Some of the planned features/ideas for Drupaldesigners.org:

• Drupal theming & design posts aggregator like Drupal Planet
• Interviews with best designers
• Help designers to know Drupal best practises
• Bring designers of awesome Drupal websites out of anonymity
• Creative process of a designer
• Workflow of a Drupal themer
• Design case studies
• Closing the gap between Drupal designers and themers

Subscribe on Drupaldesigners.org to stay tuned on latest news or follow @drupaldesigners on Twitter

Images from sxc.hu

Learning from the experiences of others can be very beneficial if you are willing to learn and make changes to the way you do things. There is a saying in my country that a wise man is learning from mistakes of other people, while a fool is learning from its own mistakes.

I was lucky enough to be one of the few hundred people that were able to squeeze in to a fully packed room on a DrupalCon San Francisco session where owners, founders and managers of some well established Drupal webdesign studios shared their experiences, things that they did right and things that were completely wrong.

Here is a list of responders with their Twitter account, company name and amount of people they manage

Glenn Hilton – @glennhilton – ImageX Media – 12 employees

Dave Terry – @mediacurrent – Mediacurrent – 12 empolyees

Jeff Walpole – @jeffwalpole – Phase2Technology – 32 people

Jon Clark – @juaneclark – Aten Design Group – 6 members

Eric Gundersen – @ericg – Development Seed – 15 employees

Ben Finklea – @benfinklea – Volacci - 60 person firm

What was the best decisions you have made

- moving a Drupal to first place, focusing on a single solutions for our products

- allowing telecommuting

- focus on getting team „dance“ well together

- create an effective in-team communication

- Read good books: Good to Great and Getting to Yes

- using Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology

How, where do you recruite employees

- start with a vision and culture for your company, then hire people

- try to hire people that you know or are reffered to you from a trustworthy source

- follow people on Twitter, Linkedin, see what they discuss, how they act, what is their attitude

- network like crazy

- have the job post on your website allways open

- read the responses to open positions, see if they included what you required (references, portfolio links, cover letter…) see if their response is general or targeted (with your name, email)…

- be enormously picky who do you work with, working with a wrong person can make more damage than not working with anyone

- read a book called „Who“

- remember that finding a good employee is like finding a needle in the sand

How do you attract or keep your team together

- go snowboarding, have fun, spend time doing different things together

- make sure they are self motivated and that an internal communication is healthy

- real client work will point out the best people out there

- work with a fix priceing solution, based on the hourly rate

- Be stubborn with clients. If a client always likes you something is wrong, be a pain in the ass, when you talk to client, don’t try to be kind all the possible time

- direct the relationship with employees – owner vs contractor – do not necessary be friend with everyone on team

- send people to DrupalCon, DrupalCamps, let them get a Drupal or design book, but get them to share the knoweledge they learn

- make a culture where employees can talk to an owner with trust

- have a regular meeting where team members give kudos to somebody else on a team

How do you get sales

- you must create relevant fresh content – write blog posts, publish white papers…

- get known in a community by contributing modules, themes, time, knowledge, or by organizing, sponzoring or helping with DrupalCons, DrupalCamps, meetups – giving back to the community is a great way to promote your services and get huge publicity

- outreach to larger firms to get smaller projects, get reffered – alliances are critical for creating outstanding projects

- you want to look good – be that hot chick on the high school;) – be the one that has the best website, most creative stickers, swags, goodies, be the one that others are looking to

- when you respond to RFP – make sure you deal with client individually, make sure you have read all requirements, that you are not talking to random client but insted let them know that you really care for their need

- do a good SEO, be active on social networks

- find a niche an be a possibely best company that exist in that niche (Volacci – SEO, Lullabot – Drupal training, Acquia – Drupal commercial support)

- some niche examples – bankrupcy attorneys, legal websites, church websites, realtors, service sellers, music bands… – find a good fit and make it your “another company” – legalwebsites.com, realtorwebsites.com etc…

- the more narrow your reach will be -> the more successfull you will be

- top brands, products, services are the best in their niche, that is why they are sucessful – read the book DIP

General advices

- develop a partner program for your services

- always look how you can do things better

- as the owner find the right ballance between being thinker and doer

- do not do same mistakes again

- don’t do what you do not have time for or what does not align with your vision

- say no to the wrong fit client/project

- crystalize your processes soon enough

- make things simpler, try to cut the scope,

- read the Rework book by 37signals

- aim for 75% billable time, spend rest on contributions, do not primarily focus on margin

I have put together a showcase of 32 websites of the national football associations that are present on the Football FIFA World Cup.

