.

Modular feature set: This is a unique strength to Drupal -- almost anything you're going to want to do on your Web site has been done before, at least to some degree. If you want to add slideshows of images, an online storefront, parametric search, a forum, an extranet -- all that stuff has already been written. Sure, it needs to be configured and tweaked a bit to fit your specific situation, but the days of "from scratch" custom development of all these features is over. There's a huge and active community of generous developers who provide all this functionality absolutely free.