Knealing before the Drupal community begging for help.

The site is searchable by search engines so whoever made that evaluation is wrong and meta tags can be added quickly and easily through the installation of the nodewords module (Drupal 6). All drupal sites are relatively slow to load and yours is faster than average, based on the fact that I am in NZ and your site is probably hosted in Europe. Even the language section appears to work well, probably missing a lot of translations and needs to be configured to default to English.

You need to be careful now of not being suckered into people telling you that your site is a wreck, when it probably isn't. You need to do due diligence with all applicants until you find one that you trust.

It is difficult taking over a site, especially if documentation is thin. One reason why someone might suggest starting from scratch is that it can take a long time just to work how the site was built, let alone fix it.

The comment about 177 bad pieces of code, who knows. Sounds like a sales point from someone who wants to rebuild the site. Clearly there is a problem with the languages getting mixed.

I find the website slow. It looks like it is on shared hosting? Anyway it is on a VPS node (not dedicated), no APC, no Memcache, no sign of a reverse proxy (?), and maybe too many Apache modules loaded.

A Euro30k website should be hosted properly. The speed is not too bad considering (unless I am mistaken) that very little time, effort and money has been put into providing adequate hosting. Your Drupal company cannot be blamed for that, unless setting up and providing hosting was included in the services you paid them for.

Thanks for taking a look at our mess! I am the person within our company who has a IT background so I will explain what the biggest issues for us are at the moment.

1. There is a big problem with the way the translation system of the websites has been set up. We are active in 11 countries at the moment with a lot of different languages. Somehow they were not able to use the standard Drupal t() translation function and created one of their own. It seems that this has caused a lot of problems. Somebody can translate a piece of english text on their Bolivian website and we end up with Spanish text on our international site! What also happens is that people translate a certain page and after they save the whole page disappears, but not only for them but for every other country! The good news is that this doesn't happen all the time but it really needs to be fixed. Besides this we have a problem with all languages that run from right to left, go check out Israel for instance.

2. The site does not scale, this means that everybody with a resolution below 900px will have a far from optimal experience on our site. We can see in our Google Analytics that around 30% of our visitors is using a resolution below this number and they have a bounce rate of around 75% and the people that do stay are gone really quick. So we know that we are losing almost a third of our visitors because of the bad experience they have on our site.

3. There is a big problem with the Google indexation of our website. We are partly being found in English when you search but for most of the other languages there is a big problem since a lot of their content is not found within Google.

4. There is a enormous amount of PHP and javascript being used in our website because of the fact that the programmers had never worked with Drupal before this project. So they used their PHP skills to solve all kind of problems which could have been solved by just using Drupal modules. I have been told that because of this and the creation of their own translation system the loading times of our website are pretty bad. I think that the solution for this problem is pretty extensive so our focus for the moment lies in solving the first 3 problems.

If you have any questions please ask and I will happily try to answer them!

We really would like to keep our site as it is at the moment but fix the biggest problems. We are really happy with the design and just need somebody who feels he is able to help us out. Completely rebuilding the site is by no means an option for us at the moment since we have already spent a fortune on building the site so far. We are a small startup and don't have the resources to take a big hit like this. That's also the reason we turned to the community for advice.....

Again thanks for all your time.

Yeah, I would tend to agree with this assessment. They haven't even used the drupal menu system; it is all hard coded. While the developer appears to be competent, by not using drupal functionality you are missing out on one of the big benefits of drupal and that is that there are thousands of developers around the world who know it so you are not stuck with the person who originally wrote your site. In the case of this site, it looks as though you are tied to them, not only through the script but also through content!

I would tend to agree, based on the theme template and other things you have said, that this site would need to be redone from scratch.

Guys, thanks for you insight. I am the one who did a quick review of the code and gave GreenGraffiti the advice to fully rebuild the site in Drupal7. The current site hase some very big problems. I'll try to point out some of the current problems:

• They invented a custom translate function greengraffiti_t() in favor of t() based on nodes. Which does a node_load() on every translated string. Very heavy.
• Core content translation is not used to translate content. There is no link between translated nodes, so migration will be tough.
• Lots of SQL and business logics splattered around the theme. An example within node-partners.tpl.php:

<?php
$nodes	= array ();
$type	= ($node->field_generalpartnerpage[0]['value'] ? 'general' : '') . 'partner';
if ($node->field_generalpartnerpage[0]['value']) {
  $result	= db_query ('SELECT * FROM {node} n WHERE n.type = \'' . $type . '\' AND language = \'' . $language . '\' ORDER BY title ASC');
} else {
  $result	= db_query ('SELECT * FROM {node} n WHERE n.type = \'' . $type . '\' AND language = \'' . $language . '\' ORDER BY title ASC');
}
while ($row = db_fetch_object ($result)) {
  $row		= node_load ($row->nid);
  $nodes[]	= $row;
}
?>

• API functions are hardly used. A lot of custom functions or hard links to imagecache paths and themefiles.
• The code is completely undocumented and hard to read.

An example:

<?php
  $i['target_audience']++;
  if (!empty ($nodes['target_audience'][$i['target_audience']]->nid)) {
  $tid  = empty ($nodes['target_audience'][$i['target_audience']]->field_target_audience[0]['nid']) ? $nodes['target_audience'][$i['target_audience']]->field_target_audience_2[0]['nid'] : $nodes['target_audience'][$i['target_audience']]->field_target_audience[0]['nid'];
?>
<?php if (user_is_logged_in () && in_array ($user->language, array ($language->language))) { ?><form class="admin-homepage-settings" method="post"><?php echo custom_render_select('field_homepage_target_audience_'.$i['target_audience'], $_nodes['homepage_text'],$_homepage['field_homepage_target_audience_'.$i['target_audience']]); ?><input name="change_default" type="submit" value="Ok" /></form><?php } ?>
<article data-nid="<?php echo $nodes['target_audience'][$i['target_audience']]->nid ?>" class="animated-text title-3">
  <a href="<?php echo url ('node/' . $tid) ?>">
    <?php echo homepageText ($nodes['target_audience'][$i['target_audience']]->title, 25) ?>
  </a>
</article>

The menu is hard-coded and the code contains a lot of hard links to nodes. Example:

<ul class="links">
  <li>
    <span>&copy; <?php echo date ('Y'); ?> GreenGraffiti Holding B.V.</span>
  </li>
  <!--
  <li>
    <?php echo l ('Disclaimer', 'node/57'); ?>
  </li>
  <li>
    <?php echo l ('Privacy Statement', 'node/58'); ?>
  </li>
  -->
  <li>
    <?php echo l ('Sitemap', 'node/59'); ?>
  </li>
  <li>
    <?php echo l ('Contact', 'node/230'); ?>
  </li>
  <li class="yellowfizz">
    <a href="">Design &amp; Development by</a>
  </li>
</ul>

The '177 pieces of wrong code on the homepage' is based on a W3 validator scan (http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=www.greengraffiti.com&charset=%28detec...). 181 errors at the moment. Not good for SEO, as Google takes valid code into account as well.

Our conclusion is that it would be better to rebuild the site from scratch. And while you're doing that, make the switch to D7.
But given that the site is very original and fancy in its design this won't be an easy task. Some great (but hard) pages to build:

• http://greengraffiti.com/content/your-suggestions
• http://greengraffiti.com/content/history
• http://greengraffiti.com/content/team