Enjoy and let us know in comments which is your favorite team and which of the association websites you like the most.

GO SLOVAKIA !!!

My choice: Mexico, Denmark, Greece

Algeria

Argentina

Australia

Brazil

Cameroon

Côte d’Ivoire

Denmark

England

France

Germany

Ghana

Greece

Honduras

Chile

Italy

Japan

Korea DPR

DPR Korea Football Association apparently does not have a website

Korea Republic

Mexico

Netherlands

New Zealand

Nigeria

Paraguay

Portugal

Serbia

Slovakia

Slovenia

South Africa

Spain

Switzerland

Uruguay

USA

Samaritan’s Purse

Yele Haiti

Housing Works

World Concern

Charity: water

One

World Food Programme

Red Cross

UNICEF

Plan Canada

Bright Hope

CARE

Convoy of Hope

Direct Relief

Feed my Starving Chlidren

Food for the Hungry

Giving Children Hope

Global Aid Network Canada

International Rescue Comitee

Kids Alive

MedShare

Operation USA

Stand With Haiti

World Help

World Vision

American Refugee Comitee

I would like to encourage you to help as you can. Donate your money, skills or time. Look for an opportunity and see what you can do.
Please share this article if you like it, bookmark it, tweet or digg it. Maybe your tweet will cause someone to donate and help Haiti.

There were always two parallel sessions running on Friday and even three parallel sessions on Saturday during whole day. So there really was what to choose from. And to keep it more funny (… and healthy :-)) the sessions were in other rooms, other floors, even other buildings. So it was also very nice cardio training :-).

First session I would like to cover was from Saturday – “Theming Drupal – The gap between PHP Developers and Designers”. Raphael (@rapsli) opened one of the hot topics: whose responsible for area between design and development. He described Drupal’s theming system and showed some best practices of Drupal theming. The conclusion is that Drupal developers and themers support each other work hand in hand.
[session slides]

Essential topic for every Durpal website maintainer: Upgrading Drupal. Whether it is from lower to higher version (like Drupal 5 to Drupal 6) or keeping live Drupal site up to date. Florian (@flobruit) revealed some great practices from his expirience in this field. He described a workflow how to update modules or even add custom functionality to live Drupal web site with as less downtime as possible. To mention at least ingredinces for his recipe, you would need:

• some STAGE server between PRODuction and DEVelopment server
• use versioning control system like SVN, Git, Bazaar, …
• drush magic and shell scripts
• Installation profiles, Features
• … and backup often:-)

To describe whole workflow here is much out of the scope of this post, but I will get back to this topic soon, so stay tuned.
[session slides]

Next session with a bit similar topic but focused on development process – Development workflow and deployment at Absolventen.at – was presented by Klaus Purer (@klausi). Klaus was talking about their team development work at Absolvent.at. Just short list of tools Klaus was talking about:

• [Subversion (SVN)[http://subversion.tigris.org/ "Subversion"] – industry standard tool for version control, CVS is really not a choice knowadays. Use branches for features development, bugfixing and tags for releases and deplyments.
• Document your code. Really. Also check out new Drupal installation profile called Open Atrium. It offers simple document management, communication tools like blog, issue tracking and can by customized.
• Use Simpletest to catch as many bugs as possible.
• Examine your watchdog for “File not found” (some dead links ?) and PHP errors (NULL values in arrays ?)
• Have separated Development, Staging (testing) and Poduction servers.
• Deployment of DB changes:
  • manual DB dumps
  • for some modules you can export the changes (e.g. Views, Rules)
  • custom code hooks
  • export Features
• use Drush to simplify and speed up your work

The session triggered interesting discussion about versioning systems and their future. Should we use Git or Bazaar ? What about migration from SVN ?

