By ThaboGoodDogs on

Client of a friend of a friend wants the site to look like his current flash bases cheapy template site: http://spanish-institute.org/ - We started off with a Marinelli based site and he hated it. So please, can someone point me to a pay or free them that looks like this flash template. Also I'm curious as to what you think is more professional looking:

Current site:http://spanish-institute.org/
Or this: http://spanish.jacana.net/ (site not yet complete but he hates it and informed me others have comment on how it sucks too)

(On a professional note, client must like the template even if I think their taste is questionable and yes, the one I created is OK but the menus suck and don't work well on IE at all)

Thanks
ANON ;)

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

WorldFallz’s picture

WorldFallz commented

I'm not exactly sure what you're asking, but there's no reason you can't theme a drupal site to look like the flash version the client likes. The animation may not function exactly the same, but the rest should be no problem.

ThaboGoodDogs’s picture

ThaboGoodDogs commented

Themeing is an option but not really in the budget, we agreed to choose a pre built free theme. This is also a multi language site too so budget is a little tight. I need a free or $50 theme that looks like his current site with those lovely round rectangular buttons :) with the chrome effect on them and a carousel with moving picture (views carousel of jquery I assume)

WorldFallz’s picture

WorldFallz commented

ah ok.. sorry i don't know of any canned theme that looks like that but even so, if you do find one it's likely to be more than $50 for those features. All the commercial themes I've seen in the $50 range are very basic and often pretty ugly, lol.

Jeff Burnz’s picture

Jeff Burnz commented

Why don't you just re-use the flash and either edit the paths in the flash or change the paths in the Drupal site to match, which would probably be better since they are indexed in search engines already. Just embed the flash menus in the Drupal site, seems like a bit of a no-brainer.

Pimp your Drupal 8 Toolbar - make it badass.
Adaptivetheme - theming system for people who don't code.
nevets’s picture

nevets commented

As WorldFallz said you can do something close without any flash.

Start by considering the part with image, and button links as a region.

The red bar as the title of the page.

Part of the "trick" here is how to relate things and without knowing how the site is organized I am only to give a general suggestions based on a site I did.

So part 1 is organizing the site into sections, for a start I would consider each of the button links plus the home page as sections. This may only be a concept exercise, details depend on the site. The rest of this assumes sections you just need to know what the sections are. In my case I needed a way to determine what section I was in and used the context module to help out here, I defined one context per section. This works nicely because you can mix and match. Something may belong to a section based on path, taxonomy term, node type and more. There are other approaches to breaking the site into sections, context happens to be the one I used.

Next you need to be able to associate an image with a section. My first thought is each section seems to have associated page/node. If this is the case I would add a "header image" field to the content type, type: file, widget: image. Note we do not want the image to display with the node. I would also use the image cache module so I can get the two images sizes from the one.

Next I would add a menu that has the six links for the buttons and style so it looks like it does on the front page. (MENU)

I would use views slide show to make the set of images on the front page, add a block display (SLIDESHOW)

I would either use CCK block or a view to make a block that shows the image that belongs to the content and use the small image cache preset. (IMAGE)

You then need to add blocks for SLIDESHOW, IMAGE and MENU to the appropriate region, SLIDESHOW should be set to only show on the front page, IMAGE not on the front page.

Add css to control the layout as needed. You will want to constrain the width for the menu buttons on the front page so they end up in two columns.

For example, see http://www.prontoconnections.com. Notice how the header image and right sidebar change with the section of the site. As mentioned above I controlled this with the context module.