Drupal website designing is one of the most interesting features in Drupal CMS. It requires an expertise and innovative skills to create a visually appealing website. Designing Drupal website is considered a better option over the traditional web designing and development. There are a number of Drupal CMS customization service providers available online that assist in developing an incredibly advanced and attractive website.
Drupal provides maximum flexibility by allowing you to design the site exactly the way you want. One can easily have the full control over the designing aspect. However, you should take utmost care while creating the site as you may overlook the essential and aesthetic factor. There are certain do’s and don’ts that must be followed while designing a Drupal website. This not only helps in developing the site flawlessly, but also speed up production, saving clients’ money in the long run.
We have brought together a few do’s and don’ts that must be kept in mind while designing a Drupal site. Although some of the tips and techniques may apply in general website designing, not just Drupal sites.
Do’s, when building a Drupal Website
l Make use of reusable graphical elements: The designers may be interested in resizing graphical elements like buttons, arrows, icons, and many more based on the page. However, the best thing is to standardize the elements as much as possible. Designers often reuse these graphical elements. Therefore, it is better to keep them on separate layers, so that they can be used with the transparency.
l Better to consider using grid: It is wiser to use grid on your site. This not only makes your site more attractive, but also provides uniformity to the site saving a lot of time. Using standard grid fits nicely with the Drupal principles including flexibility, reusability and standardization.
l Be aware of using Drupal forms: Designer might be tempted to redesign various Drupal forms like contact form, node add form, log-in form, comments form, etc. Familiarizing yourself with the ways to structure the forms that will help you a lot. You can opt for CSS while working on time sensitive projects.
l How contents are shown by default: There are certain things that take a little time to work with. Therefore, it is essential to pay required attention to these details. The content may seem to be simple, but you must observe the things closely. Think about how the content is shown by default in Drupal.
l Do consider utilizing jQuery: There are some pretty tricks that can be included easily to a Drupal site, even if you don’t want to spend much. Tabs, sliders and accordions add special effects to the site without spending much of your time and money.
Don’ts while creating Drupal site:
l Do not use Photoshop tricks: Avoid using Photoshop tricks, which do not work on the internet and fail to produce precisely on the web. Opacity and PNG are the only features that can be applied to the web. There are a few things that we do in Photoshop and are certainly possible with CSS, but they require a lot of time for proper implementation.
l Do not forget configure color settings using Photoshop: You can set the color schemes using “color-managed” softwares like Photoshop and illustrator. These softwares have various color management schemes that suit web printing. Sometimes, there is a slight color shift, when saving out slices for the web, if the color settings are not correct.
l Do not ignore elements that require theming: Do not avoid the things that need theming or customization in Drupal. This is one of the basic and the best Drupal solutions for several Drupal problems.
l Do not use styles that vary from page to page: Everyone likes a uniform and decent looking website. It requires a lot of time and development work to build a bunch of sidebar blocks that look completely unique. Development time will drastically reduce, if they all have common styles. It is good to opt for a tool that allows you to choose from a set of styles for nodes, blocks and other content areas.
Conclusion:
Consider all the do’s and don’t’s discussed so far, if you are planning to design a Drupal website. These tips and tricks will surely help you build an amazingly beautiful site.
