By beejaysea on
I have recently teamed up with the VivaGreen.com crew. This is a very-cool feature-filled Drupal 5.2-based site that I feel will be appreciated by the Drupal community as well.
The fundamental concept is a directory for green and sustainable resources, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. Please check it out. The group of us would love to hear some feedback from the Drupal community.
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More on the site
Hello everyone. I'm the founder of the site with a follow up to Ben's excellent post.
PROJECT BACKGROUND
I started building Viva Green on May 23rd of this year, and turned on a somewhat stable public version on August 23. I started this project with:
* a very limited budget
* an excellent part-time graphic designer
* a competent part-time developer not familiar with Drupal
* a real Drupal expert (Ben, from above), who put in the last crucial few weeks to kick things into high gear and get it done.
* A copy of the Pro Drupal Development book handy for every member of the team
Our designer has a lot of solid web development experience, and so while not familiar with Drupal themes, she was able to get up to speed quickly.
I highly recommend finding a developer who is somewhat familiar with Drupal, or in Ben's case extremely familiar with Drupal. If you can find someone like Ben who also understands usability and happens to *love* Drupal, you've hit the jackpot. Otherwise, even a developer with good all-around skills can get hung up on the Drupal learning curve and slow things down a bit.
I am no developer, but have spent the past two years installing and testing various personal test sites using Drupal, so I consider my role to be site administrator. I'm comfortable installing Drupal, installing modules, slightly modifying modules, administering modules and the administrative interface in general. If you are the site owner on a small budget, you owe it to yourself to learn as much about Drupal's administrative functionality as possible. Ben is happy to install and configure modules, but is better served optimizing the database.
GOALS FOR LAUNCH
* Solid performance on low-to-medium traffic (2 second front page load time)
* Attractive, simple, clean theme that would anchor the user experience and allow for the site's contributed content to speak for itself
* Meaningful social networking features
* Smart, happy, useful time for our visitors
As such, much of the labor was spent on graphic design, graphic design implementation in the theme, information architecture and site optimization.
THEME
We use the Zen theme as a base.
SERVER AND HOST
VivaGreen.com is hosted at MediaTemple.net. We started with the basic Grid Server account, which is ok for development but not ready for prime-time. We later simply upgraded to the dedicated hosting option. Specs are available at the MediaTemple web site.
We have a development and product server, a CVS repository, and a quick MediaWiki for internal notes and documentation. Even though our team is small, it is distributed, so keeping a clean, easy to access environment helps communication.
MODULES USED
This is a fairly generic Drupal installation that anyone can duplicate. There are very few customizations to any existing or contributed Drupal code. Here are some key modules used for VivaGreen.com:
* CCK, with Date, Phone, Email, User Reference
* Devel and Project for the development server
* Aggregation module for feeds
* Links package set of modules
* Location and GMap
* Invite, Send, Mass Contact, and Mime Mail
* Organic Groups
* Custom Breadcrumbs
* Classified Ads
* Ad sense module
* Google Analytics module
* Email verify
* FAQ module
* Favorite Nodes
* Flag Content
* Global Redirect
* XML Sitemap
* Node Queue
* Profile Plus
* Meta Tags and Pathauto
* Wiki Tools
* Captch and Login Tobaggan
* User points
* User cancellation
* jRating and Voting API
* Last but not least, the mule-like Views module
OPTIMIZATION
Apart from upgrading servers, we noticed our biggest boost in upgrading php and MySQL installations. We have tested converting key tables to innodb but have not implemented on production yet. We also various bugs that were hogging up resources or in some way malformed and gumming up the works. For example, some errant code in our theme was rendering all of our blocks with a missing .css file. This caused some considerable performance lag.
We plan to take advantage of Drupals many good optimization options, such as installed memcached, as we continue to scale.
SO FAR
We've gotten some nice initial search page ranking on specific keywords at specific engines. Drupal gets your site noticed and picked up fast, so no surprises there.
We're excited to build out some interesting data in / out tools for our user base and take advantage of Drupal's open architecture. We anticipate many of our user's to be business wanting to post information about their services and products, so our goal is to give them the tools to get that data quickly and easily into the system.
We're also excited to roll out incentive plans for our site contributers based on the User Points, Ecommerce and Google Adsense modules.
For the immediate future, we're also excited to start on improving the site's usability and exploring the many jQuery possibilities. We basically rolled out the site with many default settings, and our forms in particular need some attention.
LESSONS LEARNED
* Purchase Pro Drupal Development
* Work with an enthusiastic Drupal developer
* Work with a good graphic designer
* Roll up your sleeves and prepare to spend many boring hours in the admin section nailing down all the little details
The last point is unfortunate but important. Drupal does so much for a project already but it can't be expected to do everything for you. As such, much of this project was just adding taxonomy terms, tweaking things over and over, and making sure all the settings are correct.
We think we have a solid, useful service and hope Viva Green does well. However, we were all pleased to arrive relatively quickly at the start of a pretty solid commercial web site in just a few months. I personally learned a lot more about the ins and outs of Drupal performance and got more up to speed on Drupal 5.2.
