When it comes to choosing the right content management system (CMS), every business has unique needs and wants. Biotech companies in particular, benefit from a specific feature set in the management and display of their site. Choosing the right fit in a CMS tool from all of the solutions currently on the market can be confusing, and we're here to help!
What Do Biotech Companies Need Most in a Website?
- Promote the brand while simultaneously raising awareness for research/causes, as well as products. Biotech companies don't have just a product to sell. What about the problems that its products are meant to solve? Everything from cures to diseases to making everyday life easier are what these companies want to be known for and have their brand associated with. Building up that brand and trust is integral and websites provide the first impression of the brand. A site with a compelling voice, a professional visual style, and a top-notch user experience, is crucial to having your product and research be taken seriously.
- Offer a unique user experience that is reflective of the groundbreaking research the company is doing. The site needs to be both functional and aesthetically pleasing, customized to fit the tone and purpose of your site and company. The website can be media-rich or simple, but the design needs to reflect your company's accomplishments and be synonymous with the products and research that you are focused on.
- Attracting and informing investors. The way a website looks and functions is also one of the first things that a potential investor will notice. There should be a constantly updating section of the website that has your company's news, public relations information, updates on any IPOs, and investor relations documents such as annual reports and SEC filings if the company is already public.
- Customized e-commerce structured for handling complex products. Biotech products contain complex SKUs, and cellular products have complicated interdependent relationships. A simple inventory management setup found in any given e-commerce platform isn't going to translate well to biotech. Allow yourself the ability to implement a custom e-commerce structure that gives you the power to display and sell your products in sensical and user-friendly ways.
- Account-based e-commerce solutions. In addition to having an e-commerce solution in place for consumers, there should also be account-based e-commerce for wholesale and B2B purchasers that is just as seamless to use. Being able to control specific permissions and rights is crucial when you're dealing with multiple types of purchaser, and gives you the power to display only what you want to for each type of user.
- FDA Regulation Compliance. Additionally, biotech websites must be in compliance with content regulations while also being easily searchable using complex scientific terms. Product and meta descriptions need to be compliant with the FDA and other regulatory agencies in terms of what they can and cannot include. A robust CMS solution that is easily customizable will make this requirement much easier to meet.
Given the complex nature of the research being done, the products being sold, and the depth and breadth of audience being addressed, biotech companies require a more robust CMS than that of a typical science or retail website. In order to ensure smooth content and product management as your website begins to scale, it is important to ensure that your new website is built with the right back-end system.
Why Drupal is the Ideal CMS for Biotech
There are several different CMS solutions that will work just fine for a biotech site. However, Drupal is the absolute best solution for several reasons.
- Drupal offers more control over how information is displayed. This is particularly important for extremely-regulated products where the technical specs will be of utmost importance to regulators and wholesale clients, but not to consumers who are looking for the same information in laymen's terms. There are configurable, unassuming content types that are capable of handling and displaying complex sets of information that can be both searchable and also displayed differently on the consumer e-commerce portal than the wholesale one.
- Content permissions are complex. Not only does Drupal allow you to make the display of information to different types of users more convenient, it also allows you to ensure that sensitive information will only be available to those eyes which are authorized to see it. Special access pages that should only be visible to investors or partner organizations, for example, can be securely locked down, and easily revealed to only very specific users.
- Drupal's e-commerce functionalities are robust & fully customizable. You have the choice to easily augment the basic e-commerce function or you can have a completely custom flow built from the ground up, depending on whichever best complements your product offerings and complexity. Specifically with the relationships that different cellular products have with one another and the information that needs to be included as per regulations, customizable e-commerce is one of the most crucial features that biotech companies need to look for in a CMS.
- Drupal is highly customizable in all aspects. The sky is the limit as far as what you can build on your website using Drupal. Being a headless CMS, Drupal is easy for site owners to self-manage and keep content management separate from the development aspects and incredibly scalable. It is so easy to add another segment to the website if necessary without having to rebuild the site all over again.
- Last but certainly not least, Drupal offers the best enterprise-level security on the market. Keeping customer information safe is made simple with Drupal: even whitehouse.gov was built using it, so you have peace of mind that the site is completely secure.
With the need for keeping customers, regulators, and potential investors up to date while simultaneously providing a fantastic and user-friendly web experience, and also providing a secure and steady e-commerce platform with an often hugely complex inventory- choosing and successfully executing on a CMS solution for your biotech company can be a bit more difficult than the average content management tool application.
Fortunately, Drupal simplifies the process as much as possible and offers the ideal solution for creating a website that looks and functions well for all aspects necessary to run a well-functioning and designed biotech site. Customization and security are among the most important functionalities needed, where the content displayed can be customized depending on who is viewing it, all without having to compromise on SEO.
Drupal is the most efficient CMS to handle the intricate backend requirements that come with biotech sites as well as allow for easy additions to your site without having to rebuild from the ground up. In an industry that needs to be on top of constantly occurring advances in product development and research, this type of scalability is very important when choosing a CMS. While there are other solutions on the market, Drupal is absolutely the best CMS you can work with as a biotech company.
