Upgrading vs Upcycling - How to stay ahead of the curve

I presented about my concept of Upcycling at DrupalCon Seattle.

A full rebuild of a website can be a time and money consuming process. This session is about exploring different approaches between upgrading and upcycling existing websites. To keep up with online trends, technical debt, or just to be able to refresh their appearance, websites often get rebuilt between every 3 to 6 years. We have helped helped many clients transition from their legacy web systems onto Drupal 8 but not everyone is ready to do the move all at once. If you find yourself in the situation of having a well established web system that has seen a few years already, but you aren’t ready to spend the time and money to do a full rebuild, upcycling might be the answer. Upcycling allows website owners bring improvements to their websites continuously without the need to wait for a full rebuild. It reduces time to market and risk and are able to leverage up-to-date technology by upcycling individual parts of the website. Upcycling can enable you to:

• Get the most out of your existing website infrastructure
• Benefit from user experience, design or frontend performance improvements without the need to wait for a big relaunch
• Improve the editorial experience
• Implement your investments as quickly as possible
• Use Drupal 8 features

This incremental approach allows us refresh parts of the existing website and make it ready for a later transition or into an existing website infrastructure or build decoupled parts of it in Drupal 8.

This session is intended especially for those in architect & client-facing roles but basically for anyone who would like to:

• Weigh the pros and cons of Upgrading vs. Upcycling
• Leverage decoupled technology early on
• Improve an existing Drupal 7 site
• Migrate to Drupal 8
• Improve an existing Drupal 8 site