At the end of the day, we owe a big thanks to Drupal and the Druapl community for making it all so much FUN!
I know I'll sound harsh
I know I'll sound harsh but... a great way to ruin a website is to put horribly colored Google Ads, 3 times a page, on every page, in spots where it breaks the design. You might want to reconsider that, I stumbled upon the site in Diggs submission queue, and I clicked 'back' in less than 2 seconds. Now I see that its on Drupal.org front page (for what reason, thats another question) - you might want to reconsider losing all that work building a great site with a great concept by splattering it with ads. Google ads are a 2 edged blade, theyre great if you know how / where to use them, but finding it 3 times above the fold on http://www.vivagreen.com/classifieds-directory is really getting me to not even look at the rest of the site.
Also, put emphasis on your front page on your site purpose, not on tons of stuff I don't know why/what I'm looking at. Simplicity, less is more.
The design as a whole needs work if you're serious about this.
Still, It looks like Drupal has been a great framework to build your site! Its just not ready for mass public exposure (digg/d.o) yet :) Keep working on it and Im sure itll turn great.
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e! Science News
...
The reason is that it's a good write up on someone's experience implementing a Drupal based site.
We often don't get solid write ups and whether one is a beginner on a budget or a full out professional developer, write ups across a variety of skills / experiences on implementations of a Drupal based site is valuable for a lot of people.
-Steven Peck
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Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain
-Steven Peck
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Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide
Don't get me wrong, the
Don't get me wrong, the actual site seems very well done and functional, and the writeup is a great example of a personal experience developping with Drupal. I was just saying that personally, I would have waited a little and perfected it before going 'big' - you only get the kind of attention d.o. and digg can generate once or twice, and launch time is especially important for a new website.
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Biology Articles
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e! Science News
Not front page worthy
While I am able to relate to your motives, I second fireang3l's and _Troy_'s view.
I agree, the write up is basically informative. However, the site design lacks in several areas. Thus, I would even say, that this negates the message on d.o's front page: Designing an attractive Drupal site is hard to accomplish and we, the Drupal community, feel quite okay to promote a site that is far from complete in terms of modern web design. IMHO, this will detract the interest of all visitors that did not work with Drupal before.
My 2 cents.
greetings,
Daniel F. Kudwien
unleashed mind
Daniel 'sun' Kudwien
makers99
...
Why do people feel this is a competition? Or that front page should be only reserved for those special people. It's not, nor should it be.
Is our community so fragile that we can only afford to promote those high end sites and must ignore and bypass those others? Is drupal.org so special that those who strive and do well even though it doesn't meet some arbitrary standard shouldn't merit recognition? Should we exclude those people who make good effort and share their experiences unlike most others so that they and we can learn from each other?
My how elitist.
I promoted the post because I thought that people of various levels could learn from it. Not because I thought it was MTV but because I thought it was a good example of how someone can do well with limited resources. I thought the community could benefit from the feedback such a discussion could bring.
Evidently the community is to fragile for such things..
-Steven Peck
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Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain
-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide
Perspective
It seems my articulation was wrong. I totally agree with you, that it is great and important to have some write ups like this. From a user view it is great to see, which modules are used by others to accomplish various requirements. It is definitely no competition and should not be one either. Given the feedback, I am sure that jkrane and beejaysea will tweak that site within in the next weeks to become a stunning web site. It is great to have such a place like d.o, where everyone is able to ask questions freely and gets valuable feedback how things might even be improved. In this case, I am sure it will, since Drupal is a great Framework & Community and the guys seem to be really skilled.
From a marketing view, I tried to express that it might was too early to promote the site on d.o's front page. It is definitely noteworthy and I am happy to know about it now. However, that is only my point of view. I would like to see more users of other well-known CMFs/CMSs being directly attracted when visiting d.o. Why do many people like Apple's products? They like them because they know they simply work and especially because of their look. I love to give and get support and contribute to Drupal. But I would even love more to see the crowd of this community raise, for example to get more supporters in the forums and more writers for the handbooks.
During writing, the idea of having a exhaustive front page for authenticated users and a filtered, promotional one for anonymous visitors came into my mind. Basically the same stuff, but members would see additional posts that matter when dealing with Drupal. One could argue that this great community also has an attracting effect, but from my own experience I would bring forward the argument that many people look of what avail a particular thing is, in front of enjoying the community behind it.
Daniel F. Kudwien
unleashed mind
Daniel 'sun' Kudwien
makers99
Very well said sun, it
Very well said sun, it reflects my opinion too. Its not about competition, elitism or something along those lines. The post displayed a link in the teaser on d.o. front page. I'm sure many people clicked the link directly, saw the site, and never the great (and i mean GREAT) writeup describing their experience building with Drupal. And I'm also sure I'm not the only one that bright yellow bordered ads 3 times above the fold on most pages on a white background turned off from the site in less than 2 seconds, sadly (all of us internet users suffer to some extent from ADHD).
