Good Design Can Really Improve a Website!!

Take a lok at these screen shots of how the website has improved now that it has been ‘designed’

Our t-shirt designer at Hard Luck (actually also my boyfriend – he he) had a go at the website just using screen shots and having a play around with Photoshop. He came up with a new banner for the top, a new colour scheme and a fantastic new layout for the store!

I am so happy that I was able to use my knowledge of drupal to get the results that he wanted – it looks so pro now 🙂

Home Page before and after – Brilliant!!

 

Before and after shots of the store too. Admittedly a lot of it is done with adding good photos but still it has reminded me how important it is to have a professional looking website. And given me the courage to go on and do more! I am soooo happy that I created the site all myself and its looking and working so good now!

Fantastic results and really inspired to do more!!

Acquia-Prosper new theme made my site all grey!

OMG – I just had such a massive panic because I thought that I had lost the site appearance, all my css work. I thought it was somehow never going to work again.

I uploaded the updated acquia-prosper theme , which was fine. But the site went back to being grey colours and not all the colours I had chosen for it and spent DAYS adding into the css file. But it was ok coz I had a back up and I just uploaded the css file from before.

But then it didn’t work. Itwas still grey.

So I restarted the computer and swore at it and that didn’t work. Then I did it again and again and again and that didn’t work. And then I went into firebug for a look at it and I saw that my css file was being recognised but that it was being superseded by a new file called gray.css. So I went and had a look for this and in the updated theme there is a folder called design packs where there is a css file for gray and one for blue. And these are above the css file for the general theme.

I’m not going to use these as I have the look of my site all sorted so I just deleted the whole folder from my site. And now everything looks as it should do again – PHEW!

Aquia Prosper Theme – Visual

Just wanted to record the appearance of my theme at this point…

Header – As you can see, I have an image across the top and the primary links are below this. I like the simplicity of this.

Sidebars – To the left, in the ‘left sidebar’ I have the items available to buy in the store displayed in a list so visible on every page. (yes I know there are only 4 so far – need to create some more designs!)

Under the list of items is the shopping cart – this is only visible on pages which are directly related to the store.

There is no right sidebar at present, keeps it simple…

Main Content – This page is a store page and is displaying one of the designs. You can see that I have not been able to get the image of the t-shirt to show up. The image has been inserted using Ubercart and the theme. It is supported with the ImageCache module and the Views module. I really have to get my site online to see if that will fix it….

Had friends staying for the past week and have ignored my site completely – tut tut!  Better go do it now!!

Choosing a Theme in Drupal

So like I said in the last blog post I have now added Ubercart to my Site and I have started to get real excited coz I can see it in my mind and I can imagine how good it will be once it is finished. Its going to be a shop for hot-rod inspired t-shirt designs- it will be so awesome!

The only problem has been that I think I set myself too big a challenge with the theming.

I think that really there are so many themes out there made by people who know what they are doing that I would be a fool not to start by using one of these and making a site that way. As they are customiseable I wouldn’t have a site that looked like someone else’s, I could make it unique.

So I went for another theme hunt and I tried out a few and came up with Aquia Prosper as my favourite. Its set up for Ubercart already so it will work real well for what I want and also the colours are perfect as I would like to have a theme of black (or grey), white and red. Also its clean and clear and it seems to be really flexible.  It is based on the Fusion theme so I had to download that as well and also the module called Skinr as this is what is used for some of the flexibility with the appearance.

So far it is all going really well and I am super pleased with how it looks and works and I have even managed to get the banner (is that the correct term or is it just header?) at the top to look how I want it to by turning off the title and letting my image stand out. I uploaded a png image for this as it has no background and so I was able to use the grey background within the theme, by getting it to show thru. Its really cool to be able to do that and I am really happy with the result.

The problem I am having at the moment is that the images aren’t working as they should. I am not sure if this is because I have two image modules downloaded or if its something I have done. Thats the problem with not really knowing what I am doing – it is so great when its going well but when a problem comes along I can spend hours and hours trying to solve it and not knowing what to do. It has certainly used up a lot of time!!

What is happening is that the images I am adding in for the products are not showing anywhere. They do not show in the product description, or in the catalog or the cart. This is all set up and should work straight off with this theme so I am a bit confused as to why it isn’t. Its quite frustrating!

I have been looking on the internet and the problem appears like it may be something that a lot of people have and that many ppl can only get around it by having the site on a remote server (ie – on the actual internet) and not the local host (ie – on my computer at home) so I am going to upload, or at least I thought I would “just upload” but its proving to be more difficult than that…
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Thats me just back to add this note – all I needed to do was to ask the web hosting service for an upgrade to their premium service so I can get 100MB of disk space rather than just 10MB.

Ah so easy!!

First Layout Attempt

So now that I have chosen my theme its REALLY REALLY difficult and I dunno really what I am doing!

I have it sorted into a layout with a sidebar on either side – just followed the instructions on the drupal site, well I say JUST, it was a long and difficult process. And then adding information in to a whole load of different pages took ages and I didn’t really know what to write in them. Some people use lorem ipsum I think but I dunno even what that is, so I decided its better to write sort of what I want in each page. Then at least I have thought about each one. So after all that effort, I think it took me about 3 days to go from downloading the theme to now, I had great expectations for how I would feel about the site and how I would be able to see the potential in it by now. But I can’t really it still looks rubbish. I mean its layed out ok but its not nice and I don’t know how to get it to look good. I actually don’t have the first idea.

I only just worked out how to get an image into the site yesterday! (I had to download a module from the drupal site – I was surprised at that, I thought it would have been one of the core modules)

Here it is anyway –

I had an idea tho! I am going to get firebug so that I can see what is goin on with the html and css and hopefully that will make it more clear for me about what makes it look how it does…

Oh and in case you didn’t know – firebug is an add-on for firefox (the browser) it shows up at the bottom of the browser window and shows the code for each element as you hover over it with the mouse!  How cool is that! I have high hopes!

Choosing a Theme

I decided from the start that I would get a theme as that will be the only way that I will be able to do this!

I have already got a sketch of how I think I want the site to be laid out and what it should contain so I reckoned that if I could get a theme that is close enough to what I want then it will be simple to modify it to just about right. I’m not aiming for perfect – I am not that ridiculous!

I began to look for themes on the drupal website, and I spent probably about 2 hours looking through them and thinking about them, comparing them to what I wanted but I couldn’t really see anything that matched. So annoying!

So I started to look at other sites similar to the one I want to build to see what they look like and whether there is a layout that appears often, which is like one of the themes. I suppose I was looking for inspiration although it seems to me like I just wasted a whole day looking at websites and not achieving anything! I am grateful for it tho because I do have a better idea of what I want and I have made some changes to my ideas.

The thing is that what I want is not really like any of the themes and I am also not sure that the theme will let me do what I want. So I am going to try a different tactic – that is to use one of the themes that is really customisable. I didn’t realise this before but some theme developers use other themes as a base for their theme. So if they can do that then I should be able to too!  😀

So I have chosen genesisand it is downloaded and saved into my themes folder now. I have also followed the instructions and copied the sub-theme folder into the themes folder and given it a new name so that its my very own sub-theme. This is what I will customise.

The instructions were all on the page but it was still pretty hard!