Modules that are useful - displayed simply... excerpt, gsitemap, nodewords, pathauto, taxonomy_menu

I am building a website for employment law resources using 4.7.4 and have spent considerable time researching my options for different modules. I wanted to provide some assistance to newbies (as I am one) to make their first module selections easier - at least as to the ones I have used - it took me a while to make my selections of modules and these have worked very well for me - thought others could benefit from my labor.

Excerpt module
I was having lots of trouble with getting rid of teasers - the excerpt module made it very easy - I was having trouble getting teasers to stop displaying despite everyone's insistance that

was the way to go. The exerpt module gives you a field for the teaser on each page and works with every input format that I have used - all the normal ones - full html, php, html.

would not seem to work with php for me. With the excerpt module, you bypass the existing teaser info and have direct access to the teaser. You can see it in action on my website:

http://finduslaw.com

The teasers within the By Legal Topic and By Region are customized or blank at my option through the excerpt module - press either of those categories and you can see teasers that are custom - depending on the legal resource that I was displaying.

gsitemap module
Website optimization is important to me. I set up gsitemap and it gave me control over a sitemap that I didn't know google uses to index your website. I think it is very useful - I can see when google crawls my site - which seems to be every day. The only thing that was confusing was the placement of gsitemaps' page- which was at http://finduslaw.com/gsitemap - because I had set up my path so that I wouldn't have ?=gsitemap be the way my URL was displayed. I added a URL alias to gsitemap.xml and sent it to gsitemap so that google would be happy with the placement of the site map.

nodewords module
Along the same lines, adding keywords, metatags and descriptions is key to some search engines - like yahoo and altavista. being able include these on your website and customize them for each page is key. nodewords makes this very easy. if you view source on my website (http://finduslaw.com) you will see that each page has its own unique keywords and metatags and some that appear by default on each page - and depending on which category vocabulary they are in.

pathauto module
Pathauto is a useful way to make sure that you have relevant keywords in your URL's path. The title of that webpage are the keywords. The only problem is that you MUST be very deliberate about selecting the title for each page because if you change the title, the URL changes. Then any links that you have around the web pointing to that page will be worthless unless you set a URL alias (administer > url alias) for that page - which could be a real pain each time you change a title.

taxonomy menu module
this module makes setting categories and subcategories very easy so that you can organize your website in a more user-friendly fashion. I wish there were sub-sub-categories but this is not a feature of this (or any) taxonomy module that I have found. Right now, you can see that I have the Category: By Legal Topic with the subcategory : Employment Discrimination, for example. See http://finduslaw.com. I have the category set to display all subcategories - Display descendants - in adminsiter > settings > taxonomy_menu. So all of the descendants are displayed in all of the categories.

This is progress I have made so far - hope it is helpful for people who are selecting modules to make their websites better.

best of luck,

sam