By infoesse on

Hi all

I just finished preparing a complete rebuild of a directory using drupal. The site is for professionals and is not yet public (the old site is public). I used drupal because it was flexible (for multiple editors), had the modules I wanted, it was open source and robust. Previously the site was in vanilla html. I tried Joomla (too heavy on graphics and not a good fit for me) and seriously considered plone at one point (zope servers are rare in my price range). The site is at:

http://infoessentials.com/info/

I've restricted most of the bells and whistles in order to focus on the site content (it took months to check every link on every page and find suitable new links).

I wanted to show the site to the drupal community and look at any comments before launching the site.

I would appreciate any feedback, comments, or advice. I'd be particularly interested in the site's ease of use, any errors (especially broken links) and sites I've missed.

Thanks
Pete

⋅ Categories: Drupal 4.7.x

Comments

jlmeredith’s picture

jlmeredith
Location Denver, CO
commented

Here are some of my thoughts:

1) Default the Google Search to your site rather than Google.

2) Large White space in the header is distracting.

3) Explanation of the site purpose is needed. If I hit this site while doing a search I would close it immediately. It looks and feels like a link farm.

4) You may want to consider moving the navigation menu up and using something like block bar for collapsing the menu. http://drupal.org/node/36373

5) The colors used (mainly in the links) are all over the place. You should consider building a complimentary color palette and pushing that through the site.

6) When viewing a taxonomy term list such as http://infoessentials.com/info/taxonomy/term/10 , The post info line is almost sitting on top of the title for the next node. Need some margin on the bottom of the post details area would be good.

Hope those help.

themacgeek
Finding Balance In A World Full of Marbles
http://themacgeek.com

--
Jamie Meredith

infoesse’s picture

infoesse commented

Thanks

Much appreciated. I'll see what I can do to address these.

infoesse’s picture

infoesse commented

The http://infoessentials.com site is now live using Drupal 4.7. I found these modules particularly useful:

  • the 'views' module, http://drupal.org/project/views for recent and popular entry blocks
  • the 'tinymce' module, http://drupal.org/project/tinymce for editing and
  • the 'nodewords' module, http://drupal.org/project/nodewords for metatags.

    • Thanks to all the module developers for all their hard work.

    I used a link checker (Xenu link sleuth - http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html) to check for broken links (I have thousands of links and I am fairly selective) as I could not find a module that did this. Could you contact me through my profile here or through the contact form on http://infoessentials.com if you can think of a link checker module for Drupal. There are a number of link modules around but they don't seem to be link checkers.

    Also, thanks for your feedback on usability, now the site is more userfriendly (and the feedback has been good).

    Thanks
    Pete