How to Create Branding Consistency with Drupal Multisite
Drupal is a powerful content management system used by many of the world's top brands. When you maintain more than one Drupal site you can use a multisite design to save time and money. It also helps ensure that your branding is consistent across all of your sites.
Let's say you're a business with multiple products, each with its own site. Maybe your team manages sites for multiple departments. If so, then configuring your Drupal install for multiple sites is a great fit for you.
Imagine simplifying the management of dozens of unique Drupal websites that share both common functionality and branding.
Storing common design features in one place improves your branding power across your sites. Use a Drupal multisite setup to centralize the design, user accounts, and site components across all of your digital assets. With everything in one place, you can be sure that your branding is uniform. As an added bonus, updates can be easily synced across all websites.
A multisite design can be configured in many ways.
The two main ways you can use it are:
- via a shared database; or
- via a combination of shared and separate databases.
Both options typically share a common Drupal core and a modules code base. Choose your best option based on how much your sites have in common.
In addition, you will have to decide how you want each of your site urls to appear. For example, your sites can appear totally independent, by each using a unique name like "www.yourname.com". Maybe you want one of the site urls to look related to the others as a subdomain, like "subname1.yourname.com". Another option is that you may want to serve your site inside a website directory as part of an existing site, like "www.yourname.com/site1directory". Based on your needs, you can customize each of your sites to be accessed and displayed to your users as you see fit.
You still may be wondering if Drupal multisite is for you.
Ask yourself the following questions:
- Do you share admin or user accounts across your websites?
- Do your sites have shared user accounts with similar roles?
- Do the sites share similar functions?
- Do the pages on your sites have similar design layouts?
- Do the pages on your sites have similar components?
- Do the pages on your sites have similar content?
- Do your sites share hosting and design teams?
If you answered yes to 2 or more of the questions, then Drupal's multisite option may be a great solution for you.
Ready to start? Write down the answers to the questions above and contact us today for a free consultation. Click on: contact us for more info.
For the official "How To", see Drupal.org at: https://www.drupal.org/documentation/install/multi-site and then contact us for guidance.