Launch of the New Domani Archtiecture Website

Today I completed the new web site for Domani Architecture & Planning Inc, my place of employment for the last decade. The new site features an all new color scheme; all new projects section; all new biography for the resident Architect, Fabio Rigo de Righi, and a new updates/news blog where we will be posting project status updates and other interesting bits of information as it comes to us.

I built the site using Drupal as I did for my new site. I like that out of the box you get a fully functional administration section, fully functional blog and a fully functional contact page - that saved me some time because my boss wanted the site up fast. Expanding the base functionality with downloadable modules was a snap as well. A few modules I added into the site were Imagecache, Image, Lightbox2, and Views. It took me about a week worth of tweaking and adjusting to get my code and Drupal's code to play nicely but, in the end, I feel like it was a worthwhile journey for me. There was quite a bit of digging that I had to do in order to find CSS classes that I needed to override in order to have the look I wanted. I cheated a bit in the Projects section of the site by setting the content of those pages to my own PHP files where I coded my own gallery layouts. Technically I think one should have a module handle the galleries but I didn't have time to find one that worked the way I wanted nor did I have time to design one myself.

Drupal allows you to setup URL aliases which I used to my advantage in the project section. All of the individual project pages are actually the same "node" in the site. That node's content is set to include one of my own PHP files where I read the request uri, break out the project name from it and load the appropriate gallery. Thanks to the URL alias system, I was able to point multiple aliases to the same node giving me the functionality that I was looking for without having to add multiple nodes to the site. When I have to add a new project all I have to do is update my project data table, upload the images and add an alias and I'm done.

So go check it out and see the kind of stuff that I do at my day job, read about my boss, and check out my latest site design. Shoot me some feedback if you like.