By jonathanbernd@aol.com on

Hi there

I've posted a couple of times before. Long story short:
The non-profit I've come on board with (not as a webdesigner:)) had spent over $2,000 getting "a professional" to set up a website - a lot for a very small start-up looking to work in post-conflict communities in Africa.
This person used drupal, but the coding is pretty messed up. It obviously doesn't work properly. It also looks very average. All in all it's extremely unsatisfactory and this "professional set-up" keeps asking for more money for useless info available for free on the drupal website and no fixes.
I've developed an html front page with css and some content pages, but I can't figure out how to make it "appear/mesh" with drupal.
I understand the concept of adapting an existing theme, but I'm also struggling with the messy drupal theme and set up we've already got. I don't know enough to code a drupal theme from scratch.
I don't want to mess up the email addresses either, and my coding skills in drupal and php in particular are as good as non-existent.
If there is any kind soul out there who could give me a step by step in doing this that would be really cool. I'm losing mine with this:))

Thanks very much in advance for any help.

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

Chad_Dupuis’s picture

Chad_Dupuis commented

Drupal has a fairly large learning curve to use it effectively. Creating themes for Drupal is also no easy task, particularly if you are not fairly skilled in css and php. The drupal theme guide is here - http://drupal.org/theme-guide . For the theme, however, I would consider trying a software product called artisteer. This will allow you to produce a theme you can use (read this - http://drupal.org/node/402772). I've done some themes with it and they look fairly good and more importantly they work. The themes from roople theme come very well equipped and are relatively easy to manipulate. It's much easier to manipulate an existing theme that works well than to get into using your own, particularly if you don't know drupal very well or how you will be using drupal features in your site (views, panels, various modules, etc.).

jonathanbernd@aol.com’s picture

jonathanbernd@aol.com commented

Hi Chad

Thanks for getting back to me. I'll take a look at it. Right now, I've just put up an html site. The pages on the other one needed to be populated anyway, so I'm not losing anything. It's so much easier with the design with html and css. Drupal's learning curve definitely is large to get anything necessary done:))