Finished up one of the cooler projects I’ve had the pleasure to work on a few weeks ago. The site is www.visitavalonnj.com.
I’ve worked with the client in the past and they were looking for a new site to help with the tourism of Avalon, NJ (a very nice place). Working with them is excellent and probably the best overall client relationship I’ve had to date. They know what that want, and present a professional design/concept and I build them a web solution to meet their needs.
In this case they really wanted a site that would be easy for them to maintain and add and edit content on a regular basis. Oh yeah, and they also needed it done before the start of their tourism season (middle of March ideally).
With only a few seconds into the conversation I knew that Drupal would be the perfect match for their needs.
Some modules featured in the creation of this project were:
- Views – while I use it in every Drupal site I’ve ever worked on, it was heavily used in this project and really helped cut down on development time.
- Calendar and Date – they needed an events calendar and the Calendar module was great to build upon. They also used dates with other content types and the Date module was a real life saver in these cases too.
- Media – the client wanted the ability to add images inline view a wysiwyg editor. While still not a perfect solution, the Media module did help us give the client such a ability.
- Facebook OAuth – they wanted users to have the option to login with their Facebook account instead of having to create a separate account for their site. This module was simple to set up and got the job done.
- Google weather – this allowed us to easily bring in and display the latest weather in Avalon without too much hassle. Just some minor CSS tweaking was involved to get it done.
- Social media – a very new module and it’s release was most timely. An excellent way to bring the now common social media button onto a website.
- Webform – again a well known staple that just gets the job done.
- Omega Theme – a real lifesaver for building a responsive web design. I highly recommend it as a starter theme for any new site.
The whole building block structure of Drupal really allowed us to deliver some cutting edge features without having to start from scratch. This really saved us a great deal in time and costs ($$$) and allowed me to concentrate more of the really unique aspects of the site.
Most impressive was how well the client has been able to use Drupal to manage the site. Our training simply consisted of a few minutes on a phone call. The admin interface was very intuitive to them and I did make sure to label all content types and fields so that each part was clear to them when it came time for them to manage the site.
Again, this was a pretty impressive project and and absolute treat to work with them again! I’m very impressed with it’s outcome and am very excited to check back with it’s performance in a few months.
Lots of fun.
