We're pressing ahead with our redesign and migration into Drupal of our flagship site. We created a .jpg image of the basic layout and "look-and-feel" we want for our new site that now needs to be realized as a Drupal theme.

So, I put out the word on groups.drupal.org, Twitter and in a few other more local spots online and the response was immediate and plentiful. Seems there are many individuals and firms that do custom Drupal theming. We were pretty sure we just needed a custom themer to adapt something like the Zen theme but lacked the specific skills here (nor the time for that matter) to do it.

I chose an India-based firm called Designs2Drupal and the experience, so far, as been excellent. They were very professional extremely fast - after a 20-minute Skype call and a few emails explaining what we needed, they produced an initial theme from a simple .jpg mockup at no cost for us to evaluate in under 24 hours hosted on their servers. They are now doing some "final" tweaking and will deliver us the theme and then we pay. A very smart way to do business, I reckon, as when people see the work you do before payment, they are more likely to follow with your services. I would definitely recommend them.

We will, of course, be tweaking the theme over the next few months to get it just how we want it, but we have in-house staff that know CSS, etc. and will likely work with a local design firm for the more complicated bits. But, to get us going with this process quickly, I highly recommend having a custom Theme developed quickly via a service like the one mentioned above.

We are still working on re-doing our IA and writing and developing our taxonomies in Drupal - what I like to call "the intellectual work." Not that design and theming don't require intelligence - of course they do. It's just that re-labeling menu items and re-doing a confused information architecture are task that no amount of technology can complete for you. So, we're wrapping up our IA processes with taxonomy creation and moving from our content audit > content modelling > personas > user journeys into some hands-on content migration and re-design. To do this, it helps to have a functioning theme in one's Drupal installation!

Note: I have retired 'The Weekly Drupal' column in favor of simply writing about Drupal as topics arise. During our first 6 months of development this year, I could easily write weekly posts as I was new to Drupal. As we move into our content migration phase, I have less time but will still write about Drupal often. You can see my old Weekly Drupal posts here.