According to a report, if your website leaves a bad taste in customers' mouths, they're unlikely to return - and 88% of online consumers agree. Bad experiences usually occur due to an outdated website. If you operate such a site, it's time to upgrade to Drupal, a powerful CMS utilized by leading organizations and businesses worldwide. With Drupal migration services, you can upgrade your website's functionality, security, and overall performance, giving your business a competitive edge in today's digital world. But let's face it, migration is complex and requires technical expertise, planning, and execution.

At Evolving Web, we love sharing knowledge and empowering professionals to do what they do better, faster and with less resistance. Our Design Team often publishes useful resources to share their expertise, best practices, and insights from projects. We’ve rounded up our pick of the best ones below. 

We’ve rounded up these resources that’ll be useful for anyone on your team, from designers and content creators to strategists and web editors. 

Jump to the sections below:

1. How to Build a Design System
2. How to Leverage Your Platform’s Existing Design 
3. How to Optimize Images for Your Platform How to Make Your Images Accessible 

Big brands such as Airbnb, Shopify, and Atlassian use design systems to build better digital products. Image credit: Balázs Kétyi.

How to Build a Design System

Good if you want to:

• Improve consistency across assets
• Increase designers’ productivity 
• Free up time for complex, high-value tasks

Share with: 

• Designers
• UX strategists
• Project managers

Design systems go beyond asset collections and pattern libraries. They’re a set of standards, style guides, and components that increase efficiency and unify your brand experience. Think of it as combining a pantry with a cookbook: you don’t have to grow your food from scratch, nor do you need to experiment to make a meal. Instead, you have a collection of ready-to-go ingredients and tried-and-tested recipes. 

With a good design system, there’s no need to create and implement digital components from scratch. This allows your designers to focus on hierarchy, flow, and more complicated features. 

Read the guide: Building a Unified Design Language System.

The Design System Efficiency Curve. Productivity dips while a new design system is ramped up, but exceeds standard levels once the system is firmly in place. Credit: Callahan (2021.)

How to Leverage Your Platform’s Existing Design 

Good if you want to:

• Help colleagues leverage your platform’s design
• Promote UX best practices in your organization
• Reduce poor practices that break the design

Share with:

• Web editors
• Content creators
• Site admins

This guide is packed full of actionable tips to help you harness the full potential of your platform’s design and avoid common pitfalls that weaken the user experience. We explain how to create new pages using web components, develop compelling content, and use WYSIWYG for unique content needs. It’s a must-read for anyone who has admin permissions to update your site. 

Read the guide: Maintaining and Growing Your Digital Platform: UX/UI Considerations.

Images have a considerable impact on user experience. Everything from subject matter and tone to quality and composition will make an impression. Image credit: Fotis Fotopoulos. 

How to Optimize Images for Your Platform

Good if you want to:

• Optimize images to create a more valuable user experience
• Discover the best tools for sourcing and editing images
• Fix common issues such as blurriness and slow load-times

Share with:

• Designers 
• Web editors
• Content creators

Images are a powerful tool for enhancing the user experience, communicating your message, and connecting with audiences. The catch? They have to be spot-on. Done wrong, images can leave a poor impression, alienate users, and slow down your site. 

Read and share our guides:

• Picture Perfect: Selecting and Preparing Images for the Web
• Troubleshooting Blurry SVG Icons With Sketch and Adobe Illustrator

Accessibility standards apply to everything on the web, including PDFs and images. Image credit: CURVD®. 

How to Make Your Images and PDFs Accessible 

Good if you want to:

• Comply with accessibility standards and regulations
• Improve the user experience for people with disabilities
• Reach a broader audience with your content

Share with:

• Designers 
• Web editors
• Content creators

Your digital platform may have been designed to meet accessibility standards, but what about the content that you upload to it? The standards apply to images and PDFs too, but these assets often get overlooked. 

Learn about common accessibility issues, such as using the wrong PDF rendering tools and hiding important information in images. Our guides offer tips, tools, and examples to help you provide a more inclusive digital experience to all. 

Read and share our guides:

• How to Improve Accessibility on Your PDFs
• How to Use Alt Text and Accessible Images

Need Design Support on Your Next Project?

Evolving Web has spent more than 15 years empowering organizations to create deeper connections through valuable digital experiences. 

Our Design Team harnesses research, strategy, and innovation to unleash the creative potential in every project – no matter its size. We give you the confidence, wisdom, and support to take your digital platform to the next level.

Thank You For Making MidCamp 2023 A Success!

Thanks to everyone who helped make MidCamp great!

MidCamp 2023 is a wrap, and we couldn't have done it without all of you. Thanks to our volunteers, organizers, contributors, venue hosts, sponsors, speakers, and of course, attendees for making this year's camp a success. 

Replay the Fun

Find all of the sessions you missed, share your own session around, and spread the word. Videos can be watched on the MidCamp's YouTube channel or on drupal.tv.

Please note, professional image editing captions will be made available within two weeks.

Share Your Feedback

If you didn't fill it out during camp, please fill out our quick survey. We really value your feedback on any part of your camp experience, and our organizer team works hard to take as much of it as possible into account for next year.

Also, don’t forget to rate any sessions you attended (these can be found on each session node).

And now announcing... MidCamp 2024!

Mark your calendars: next year MidCamp will be late March 2024. The final dates will be coming soon.

Explore other Upcoming Drupal Events

Need more Drupal Events to tide you over to next year? Head over to the Drupal Community Events page!

One Last Thanks

MidCamp wouldn't be possible without our amazing sponsors. See the entire list of 2019 sponsors on the site, and think about adding your name to the list next year. (2020 prospectus coming soon!)

Keep the madness going all year by joining in the MidCamp Slack! We look forward to seeing you at MidCamp 2024.

Quant is excited to participate in Stanford WebCamp 2023 in May and talk about decoupled and static website solutions!

Did you know that more than two billion websites are powered by Drupal globally? This implies that a majority of sites have chosen Drupal as a companion in their continual process of business growth. With Drupal's upgrade and migration services, you can easily keep your website up-to-date and take advantage of the latest features and security updates. If you have also tapped into the enormous potential of the powerful CMS, you already know the magic it can create.

With its relentless pursuit to elevate itself further, Drupal persistently releases higher versions that are equipped with cutting-edge technology and top-notch features. Drupal 9 is the latest version of the CMS which boasts its innumerable ingenious tools and features capable of introducing quantum leaps in the world of content management.

At Debug Academy, we pride ourselves on having a team of highly skilled Acquia Certified Drupal developers. This wasn't a goal we set or a requirement for employment, yet every developer who has ever worked with us has become certified while working here at Debug Academy.

How did we do this? 

Many people and companies struggle to find the time and resources to prepare for the Acquia Certification exam. And not preparing is not an option. Even experienced Drupal developers can fail the exam without proper preparation. The Acquia Certification exams are notoriously difficult for several reasons: 

• They cover a vast range of Drupal knowledge, including topics that many developers are not familiar with

• They test on best practices, meaning there may be multiple technically correct answers, but only one that is the best practice approach

Security is one of the most important considerations for anyone creating a website. Any site needs a reliable security system with a minimum number of vulnerabilities. Personal data must also be protected. Sometimes it is too expensive to deal with the consequences of avoiding an unpleasant situation. 
It is not the purpose of this article to discuss how useful and convenient Drupal is. We'll talk about steps you can take to improve your security. And now, let's look at some Drupal features that will help you to avoid various threats and security vulnerabilities.