Community is extremely important, but so is marketing and convincing new users to use / learn Drupal, which already suffer to some extent from a reputation of being unable to build 'non-drupal' looking sites. Quite honestly, I'm not sure of what my reaction would have been if its been my first time visiting d.o. while shopping for a CMS and seeing this post as being #1 on the front page. But then again, maybe I do not represent the #1 target market for drupal.
All this could have been a lot better with a new post on d.o frontpage explaining things ("Here's a great example detailing how Drupal can easily help you build a great website with modules etc etc") and linking to the original post and writeup. In its current state, its confusing because there's only the link and a description of the website on the teaser. I hope you understand my point of view.
Love the suggestion of a auth user specific d.o. frontpage btw. We could even have a section on the front page with the latest posts from Forum > Showcase, or the selected best subset of posts coming from there. Right now its 2 levels deep and very hard to find.
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Biology Articles
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e! Science News
Community vs Business
Drupal.org does not have a target market.
Drupal.org is a community as opposed to a business. It is people building websites and sharing knowledge. So if someone wants to worry or concern themselves with a marketing campaign that's fine, but it won't be my concern nor is in the criteria for promoting pages to the front of drupal.org. Every one of the 'marketing campaign' idea people we've had in the past have started with grandiose plans and wandered off and were rarely ever heard from again and rarely ever produced anything.
I am more interested in the Community, than the Business, of Drupal. Every time someone starts getting concerned about marketing Drupal, I always think of how we got to where we are now without a marketing plan and don't worry about it.
A redesign of drupal.org is outside the scope of this thread. Contact Kieran Lal if you want to discuss a redesign.
-Steven Peck
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Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain
-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide
There's active (campaigns)
There's active (campaigns) and there's passive (image) marketing. And I don't care about the 'Business' side of Drupal either, but the Community doesn't come out of nowhere for no reason. Again, I have nothing about promoting the efforts of drupal users on the front page, especially this particular example. But it could have been done in another way than simply promoting the post to the frontpage with a link in the teaser; another post explaining what and why with a link would have been better IMHO.
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e! Science News
Thanks for sharing - good
Thanks for sharing - good looking site!
intentional or not i think
intentional or not i think its worth mentioning that i can see revisions of every page.
Sometimes something interesting appears on http://litwol.com
Good Drupal dev work, but I
Good Drupal dev work, but I have to admit that the overall design is rather weak. You have very good light logo.. but the website consists of: unstyled search box, , so solid-colored primitive blocks and menus that doesn't work with that style of logo at all, badly styled google ads, almost unstyled nodes that look like a mess, etc.
There is also a horizontal scroll in Opera9 1024*768.
RussianWebStudio: improving the web
thank you for feedback
Hello, and thanks for the comments. We definitely have many improvements to make with Viva Green, including our forms and more complete browser support -- the Opera tip is very much appreciated!
Best,
--Jeremy
According to your post
According to your post you're using a lot of modules. How many visitors per day you have currently?
I'm asking, cause I've been at MediaTemple and found that their servers are poorly configured and aren't optimized for dynamic content, so they may shut your site down for "excessive resource usage".
* * * * * * * * *
¤ EbayBlog.net: Profitable eBay Niches for Your Own Home Based Business
¤ BuyOCR.com: ABBYY FineReader 8 Professional & FR 7 Home :: ABBYY Lingvo 12
MediaTemple
We have found MT's Grid Service to be a little buggy and perhaps not the best choice for a site that plans to scale. That said, the MT folks are working to get the kinks worked out and are in general responsive and helpful. We've only just upgraded to MT dedicated virtual hosting, but so far so good with performance at low concurrent users/traffic.
Cheers,
--Jeremy
Another green site made with
Another green site made with Drupal: http://greenbahrain.com
--
Check out my Drupal sites on advertising and design.
Nicely Done :)
Nicely Done :)
Congrats on the site launch.
Congrats on the site launch. I struggle just designing and deploying a blog site for myself!
I'll let the guys at Sundays Energy know about the directory... they do a lot of Ubercart sites for green companies and I'm sure could benefit from getting listed. : )
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Current Drupal project: http://www.ubercart.org
I really enjoyed this post,
I really enjoyed this post, I for one have nothing against a plug every now and then for a nicely configured/customized drupal (in fact, it's favorable). It'd be cool if something like this had it's own little category or section. I especially like how jkrane was cool with giving us a very fine project overview so we could see how he did it. Good work guys.
Now that you think about it, there is a place on the forum where you can show your site off at. =]
Buy Blue?
Are you guys working with the now-defunct drupal-powered Buy Blue at all?
Buy Blue is coming back in Fall 2007
http://www.buyblue.org/
They're asking for feedback, so if you have a minute or two, I'm sure they'd appreciate it.
Walt Esquivel, MBA; MA; President, Wellness Corps; Captain, USMC (Veteran)
$50 Hosting Discount Helps Projects Needing Financing
Hi, I just finished the raw
Hi,
I just finished the raw vegan directory on Drupal 6: raw-vegan.org
:-) Keep it green!