Drupal Theming/Template Design/Development Sevices

One of Drupal's strengths is in it's ability to be themed differently than the way it appears out of the box. By its nature, theming and design work in general is hard to estimate, because every project is unique, and because design is more subjective than development is (i.e. what we perceive as 'good' is not necessarily the same thing as you). That being said, we've tried to simplify the process as much as possible. We also believe that form follows function, and as such the functionality of your web site should be nailed down before design work begins. Read more about our evolving rapid prototyping site development process.

Discovery and Graphical Brainstorming

It's important that we understand what your requirements are before we begin in any design work. This can be accomplished with a primary telephone call followed by an email exchange between parties. From this dialogue will emerge a short design spec that details the primary requirements/goals of the design. This document will serve as a foundation for our designers to begin brainstorming design ideas. We have relationships with a number of independent graphic artists who excel in modern web design ("Web 2.0" is the buzzword). Our designers will brainstorm on design ideas (based on the design spec) for you and your team to review.

Iterative Design Process

After you have some time to review the brainstorm comps, we'll have another telephone conversation to discuss what you like and dislike about the various elements in the comps. For example, you may like the color scheme of one, and a particular style of another, and the overall layout of yet another, but you can't stand the way the user login looks on this one. From this we get a sense of which designer would best suit your project moving forward. Then begins an iterative (cyclical) design process, refining the design with your feedback during each iteration until you are satisfied. If your project spec calls for multiple layouts (i.e. home page, user profile page, registration page, etc.), this process will occur for each of them.

XHTML/CSS Conversion/Basic (Macro) Drupal Theming

You should understand that before we begin this phase it's important that you're satisfied with your design. Now is the time to make any changes. After we hard code your designs to XHTML/CSS, it becomes more difficult (i.e. expensive) to make design-related changes to them. When you are settled on a design, we begin the process of converting it to an actual Drupal theme. This involves converting the design (a layered high-resolution image) into browser-readable XHTML. We use fully-compliant XHTML Transitional code, which optimizes your web page for accessibility and search engine ranking. Then, we convert the XHTML/CSS code into a basic Drupal theme. When this phase is complete, you will have a working Drupal theme that you can actually use.

Advanced Custom (Micro) Drupal Theming

The last phase involves writing custom PHPTemplate code and files that define the layouts called for in your spec (i.e user profile, registration page, etc.). This involves a variety of proper "Drupal way" techniques, including rewriting theme() functions, creating node template files, theming forms with the Forms API, etc. At no point will we hack your Drupal installation to accomplish this task.

Please contact us today to get started with your project.