Drupal development & support from the engineer who knows your site

The work that makes a site better rather than merely current:

• Custom module development. Functionality your site needs and Drupal does not provide, built as a proper module rather than bolted on.
• New features. Things the original build did not cover, or that the organisation has grown into since.
• Third-party integrations. CRMs, payment gateways and APIs, connected so the data flows both ways and keeps flowing.
• Theme and front-end development. Design changes, new page layouts, and the front-end work that goes with them.
• Content architecture. Content types, fields and taxonomies reworked when the shape of the site no longer matches the shape of the content.
• Search improvements. Search API and Solr, configured so that people find what they came for.
• Performance engineering. Caching, queries and front-end weight — from someone who also manages the server it runs on.
• Accessibility improvements. Fixing what an audit found, or getting ahead of one.
• Drupal version upgrades. Drupal 10 to 11 and the module work that comes with it. Much less involved than a Drupal 7 migration, and worth staying on top of.

You get the same quality of development you would expect from an agency, from someone who knows your codebase inside out, at a fraction of the cost.

Two ways to work together, and the right one depends on how much your site needs:

Monthly retainer. An agreed number of development hours each month, with maintenance included. Predictable cost, and time set aside for your site whether or not anything goes wrong.

Pay as you go. For lighter needs — work quoted and done as it comes up, with no monthly commitment.

Either way, you deal directly with the person who writes the code, manages the server, and fixes the bug. There is no account manager in between, and nobody hands your project to a junior once it is sold.

Organisations whose site was built by an agency. The build was signed off, the retainer was expensive or ran out, and the site now needs someone to maintain it, improve it, and keep building on it.

Organisations whose developer has moved on. Somebody looked after the site and no longer does. Picking up an unfamiliar codebase is normal work for me, and the first thing I do is find out what is actually there.

I am Nathan Simmonds, a software engineer and Drupal specialist based in Bristol with over 15 years of Drupal experience.

I spent seven years at a top-20 UK digital agency working on projects for The Wildlife Trusts, Anthony Nolan, Parkinson's UK and the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries. Since going independent I have worked with clients including RELX, the FTSE 100 publishing and analytics group, and Cohesion, whose product was later acquired by Acquia. I am a member of the Drupal Association — drupal.org/u/nathansimmonds.

I also run the infrastructure. If your site needs a server change, a caching layer or a deployment pipeline, that is the same conversation rather than a different supplier.