vonn's blog

I've been theming a new website this week and was explaining my approach to the general aesthetic presentation of a site to my client. She seemed to find what I said interesting and helpful, so I decided to blog it here.

First of all, when I say 'theming', I mean that I am building the aesthetic presentation for the site: the colors, fonts, background colors and textures, graphic design elements. In other words, the way the site looks.

I brought 2 new websites to life this week and they are both for organizations that are doing great work.

I've recently starting working with a new client, Robin Hankins of As I Am Institute. Robin hosts a live weekly TV show that is streamed live on livestream.com/asiam. The show features guests who discuss topics related to spirituality of particular interest to gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people.

I sure have been busy lately!

A bunch of website projects that have been in the works for a while have come to fruition all at once. It's been great fun deploying all these sites. Every time I get one up on a publicly-accessible server, I get to send an email to my client that says, "It's Alive!" Of course, the best part is that I learn something new with every project. That's why I like this work.

Here's a run-down of the new sites:

This e-commerce site is for a start-up company based in Clearwater Florida that sells an environmentally-friendly swimming pool product.

I recently had the opportunity to do the audio recording for an evening of storytelling at the Saugerties Public Library by Janet Carter. John Drew of JFDXIII Studios did the video and I did the sound (but not the music at the beginning and end).

Quite a few people have been talking to me lately about wanting to get started making websites with Drupal, so I thought I would share here some of most useful tools and resources that I've found:

1. The Drupal Community as found at drupal.org. This open source community is your source for everything from core source code and contributed modules and themes, to discussions, case studies and technical support.

I arrived home last night from DrupalCon DC and my brain will be busy digesting everything I learned for some time to come. The information was flowing fast and free. For the most part it was highly technical but there were parts that also delved into Drupal, the open source movement, and the web as a social phenomenon too.

I'll be attending my first Drupal convention next week in Washington DC. Developers, geeks and users from all over the world will be sharing the latest ideas and programs in website development. I expect to gain a lot of knowledge and new techniques that will help me serve my clients better.

Stay tuned here and I'll post more news from DrupalCon.