Our wedding site in Marina

Posted by evansmic on July 20, 2009 at 5:59pm

Here is a wedding site I put together using Marina

This is my first site ever
http://www.allison-michael.com/drupal/

demo/demo to login

I would appreciate any comments or tips

Comments

Is that really a Flash intro to a Drupal site?

Posted by ratioswitch on July 20, 2009 at 9:02pm

I'm sure you did a wonderful job on your 1st Drupal site and I commend you on using Drupal to do so. Plus Marina's a great-looking theme too. Trouble is that even with all the accessibility features & usability improvmentd in D6, you've ended up with a site that is totally unusable on my iPhone (or other non-Flash plugged browsers) seeing that there is some type of Flash intro in place for . Maybe think about adding a "Skip Intro" button?

I would still like to see your site!

Cheers,
_rs

Oops! Flash intro faux pas.

Posted by evansmic on July 21, 2009 at 11:23pm

The flash intro was really a place holder for the coming soon notice. I didn't really consider the accessibility issues. You can access the home page at
http://www.allison-michael.com/drupal/

I'll take this into consideration for my next site. This site was used to learn drupal and see how some of the features could be used.

Michael

Redirecting

Posted by jrdixey_ on July 21, 2009 at 11:35pm

Not really a faux pas to include the Flash intro, your reason was legit enough, the only faux pas was not having a skip button. :)

On a different note, something I've just been learning about is how you can use .htaccess to redirect from a subdirectory /drupal to your main URL (so your site could appear to be at allison-michael.com, but actually live in a /drupal subdirectory). I haven't been successful at it myself but I understand it can be done.

Jennifer

As a new iPhone user (which

Posted by tommyent on July 20, 2009 at 10:01pm

As a new iPhone user (which I am actually using now) I can now see the importance for mobile compatibility more than ever before. I love being able to see client sites and even do tasks from my phone. I do think the lack of flash support is a poor decision on apples part though. It should be an option to turn on and off.

Well for now I will have to check it out tonight

definately would say add the skip

For the gallery you might

Posted by tommyent on July 20, 2009 at 11:53pm

For the gallery you might want to look at that.
http://www.lullabot.com/articles/photo-galleries-views-attach

Also for some reason when I clicked on the images on the front it displayed the actual URL then the image.

They do I think all happen to be absolute links I don't know. Weird

Congrats on first site though

I agree with ratioswitch.

Posted by DarrinRich on July 21, 2009 at 1:42am

I agree with ratioswitch. Ditch the flash intro. Sites can do without flash.

flash

Posted by eword_nyc on July 21, 2009 at 2:02am

while i too find flash intros unnecessary, there are instances where people want them or where they can serve a purpose... i just always make sure that the flash is not alone on an intro page - exactly for cases where the flash player is not available - just put a link or something (can be "skip intro" or whatever else you want it to be).

flash for iPhone was supposed to be here by now, btw (it was announced five or six months ago and supposedly in the works for longer then that), surprised it is taking this long.

Flash & iPhone

Posted by wretched sinner... on July 21, 2009 at 3:29am

wretched sinner - saved by grace's picture

Flash wil not be on the iPhone. Apple has never given any indication that they will introduce flash and many that they won't. Flash works very poorly on any IS other than windows and adobe have never tried to run flash efficiently on Mac OS X which is the underpinnings of the iPhone OS. the only anouncements have been from adobe and have usually been shot down quickly by apple.

Flash is dying, especially with some of the introductions in HTML 5 like <audio> and <canvas> tags. Apple's refusal to introduce flash on the most popular mobile Internet platform is the first nail in flash's coffin. Bring on the open standards web!

Hi!

Posted by jovemac@drupal.org on July 21, 2009 at 3:14am

I really like the site! and trying to build one for myself too. I could be great if you let me know how you did this image transform which happens just below the menu!

Awaiting for your advise.

Thanks in advance
Jo

How I did it

Posted by evansmic on July 21, 2009 at 11:29pm

Hi. I'll send you a detailed discription of the modules I used next week.

To get started, I would recommend the book Using Drupal as a good primer. It pretty much gave me everything I used in this site. Overall, the site took me about a week to complete following along with the examples in the book.

CCK and views are probably the most important modules to understand. I still have much to learn about them, but I can already see how powerful they will be in creating sites.

Cheers
Michael

Feedback on Site

Posted by jrdixey_ on July 21, 2009 at 6:16am

Hi Mike - Nice site!

For something like this, I personally don't mind the flash animation intro, though I can see why it's frustrating for iPhone users. Maybe a /mobile site would make sense for them. And definitely add a "skip" button somewhere close to or inside that frame, because even on regular browsers, some people just don't want to sit through a Flash animation no matter how pretty it may be. (Guilty! I usually skip them unless there's a reason to sit through it.)

Your implementation of Marina is nice, though I find the all-caps top tabs with the grey backgrounds a bit jarring in terms of the rest of the design. (I have a site based on Marina, too, and really want to change the look and feel of those top tabs when I get some time to!)

For the "latest yaks" and "people coming to the wedding" blocks, did you know you can add your own icons? A .png of the right size and style will integrate quite seamlessly with the rest of the icons. It just gives the site a more fleshed-out look if all the blocks have some kind of icon in the spot where the login and menu blocks have them.

On the 3-photo display at the top, the randomness seems a little bit quirky, like maybe you need to seed it differently or something. Too many repetitions of the same photo.

Hope this helps!

p.s. Congratulations on the marriage! The site says "July 18, 2009" -- aren't you supposed to be on a honeymoon or something? ;)

Thanks for the comments.

Posted by evansmic on July 21, 2009 at 11:42pm

Thanks for the comments. All the issues you brought up are the things that bugged me too. I need to delve into the CSS files to change some of them, but I'm just starting out and CSS can be a bit confusing.

The rotating pictures under the menu bar do look a little quirky and I couldn't figure out how to make it look better. I used three distinct views using the slideshow plugin for views but the problem is guests did not upload a profile picture and the default picture is used and that's why there are so many instances of the same picture. If no default picture is assigned then the area collapses when there is no content in the view which is really annoying and renders the site unreadable. I'm not sure what the solution would be and I didn't really have time to worry about it (what with an actual wedding to put together) If you have any suggestions, I would love to hear. I'm not sure if I could create a single view and embed the other three views or not.

On the flash note, I think for this site it worked given the limited audience (i.e. the 140 or so people invited to the wedding) and I didn't really think it was such an issue. I'll keep it in mind for my next site.

Thanks again for taking the time to comment. Much appreciated.