Now on Drupal

Well, we've finally made the switch over to Drupal. I've been talking about it for about 6 months, because it seems odd that I recommend Drupal to pretty much anybody I talk to about getting a website, and I was using a roll your own, pseudo CMS that I put together last summer. Making changes to it was a drag, and it didn't have all the best features of a CMS. About all it had going for it was the ability to change the content without messing around with the code. But, with the release of Drupal 6.3, and (possibly more importantly) the Views and CCK modules for Drupal 6, I decided the time had come to upgrade.

I'd been avoiding Drupal 6 up to now because it was missing some very important modules - the aforementioned CCK and Views - which are basic necessities for a good Drupal site. On top of that, I wanted to make sure they had all the bugs worked out. Since I had a little bit of free time before clients, I decided to put it together.

This also gave me an opportunity to do a small redesign - I've made the text bigger, the site wider, and changed fonts - but more importantly, I reorganized the content. The old site, while logical, was hard to get around. Specific content was usually two clicks away, and I noticed that a lot of people weren't sticking around on the site. I did some "hallway usability testing", which means I had my Wife try to use the site to find some information, and I noticed she had a pretty tough time navigating. So, we now have three sets of content. The main tabs along the top tell you about the most important stuff MABWI does. You are now in the blog, which is mostly self contained. And, on any content page outside of the blog, we have more information about Content Management Systems, our Web Hosting plans, as well as our Portfolio and a Contact form.

Some of our more astute readers may notice that it's been a long time since the last blog post. I've been busy, but mostly lazy about the Blog. I'm going to try and get a post up here once a week, hopefully about something interesting. I intend to focus on projects we're doing (where possible), interesting technologies and trends of interest to small business owners, and maybe I'll geek out once in a while with a post about the latest and greatest techie trick I've found.