Creating an Awesome Admin Experience

As website developers working in a Content Management System like Drupal, we are poised with 2 main challenges:

1. How can we get the project to work well on the front-end
2. How can we get the project to work well on the back-end

As front end designers, we are excited at the opportunity to sharpen our Photoshop and Illustrator skills. We map out wireframes with delightful annotations, create a multitude of color pallet options, optimize our SVG graphics, perfect our browser animations and obsess over subtle bits of creativity.

As back end developers, we make sure we pre-process our variables, hook into every possible core api function, fret over public class constructions and somehow optimize our caching methods.

It's a lot to juggle - I know!

That being said, let's focus our attention on one more challenge, probably the most important and often times overlooked facet of the overall website experience - the website administration.

The client just paid good money for their new website, you are ready to hand over the product only to tell them, "oh by the way, here is a binder with instructions I created for you to understand how this thing actually works. Please give this manual to your IT staff so they can decipher it and hopefully not screw it up." Okay — okay — so that was a bit overboard, but let's take a look at how we can create an awesome admin experience for the client and really WOW them on your next Drupal project.