Victron Energy Group's Website was one of my first attempts at designing a site utilizing Drupal. We used custom content types and views to input and display featured stores, brands and the portfolio pieces. I also tried to use standard aspect ratio 2:3 for photography so the client could upload photos without having to crop them in a photo editing tool.
Design lessons learned:
Limit use of rounded corners and/or drop-shadows on buttons. Drupal (any CMS for that matter) tends to use a lot more buttons (submit, read more, view more, etc) than non-CMS sites and creating custom buttons for Drupal could end up taking hours to create and/or modify.
Use standard aspect ratios for photography. Most clients I've worked for don't have photo editing tools readily available. It's much easier for them if they can simply upload photos in a standard size format without having to crop to custom sizes.
Start with a pre-designed theme as a template. There are so many design templates out there that will somewhat match any design (header/2-3 column/footer) that it saves a ton of time modifying an existing theme rather than creating one from scratch.
Comments
nice design
nice design