OrthoDoc

With great fanfare, I started out doing this and this. A little browsing through the Drupal site to pick up a few points, tweak the site to make it look different, and I thought I would have it ready for a show …but it was not meant to be! On looking back I realise how naive I have been.

So what did I learn from the whole process:
Its not as simple as buying a domain name and installing drupal. Then it will be one among thousands of other sites. If you want to be the one site, then it needs to be distinctive. Two components that most people overlook are content and design. You must have something to offer to the visitors, not something you gathered from the web through feeds which drupal easily accomplishes. Content must attract visitors and keep them coming back for more. I had a rough idea on what the content of indianorthodoc.org would be. I had decided that it should be driven by user contributions. But when I looked at sites like The Morning News it became clear that quality was more important than quantity. A magazine would fit my requirements more easily than a CMS. The periodical nature of output would give me time to acquire and publish articles that made sense.

Its amazing how one thing leads to another. The same paper had an excellent design feel to it unlike the usual paper like say The New York Times . Both of them were powered by Drupal but TNYT was crammed up while TMN was more easy on the eyes. I learnt later from this book how whitespace can make a big difference in designing a site. But how could I achieve white space? It required the art of layout and layout in website is achieved by manipulating CSS.

You have to look at a few CSS websites to see what I mean. People can really great creative with css. csszengarden had been one of the early sites to effectively demonstrate the use of css in designing sites. But take a look at others like cssbeauty and cssmania. One thing that struck me was that most of these sites belonged to the creative kind of people …artists, a different league all together. I didn’t want to stretch my site all that far. But I was certain about one issue now, I couldn’t just use the default css design that came with drupal. I had to have a design that I could call my own. Two sites that had some interesting articles on css were Sitepoint and AListApart. Both the sites practised what they preached, excellent design with relevant articles and plenty of white space.

So until I get an idea about what css is and how I can exploit its use in designing my site, indianorthodoc.org will have to wait.

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