BetterLife Directions website with Drupal 6

BetterLife Directions is a multi award winning provider of psychological services to individuals and business that was established in 2004 by co-founders James Stott & Elizabeth Benson-Stott. As CEO Elizabeth is widely regarded as a psychologist and is reguarly invited to address conferences both in Australia and abroad. BetterLife Directions' services range from those offered to individuals for psychological assessment and treatment for mental health conditions, right through to coaching and consulting services offered to senior executives of Fortune 500 companies.

www.betterlifedirections.com is their official website relaunched with Drupal 6

BetterLife Directions is currently in the process of developing a number of other websites using Drupal's multisite functionality.

Why Drupal?

Chief Operations Officer James Stott has a background in business management and online marketing, and the decision was made to develop the website in-house, without graphic designer or programmer. The goal was to find the best cms solution which was well supported and a loyal community following. It was important to be able to seek answers from people who were passionate about the platform, and the open source nature of Drupal was desirable should the need to develop customised functionality arise. Support has generally been forthcoming, and timely.

Features needed

• Information pages - It was important to be able to allow specified employees the ability to update pages on the website without programming or html knowledge.
• eCommerce facility - a future feature of the website will be the ability to sell product and take payments online. The ability to be able to link the eWay payment gateway with the Ubercart module met this requirement.
• Easy to build webforms - It was necessary to be able to quickly respond to certina opportunities and the ability to quickly and easily build webforms was a requirement.
• Smart SEO support - the number of Drupal modules to make the website SEO friendly was a significant contributing factor. Within 7 days of the SEO modules being applied the website has secured two of the top 10 places for targeted keywords.

Design

Artisteer was chosen for its ability to produce Drupal themes, quickly and easily. Artisteer used in conjunction with Drupal has allowed the option of trying different skins, and the flexibity to try new things, without having to do a completely new rewrite of the website each time.

Solutions (Modules used)

• Information Pages - Webform and Mollom (for contact and submission/referral forms), WYSIWYG with tinyMCE, Printer-friendly pages, Simplenews for newsletters, Image and Image API, Poll, Menu, Book, Comment, Path, Search, Taxonomy, Aggregator for RSS feed, and Administration Menu for easy management behind the scenes. CCK has not yet been introduced but is being investigated.
• Cart (not yet completed) - Ubercart with eWay payment gateway module
• SEO functionality- Nodewords, Site Verification, Global redirect, path auto, page title, search 404, sitemap, xml sitemap, SEO friend, Google Analytics.

All in all, the Drupal experience has been a rewarding one. Whilst still on a learning curve, our hope is that posting this gives new Drupal users an idea of where to start and what modules to consider.

To view the website visit www.betterlifedirections.com