Finally finished my first site - Keepit.ie

Posted by flaw on May 18, 2015 at 4:35pm

Hi Drupal Ireland,

Keepit.ie (and .net) is live!

Some of you may remember I presented my site at the Dublin meetup about about 6 months ago, at that time I thought I was about ready to launch... but Drupal had a different plan :) and since then it has gone through major backend and server changes to make it faster and scalable. (with some help from a drupal expert I might add) So I am delighted to say that it is now finally ready to launch, and what a perfect time than to do it this week, exactly two years from the time I attended my first Drupal Open day back in 2013.

Back then, I had an idea to create a website to help people find lost items, (in reality for myself, as I am forever losing phones, keys and coats.:) So I embarked on a journey to create a website to help myself and other forgetful users. I thought I could get it done in about 6 months of my spare time (ever the optimist), and after some research I found out about Drupal and as it happened the Drupal Open days were coming up in the summer of 2013. After attending the conference (I could only make it on the Saturday) I came out thinking ... eek, there's so much more to this and I felt a bit overwhelmed, but I then started learning Drupal on the evenings and weekends, basically any spare time I had, which in my job is a rarity .

Two years have passed and I have been on a roller coaster of drupal learning and hair pulling frustration. Since then, I have completely re-created the site about 4 times as I tried to figure out the best way to use Drupal. I'm a graphic designer by trade, so it was a steep learning curve and I have learned a huge amount since then, but I never thought I could ever finish theming the site as it took forever! :/ , but now I am happy to say I've done it. :D

So please use and abuse the site (not too much abuse :) and I would love to hear any feedback or problems that you can find. At the moment there is some sample content on the site to get started, but if you signup for free you can create tags for your own items.

Thanks!

Barry

Comments

Wow!

Posted by geewiz_ on May 18, 2015 at 5:04pm

Congratulations, Barry, great site! As a sysadmin, I probably can't appreciate the intricacies of the website but it definitely looks amazing!

Jochen Lillich, CTO freistilbox Managed Drupal Hosting

Looks Fab

Posted by frankdesign on May 18, 2015 at 5:13pm

Looks fab Barry. As a fellow graphic designer attempting to get my head around Drupal, I can really appreciate the road you've travelled to get the site done. Must compare notes on who found the Drupal learning cliff worse!!!

Will we see you at Open Days this week?

Thanks guys, Frank, it was a

Posted by flaw on May 18, 2015 at 7:46pm

Thanks guys,

Frank, it was a pretty steep cliff... and that's before I've started on Drupal 8! :D ...but looking forward to it.
I'll be at the Open Days this week, hopefully both days, but definitely Saturday depending on last minute work load. So see you there.

Nice looking style

Posted by conorc on May 18, 2015 at 8:37pm

Hi Barry,

the site looks well, well done. There's no holding you back now :-)

Coming from a design background too, I found the ways of Drupal of old, near vertical to learn too. The meet-ups, camps and conferences have been a big help, as have been talks and tutorials posted online. Still there's nothing quite like building, to learn, as it sounds like you've found out for yourself!

See you on one or both of the days, make sure to say hello.

Conor

DrupalCon Dublin 2016
http://dublin2016.drupal.org
http://www.drupal.ie/map

Barry, Well done. The site

Posted by markconroy on May 18, 2015 at 9:49pm

Barry,

Well done. The site looks great, but even more importantly, it looks like a very valuable service. Well done again.

See you over the weekend.

Mark Conroy,

Lead Frontend Developer,

Annertech - Web Agency of the Year 2016.

It looks great!

Posted by stella on May 18, 2015 at 10:44pm

It looks great Barry, well done! Hope you can make it to Open Days 2015 later this week. :)

Stella

Keepit - good job

Posted by vallab444 on May 19, 2015 at 6:54am

Proves that you are an awesome designer, indeed! It is a brilliant idea and there is no reason it should not click with users.

A few suggestions?
1. The reporting form needs usability tweaks...somehow, a vertical scroll looks a bit tedious
2. why not make 'categories/sub-cat' autocomplete, instead of drop-down lists? (you have used the dependent fields module well)
3.How about showing tagged items in the slideshow, which tell the story straight?

Thanks guys, and thanks for

Posted by flaw on May 19, 2015 at 2:05pm

Thanks guys,

and thanks for the suggestions vallab444, I appreciate the feedback.

I have been struggling with the best way to display the report form, as there is quite a bit of information to get through. I originally had a multistep form, but I found the extra clicks where a pain if you want to quickly add content, and the map display was also proving problematic (sometimes it wouldn't display correctly)
but I understand your point, and perhaps I'll look into a multistep form on the same page (kind-of like an accordion display, where the form is revealed section by section, so as not to overwhelm the user.)
Yeah I'm not a fan of dropdowns also, but they seem to work best for mobile, but I'll test it with autocomplete so see how it works.
I assume you are referring to the frontpage slideshow, that's a good idea and something that I had planned to do at some stage, and I agree that the tagged items needs to be explained sooner to the user, so I'll put that at the top of my list. :)

Thanks again for the suggestions.

I'd love to hear about the design challenges

Posted by left on May 24, 2015 at 10:03am

Hi Barry,

The site looks beautiful, and it's nice that some of us got a preview way back and now we get to see it finished and launched. Well done!

I'd be curious to hear more about the particular design and theming challenges you faced, and how you dealt with them.

If you're around for the meet up this Wednesday, maybe you could talk a bit on this subject. I notice you're using Foundation. I'd really like to hear about your experiences with it.

Lisa

Hi Lisa, Thanks for the nice

Posted by flaw on May 24, 2015 at 11:58pm

Hi Lisa,
Thanks for the nice comments, yes I went through many themes before settling on Foundation. It was the first one where the practical work of theming just clicked for me (the whole concept of theming is quite complex for a newbie), and the documentation from Zurb is fantastic.
So I would be happy to give a little run through of it on Wednesday, hopefully it won't put anyone to sleep ;)