In Belgium, there is a large range of Drupal development: many Drupal companies can therefore be found via all kinds of overview sites. This is positive for customers and plays into the hands of avoiding a Vendor lock-in, one of the main advantages when considering our Drupal solutions.
Drupal companies in Belgium
How do I recognise a good Drupal company?
But how do you know whether a company is reliable and whether there is sufficient knowledge in that company? After all, there are many players on the market and not all companies have enough seniority on board to bring some Drupal projects to a successful conclusion.
Contribution to Drupal
One of the biggest indicators of a company's Drupal expertise is the activity within the Drupal community. Drupal has been built by developers all over the world and in a good Drupal company you obviously have people who are actively building the future of Drupal themselves.
On Drupal.org you will find an official overview of Belgian Drupal companies. The ranking of these companies is based on the active contributions to Drupal by their employees. A higher ranking therefore means a closer involvement in the development of Drupal and the associated eco-system, and therefore the presence of extensive experience within such a company.
Number of Drupal experts
Drupal has a steep learning curve. So you have quite a bit of Drupal experience on board to bring projects to a successful conclusion. So building up knowledge and keeping it on board is very important for a Drupal agency. A company often has its own page with a presentation of its team, but on Drupal.org you also get an overview of the people who work there from each company. You can also see how long those people have been active with Drupal.
The Drupal portfolio
The Drupal projects that have already been carried out are, of course, also an important indicator. On most portfolios you will see presentations of finished projects, but each project has its own specific characteristics: one Drupal site is not the other. If you want to evaluate whether a website has been set up properly and is therefore structurally sound, it is best to ask yourself a few questions:
How many custom modules have been used and what are they for? Have they been written using Drupal APIs correctly and do they follow Drupal's coding guidelines? This is a good test to determine whether a Drupal agency is able to deliver the best possible combination of community modules and custom modules.
How fast do the web pages load? A Drupal website should be the best possible combination of modules and configuration, leading to a high-performance whole. Via Google Pagespeed insights, you can quickly test whether a website meets the most elementary performance requirements. You have to take this test with a grain of salt for Drupal websites, but scores below 40% can still be considered poorly built websites.
