Drupal Corporate Site from Scratch with all the helpings

In the last two months I have spend a fair amount of time looking at CMS solutions for a corporate/ecommerce websites. My old go to program was Joomla that I had used for two corporate websites in the past but had a love hate relationship with. 

The site had to be able to do the following:

• CMS Functions
• Blog Function
• eCommerce w/ affiliate & coupon functions
• newsletter sign up
• trouble ticket management 

As I've said in a previous post I had looked at the following

• Joomla
• Drupal
• SilverStripe CMS
• ModX

when I was asked to create a web presence for a start up from scratch. I actually ended up theming/coding/whateveryouwanttocallit a full mock up template/theme for each of these and then went on to fiddle with the backend.

Against my expectation Drupal came out the winner in my very limited testing. In hindsight that was an excellent choice. The user base is massive and that really helps with module availability. Sometimes there are six modules that claim to do the same thing and that can become annoying. Especially when you pick one and then find another module later in process you need for another task but it requires another module for the first task. Luckily, I've dodge most of these issues and trust me, its been purely luck.

Once the CMS is picked you get to do the fun part. Which is step away from the computer, or go to your favorite mindmap program and map out:

• Your basic page infrastructure. What are the top line pages/categories
• Which pages do you need to tell your story?
• Do you need career, investor relations etc etc etc

Then you go on to wireframe the first page of the site. This is where I pretty much pride myself of my work. I consider myself very user-centric in my layouts and designs. Pretty and user-friendly can co-exist. Once you get this together, do your mock up. I'd recommend using the Fusion starter theme as a beginning point. This allows you to do most of your work in CSS and makes changes easy to implement if you know what you are doing. 

Now before you show this to your client, you probably want to have a couple of friends take a look and critique it. More eyeballs is good in this situation. By the time your client sees the first functional mock up all menus, login etc. should be working and have lorem ipsum place holder text. Now you can do a very productive back and forth with the client and implement their changes while slowly enabling modules you may need for functions.