Be a Design Ninja!

Submitted by Igor Gembitsky
on Thu, 01/12/2012 - 17:19

Before you even begin developing your site, the best thing you can do with your time is design, design, and refine your design. "Begin with the end in mind," as Steven Covey has been telling you all these years. And in your case, you should begin with design. Carefully consider what your site is going to be and treat it like a blueprint. It's just like building a beautiful peice of furniture, you wanna know exactly how the peices are going to fit together before you start nailing. So here are a few tips and a real world example of how you might want to approach designing your site.

The Elevator Pitch

Start with a concise and general overview of the purpose and intended audience of your website.

In my case, I'm working on a webside for Alabama NORML, a non-profit organization concerned with education, advocacy and policy reform of marijuana laws in Alabama. The target audience includes people interested in Alabama laws, who need help or who want to help. 

 

Who is going to visit

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) on Drupal Gardens

Submitted by Igor Gembitsky
on Sat, 01/07/2012 - 04:00

Now that you've poured your blood and sweat in building your site on Drupal Gardens, you search for it on Google, and it doesn't show up! What gives? That's what happened to me. I made my site, birminghamphilosophy.drupalgardens.com, and it's THE site for the Birmingham Philosophy Club, and yet it wasn't showing up anywhere on Google searches. While Drupal Gardens comes preloaded with a some useful SEO, such as the XML Sitemap module, which automatically creates and submits your sitemap to major search engines, and URL Aliases which changes your URLs to more useful, search-engine friendly terms like about-us, rather than node/16, for example. But obviously that's not enough, at least in my case.

So I did some research and discovered two easy steps to improve your ranking on Google through a little SEO. Here it goes:

First - Keywords

You have your site's title, which includes both the title and the slogan, actually, since they both appear in your site's title bar.

HTML, CSS, and a Drupal site

Submitted by Igor Gembitsky
on Thu, 01/05/2012 - 05:11

Starting the new year with a coding blitz, or at least a learning to code blitz. So I had caught wind of Acquia's inauguration of "Acquia U" program later this month, as part of their new strategy for getting and training the talent they need to sustain their meteoric growth. After an initial interview, I was told that part of what they're looking for is competency in HTML and CSS, as well as some Drupal experience, so I've been hunkering down and digesting as much knowledge on those topics as I can in hopes of breaking into Acquia's palace walls. 

Here's what I've been doing.

First I found some CSS tutorials on youtube which I rather liked by an easy to follow down to earth gal named Lisa from 2createawebsite. I followed along with her and learned a whole lot of CSS in a short time, including creating content sections, a navigational bar, and boxes.

Next I got a copy of "Head First HTML with CSS and XHTML" and started breezing through it.

Drinking from a Fire Hose

Submitted by Igor Gembitsky
on Thu, 08/18/2011 - 06:30

I started reading "Beginning Drupal 7" and read through the first 7 chapters during a vacation in Florida, discussing some foundations including content types, users, taxonomy, menus, themes, and blocks. I found the taxonomy section to be particularly interesting, as it's my first exposure to this idea of building a relational vocabulary of tags to organize/categorize all content on a site which could then be controlled in really dynamic ways. It seemed very organic in the way it makes content coherent and usable much in the same I imagine the brain conceptualizing and interrelating content it gets from experience. Although I recognize that the learning curve ahead of me is quite steep, I'm incredibly impressed how intuitive and coherent the whole Drupal environment seems to be, especially considering that it was put together not by a single centralized entity, but by groups of enthusiastic techno-hippies.

I had considered my options on how I would like to really start my

Sowing the seeds of Drupal mastery

Submitted by Igor Gembitsky
on Sat, 08/13/2011 - 08:31

This is my absolutely first Drupal content.

After attending BarCamp Birmingham and getting a good glimpse of the scientific evaluation of human behavior, problem solving, and futurist forward thinking that defines the ethos of the tech community, I felt inspired to break my way into this backbone of technological innovation.

This is the beginning of a journey to understand and build marketable skills in Drupal web development as part of a larger interest in understanding the market, people's behaviors -- and seeing how I can start to contribute to open source, the tech industry, and global prosperity, by managing myself and my skills.