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By ardee-1 on
OK, say you've created a nice Drupal-based site. It has a handsome design and a lot of nice features. You've used a few third-party modules to gain functionality, plus you've written some code of your own (in your theme and maybe even in a custom module). The site has ads on it and, thanks to traffic driven by various means (including SEO), has become profitable over time.
Some day, you will want or need to sell that site. Many tens of thousands of profitable sites are bought and sold every year.
The number of people "out there" who are willing to buy profitable sites is huge. But here's the problem: the number of people willing or able to take over and manage a Drupal-based site is a lot smaller. There's a significant learning curve that you, the developer, have scaled but most can't or won't.
What, if anything, should a Drupal-based site developer do to make a site more readily sellable to non-Drupal-savvy buyers?
Has anybody implemented a CMS-within-a-CMS under Drupal? I.e., a very simple, stripped down CMS that essentially runs within Drupal?
(This is not just a hypothetical question, as I've developed a Drupal-based site and feel that Drupal's complexity makes it difficult to sell. Plus, I want to develop several more sites and am thinking of abandoning Drupal for the same reason.)
Comments appreciated!
Comments
Wide open
Your question is so wide open to make you seem like a troll.
If you are seriously looking for an answer you might want to state what it is about Drupal that makes it hard to sell sites built with it.
Not sure how my question
Not sure how my question could be construed as a troll. Having spent hundreds of hours building a site in Drupal, I find that it's too complex to handle for 98% of the folks who might otherwise buy it. I'd like to use Drupal for future sites, but I need to understand what to do differently so that people who mainly know basic HTML/CSS (not PHP and minimal JavaScript at most) can readily take over the site.
Another person answered my post by suggesting dramatically limiting the options available in the Admin UI. That's the sort of thing I was thinking of, but I'm not sure how to do that. Feedback in that area would be wonderful.
The biggest and most
The biggest and most important thing that has allowed me to sell sites is a very very idiot proof Admin UI, you need to make something that is like Fisher Price My First Admin UI, even having "Create Content" and "Content Management" in two spots gets me frustrating e-mails in my inbox. Drupal has so much to offer that it can be good for your client if you limit all the options it can belch onto the screen at once, also make sure your roles make sense, people that write content shouldn't see anything that doesn't have to do with creating and publishing content, make sure your selling sound user and business rules along with your website so its not just going to cause a crap storm at their business. And its never a bad idea to sell a maintenance plan for X months to get the company on its feet and familiar with the system.
Drupal is a kinda hard core industrial solution for websites, although it may not make sense to utilize something of its complexity you really cant justify selling something that can't be taken to the next level otherwise you are selling content trapped in a system that will require money to migrate, just thoughts.
leotemp,
leotemp,
Thanks for the helpful post! May I ask by what methods you idiot-proof the Admin UI?
What you've done sounds exactly like what I ought to do. Do you use any special modules or write your own code to achieve this?
More detail on just how you limit options would be incredibly useful to me and I bet to others as well! Thank you!