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Tips for Building a Drupal Website like A Pro

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Georgia Newman
December 03, 2015


Georgia Newman

Georgia Newman is a Drupal web designer. Choose from our selection of powerslides.com options for your mock up templates.

Georgia Newman has written 1 articles for CGIDir.
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Beginners and experienced designers alike find building a new website to be a daunting task. There are many expectations from the client and even from yourself as a designer. Good design is not just about graphics, there are many other factors that influence the quality of the design. The following are some tips for building Drupal websites like a professional for individuals with basic design knowledge.

Drupal has a great flow

When working with Drupal. Always try to follow the flow instead of forcing your way around. You should not try to over-customize it, as it already has some great features. Before you start working on anything, move around and find out how everything works to make sense of it. Understanding the different parts of Drupal can really help you in building a masterpiece.

Use PowerPoint slides to build the blueprint

You can use a PowerPoint template to create a mockup blueprint for the website you want to build. You can use these mock templates of website layouts to create blueprints containing the website structure, internal elements and the navigational structure of the website, this will guide you through the site building process. Few developers have tapped into the powerful tool that is PowerPoint templates and once you’re able to use these templates, you’ll be a step ahead.

User pages have their own attributes

In Drupal, user pages are not nodes, each user page has its own attributes. Because the user pages do not allow for most of the things that nodes can do for you, you can leave the users pages for keeping account information and use nodes as user’s profiles. As a node, you can comment on user pages, search through content and even save them to favorites, among other things. This feature is especially important when making a high-end client’s website.

CSS is crucial

Drupal websites are often content and text driven. There is a lot of opportunity for CSS. You can style up your headings content paragraphs and links.

The theme feature

Drupal has a cool theme function. You can override any core file or module using Theme in front of it in the template.php file. Therefore, you can easily change tables, username and breadcrumb or even comment appearance. 

You can over-ride core CSS files

You can override core CSS files if you like to theme certain page items differently from the default look to have your own website style. You do not have to delete the file from core but you can achieve the desired look in the tabs if you have your own style.css.

Drupal is 100% easier

Building a website on Drupal is not as hard compared to other site builders if you have the right vision and help from other professionals. You should find out as much as possible about what other developers have discovered about Drupal and use these in your own design efforts. Drupal is a great way to make the site building faster, more stable and more secure. So before you think of building a website from scratch, try out this CMS


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