Reading About Drupal

Well Christmas is over now and its time to get back to the challenge!

Christmas day was good apart from the hayfever (New Zealand doesn’t get a white Christmas!)  We ate a lot and sat about so now I am feeling ready to hit it hard and get his website conquered!

It was quite good to have a break and then to look at it with fresh eyes and a new sense of vigour.

I couldn’t decide whether to try to get the theme to look how I want it to or to get the site to work how I want it to and then to worry about how it looks later. I am still not really sure but I have decide to get the content and the functionality all sorted out first because I am not really 10% sure how it should look.

Also as I am creating a website for my boyfriend as this test site, then I fugure that he may have some ideas of how he would like it to look and I will not be able to deal with those comments until I have the site in better working order.

So I am working through the tutorials at Learn By The Drop, which have really helped me and also made me feel like I am still relaxing a bit coz its kinda like watching tv.

I think what I have to figure out is what I would like on the front page and then decide whether we would like to try selling from the site as that will add in another whole load of things I need to think about and I would rather do it now than do it later when the site looks great and it would be a hassle to add anything.

So I am looking through Google to see how others have created e-commerce sites with Drupal and also I have been looking out photos and content for the site coz it won’t be much of a site if there isn’t anything on it!

Feeling quite relaxed as I am not really doing anything difficult right now. I know it will get bad again tho as soon as I start to actually DO SOMETHING and stop reading… 😀 he he

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!