Archive for the ‘Web Design’ Category

When people appraise a website, they pay attention to different aspects of its quality. To some people it’s important that the site uses Web 2.0 techniques or is interactive; others are indifferent to Web 2.0 gimmicks, but appreciate beautiful, sophisticated graphics that indicate that the creator of the website is handy with Photoshop. Copywriters will look at the quality of the copy – search engine optimisers at the quality of the SEO – general webmasters at the source code. Everyone – especially the first-time visitors – will expect good usability; it annoys when you have to think hard to find your way around the site.

Of course, the importance of these criteria depend highly on the purpose of the site itself. Social networks have to be Web 2.0 by definition; for a purely informational website it’s less important, but the quality of the copy (informativeness, grammar, easiness) becomes top priority. Websites dedicated to design, arts and beauty have to be beautiful; websites talking about accessibility, accessible.

Personally, I pay attention to all the criteria above, though unnecessary animation or AJAX used just for the sake of it on an informational website are more likely to annoy me than to win extra points. Being a web perfectionist, I always look at the code – and cringe if tables are used for controlling the layout. But I know that many visitors to the website won’t even know what I’m talking about. WE have to define our priorities clearly before we agree with our webmaster on the future site’s specifications – and consider everything, including the costs.

What I would like to ask the readers is, what do you look at before you decide whether the website you’ve arrived at is good or bad?

If you are considering creation of a website and trying to choose one of the content management systems available for free, Drupal is definitely an option to consider. Having worked with it for about two years and developed several websites (usually within a team, but also once or twice without any help), I can safely recommend it to you if you are looking for a website larger than five pages and/or more complicated than just a blog (for a simple blog WordPress is, without a doubt, the best solution).

What can Drupal do for you?

Drupal gives you a flexible, easy-to-learn and highly configurable site administration interface, with which you can control nearly everything. It supports search engine friendly URLs and never introduces any obstacles for search engine spiders trying to access and index your site (too many CMS’s do). It gives your webmaster (or you, if you are DIY’ing your website) full control over the code. It also supports blocks (small pieces of code you can insert into any area of your template – header, content, footer, right or left column, you name it) – some of those blocks are standard and come with the system, but you can create your own. Very convenient – I’ve used them a lot.

Drupal comes with a set of modules, which you can enable or disable depending on what functionality your website needs, including blog and forum module. Some of them come by default with the standard installation package; there are also a lot of additional modules, which you can download and install onto your system. If you have an experienced Drupal programmer on staff – or are about to hire such a person for the project – you can have bespoke modules developed using Drupal API and adjusted to meet your needs.

If you need an e-commerce website, Drupal has advanced solutions for it too, and a good programmer can enhance it greatly to customise the functionality of your e-shop. I have participated in such a project: the result was amazing.

Using some CSS and very little editing to templates, an experienced web designer can customise the look and feel of your website: there are practically no restrictions to it. For SEO there is yet another module available, which, once installed, enables individual meta tags for every page. And even if you don’t know any HTML, with Drupal you will soon learn how to add new pages with content all by yourself.

What else?

If you would like to have a forum and a blog, you can enable the necessary modules in one click, and then create as many categories and subcategories as you like. There are additional modules available too – e.g. for tag clouds and other blog-related functionality you might need. Drupal’s website hosts a large community where you can find answers you any “how to” questions that may arise in connection with setting up and customising your site. If you need additional functionality, you can post your request to Drupal developers: they are paying attention to their users’ desires and continuously working on new additions: that’s why new versions of the system are released so often. Security holes get found and fixed very quickly too.

I won’t say that Drupal is perfect: no software is. But it’s definitely very good, and the chances are it will satisfy any needs you have in connection with your web presence. In experienced hands Drupal-based websites become feature-rich and professionally looking.

Just make sure you have a professional to do the job – but this is true regardless of your choice of a CMS. Another important thing about Drupal: it’s completely free.