Ladies know that getting the perfect look is difficult, and what seems like the right combination one minute can seem completely wrong the next. When it comes to websites, that’s a rule that good developers know well too. When you want to change the look of your site, you don’t want it to take laborious weeks and buckets of money any more than you want to spend all day hunting through your closet for a clean shirt. But if your site’s functionality is hard-coded inside the theme, then every time you change the design, you might as well get yourself a whole new website—because that’s basically what you’re doing.

Of course, if redesigning the hard way were the only way, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. The efficient way to develop your site is to separate form from function, so that the one can be changed without disturbing the other. And, of course, Drupal can do that.

Drupal sits the look of the site—the theme layer—atop the functionality, enabling it to operate independently. With a good developer, those two segments can be created apart from each other, so that any change to the site’s theme need not disturb all the code written for its function and vice versa. If the site is made well from the start, a future facelift will be relatively quick and painless. You could even use multiple themes, like, say, different themes for different users, without affecting the nuts and bolts of the site beneath. Without those layers, forget quick and painless—any changes desired in the theme would require drastic overhauls of the entire site, which in turn mean higher expenses and harsher headaches.

The advantages of separating the theme layer don’t stop with faster redesigns, either. Done right, it can improve site performance. When the theme and the functionality are separated thus, they are also cached separately. This means that after the first time the theme is loaded, the entire site will load faster because the browser needs simply retrieve the theme layer, rather than regenerate it. Looking good does not have to mean sacrificing performance.

Separating the functions of a site from its appearance gives you better performance and higher flexibility, and Drupal can do that. All you need is a developer who’ll build it right from the very beginning—and that’s where we come in.

After all, who says getting a new look has to be hard?