The option to use Drupal was quite a thought out one, especially after spending close to a month reviewing 4 other CMS solutions.
Wordpress which has been our favorite for a while couldn't quite scale to the scope of the project, which led us to dig into various other CMS solutions. One particular vendor was charging an abnormal $12,000 for a solution that I realize is not even on the same platform as Drupal.
We were looking for a scalable CMS platform that is easy to use and flexible, not to forget have an active community in case we ran into obstacles and Drupal rose to the challenge. Our hunt first began in finalizing a decent theme that met our requirements and we later got into fixing the modules.
After close to three weeks of work we finally came up with this: http://www.theforexdigest.com
Design
We needed a very specific news portal kind of look that combined not just content but also a directory and events, with a focus on ease of navigation and content presentation.
Modules
One of the best things of Drupal being that for every problem there is a module. We used the following:
CCK, CiviCRM, Invite, HTMLMail, Nodequeue, Captcha, Webform, XML Sitemap