I will be interested in seeing the results of this survey, indeed. If you do web design, you should take it too.
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I can’t believe it’s been a month since my last post (yikes!). A lot has been going on. I crashed and burned with my pre-school site; I basically decided that I had to start a Drupal install again from scratch. I now have to hand-code a static site for my client that I will later (much later) convert to Drupal. I did finally manage to get onto the Drupal IRC chatrooms. I had just never used IRC before, and after trying to configure Trillian and messing around with MirandaIM, I finally got going with Chatzilla, a plugin for Firefox that works well enough for me. Was I ever glad I tried IRC. It is good to get in the habit of watching what folks are doing/talking about out there, and a very nice user (EclipseGC) took me through a personal walkthrough of how to use phptemplate to theme Drupal. It’s not nearly as complicated as I thought it was (I’m beginning to think I have a mental block against Drupal, lol). It was a great mini-tutorial and it was just what I needed for the light to “go on” and get me started theming for real. You too can IRC with drupalers on freenode in the channels #drupal-support and #drupal-dojo. I’ve also been searching for an e-commerce solution for a potential customer who has a simple site in desperate need of a redesign. Of course, the first thing I thought of was using Drupal with a very promising cart module called Ubercart. After I crashed and burned trying to set up the pre-school site, though, I thought no way would it work; I needed a lot more experience before I tackled an e-commerce project with Drupal. I started to look for a cart solution that would allow me to plug “buy it now” buttons onto an existing site and provide a cart backend. I thought it would be a fairly simple thing to track down and I started to search for options. Easy, ha! Everything I found had a serious down-side, like monthly rental and hosting charges (RomanCart), or it required a desktop application to work (Cartit), or lacked enough payment gateways (NOP). The only other solution I found that was a definite “maybe” was Cartweaver, a PHP cart/extension for Dreamweaver. But 1) it costs $250 and 2) I’m not all that fond of Dreamweaver. It’s OK, but I don’t really want to invest, monetarily or time-wise, in aquiring and learning a system that isn’t something I know I will use. Sigh. The funny thing is, after that mini-tut in Drupal theming, and after coming across a series of instructions on creating a brochure site in Drupal, I have come to the realization that I am going to have to bite the bullet and, if you haven’t guessed by now, do it Drupal after all. Whew. Can I sit down now? I’m dizzy. WordPress has finally released their Plugin Directory! More than a list of links, it offers a rating system, immediate download, and (I love this) commenting, so that you can get a better idea of how a plugin might actually work on your site. The WordPress wizards spent some time developing this section and it shows. My humble opinion that it makes WordPress that much more easy-to-use for a beginner than ever before, and that its popularity as a blog/site platform is going to skyrocket because of it. Good job guys! Andy Rutledge wrote this post about web standards that I thought was a pretty good description of the “why” behind standards. He says that web standards are not being marketed properly; that it’s not about compliance, but about quality. He says:
He makes the point that W3C and the Web Standards Project have done a poor job selling web standards to the design community at large to whom “standards” come across as “arbitrary rules”. Well, Andy actually works in a web design firm with other designers, so he may have contact with a lot of designers that are bucking the standards trend “just because”. However, as someone that has only gotten a grasp of how to do web design over the last several years, I know that from the moment I read about web standards, I wanted to adopt them. Why? Because I wanted to design web sites right. It was never a mystery to me that it is about quality that had multiple benefits to the user, the site owner, and the world at large. Perhaps a large part of the credit goes to the Academy of Web Design, where I was taking classes, which introduced good reasoning for standards early on. I must admit that as I went online in search of more information, though, I found the same overarching “quality” arguments that Andy makes in his post made again and again by others, if not in those exact words. In fact, the challenge for me has been to some up with a way to express the difference that abiding to web standards makes to customers. How do I explain that what I do is different than what a web designer that doesn’t care about web standards does? The following is part of my attempt to explain this difference in a very generalized way from my business site:
and
Using web standards makes the above possible, even if I don’t mention them specifically. I’m not sure if the marketing message for web standards really does need improvement vis-a-vis designers in general. I was sold from the very beginning. But when communicating to clients about what I have worked so hard to learn, talking about web quality as opposed to web standards is a very smart move to make. As Andy says, “professionalism and quality products are hard to argue against”. |
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A new way to tweak your theme
This is a new project that promises to let you take customizing your Drupal theme one step further by providing a Theme Settings API. Check it out here.