By ldutson on

We just launched http://www.MaineBoats.com, the website for a specialty publication called Maine Boats, Homes and Harbors.

The site was a rebuild of an existing site, with a particular need for a more search-friendly platform.

The site uses SlideshowPro for some of the multimedia, as well as OpenAds. We used siFr for certain elements, though I ended up having some difficulty with it.

Most of the interior pages are constructed from Views embedded within custom content types, so we could return part of the page based on taxonomy, but still use static elements in other parts of the page. The content type allows for the use of taxonomy terms in the URL in order to specify what gets delivered to the dynamic portion of the page.

Anyway I'd love to hear some feedback.

Thanks!

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x

Comments

shi’s picture

shi commented

you can replace the space in the url's with hyphens and avoid thise %20's... for example http://www.maineboats.com/maine-coastal-directory/Hot%20Tubs,%20Saunas,%...

solutionsphp’s picture

solutionsphp commented

Awesome looking site, very clean and organized. I'm building a travel magazine site right now with Drupal and will review some of the techniques you used on MaineBoats.com for ideas.

Can you elaborate on how you created the Coastal Directory? CCK and Views?

"It doesn't matter how you get there if you don't know where you're going."
--The Flying Karamasov Brothers

ldutson’s picture

ldutson commented

Thanks solutionsphp-
The Coastal Directory was made by embedding a View within a View- The grey-box area is a View that was modified through template pages(using the template wizard in Views), and the alphabetical listing below is another view placed in the first view's footer. The URL passes the query term to the bottom part of the page to return those listings.

The Directory Listings themselves are CCK custom content types, a very simple layout that allows for a second column if the Flash gallery is available for that advertiser. A big part of this site is the workflow on the back end, and we ended up using CCK types and modifying them through the Contemplate module almost exclusively to make it foolproof on the back end.

solutionsphp’s picture

solutionsphp commented

Thank you for the follow-up! You've certainly helped me get my head around applying CCK and Views to create a directory.

thomjjames’s picture

thomjjames commented

Hi,

really nice clean design!

did you use the openAds module or did you intergrate it some other way?

cheers
Tom
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ldutson’s picture

ldutson commented

Thanks Tom-
We did use the OpenAds module. It is a bit cumbersome if you are planning on having a large number of different rules and zones to apply, but in general its about the best ad software I can imagine using with drupal. It relies on the Blocks function of Drupal to place the ads, and between the control through OpenAds itself and custom rules for blocks, its extremely controllable.

nimazuk’s picture

nimazuk commented

very well! nice and tidy design + user friendly navigation.
what did you use for flash image gallery? that sounds nice! is it a drupal module or a static flash?

Thank you.

N.Mehrabany
niGraphic web design & photography

Nima

ldutson’s picture

ldutson commented

We used Slideshow Pro Director, a great Flash gallery tool that integrates fairly easily with Drupal.

mvenkate’s picture

mvenkate commented

Really nice site. I am building a similar site and was wondering how did you create the products and integrated it with the store?

andrewge’s picture

andrewge commented

Do you work for the publication or are you an independent drupal developer