Another great session for Drupal developers on animal friendly topic focused on saving kittens: Clean Customizations: use the APIs and save the kittens. Florian (@flobruit) and Daniel introduced a lot of real-life examples, how-tos, very interesting examples of using Views as tools and many other. Simple need-to-know for every Drupal developer (if you don’t want to kill the kittens).
[Florian's blog post]

Very interesting session by Karoly Negesy (@chx) about “MongoDB: a database for websites” introduced future alternative for regulary used SQL databases. SQL databases were designed and developed a long time ago and to fulfill slightly different requirements than web applications like Drupal have. MongoDB is document oriented database which is very fast and with it’s philosophy fulfills the requirements of CMS system much better than regular SQL databases. It will be very interesting to watch development of Drupal in relationship to database systems like MongoDB.

From conception to realization: A journey through the creation of a website by Marek (@sotak). That was the last session on Saturday I attented to. And it was one great session. As Marek says in his blog, this session was almost Drupal free, but defenitely one of the best session on this DrupalCamp. Marek described entire process of creating a NGO website, from the first meeting, through the analysis, design and development to site launch.

Very useful method for determinig features of the site is so called MoSCoW method. It helps you to define MUST have requirements and cathegorize them into SHOULD have, COULD have and WON’T but WOULD like to have groups. Another great helper to define mood and colorisation of a web site are Mood boards. Just take a scissors, some magazines and put together some pictures that will define mood and colors of your site. Or do it on your computer. It’s a great starting point for creating a design. You can use another tools to extract colors from a picture to color palette and use it as a basis for your web.

Use wireframes to create layout of the pages and have them signed by your client. There are a lot of tools for it, online and offline.

After site’s launch make some buzz around it, write a blog post, present a case study on a comunitty meeting and don’t forget to track your work even after the site is launched. There is a lot you can learn from live site. Check out the statistics, Google Analytics or Chartbeat, very interesting is ClickHeat mapping (Drupal module for it). You will find all mentioned links in the session slides.

Thanks again to all organizators and speakers for great event and educational sessions, you have done a great job. And don’t forget ! The First Slovak DrupalCamp is comming soon !

About the author: David Lukac – @davidlukac is a managing partner in Mogdesign.eu – a Drupal design company. He is passionate about Drupal, music and his beloved family.

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• The Four Key Components of a Great Web Design
• 50 (fresh) Beautiful and High-quality Free Icon Sets
• Top 10 Photoshop Feature Requests
• 50 Fresh And Inspirational Corporate Designs
• 10 Expert Tips for Designing a One Page Portfolio
• 21 Resources for Getting Design Feedback
• 18 Free Dingbat Fonts Great for Interface Design
• A Collection of Useful Web Design Wireframing Resources
• The Evolution of Web Design

Development

• 20+ Brand New and Incredibly Useful WordPress Plugins
• You Don’t Know Anything About Regular Expressions: A Complete Guide
• Top 20+ MySQL Best Practices
• 43 Minimal And Really Clean Free Wordpress Themes
• Fresh Web Development Goodies Bag
• 15 Useful Resources to Get Clued Up on HTML5
• How to Evaluate What CMS to Use

Blogging

• 25 Blogs To Help You Stay Current With Social Media
• Stories behind your favourite blogs
• Tips, Advice, and Truth About How to Make Money Online with Blogger and Increase Traffic
• 10 Things You Must Do Before A New Site Or Blog Launch
• 25 Funny Comic Strips About the Web & the Internet
• How to Build & Develop an Awesome Blog

Freelance

• Freelancing For Agencies: Pros and Cons
• Why Your Worst Clients Should Still Get Your Best Service
• Designer’s Guide to Passive Income – 7 Essential Readings
• HOW TO: Get more brand exposure, traffic and sales using Facebook
• When You Need to Subcontract
• How To Create The Perfect Client Questionnaire
• A 4-Step Process for a Positive Web Marketing Approach

In the first session cgalli showed us “How to build a Drupal website in 40 minutes“. He presented the “usual suspects” modules like cck, views, imagecache and using a Marinelli theme he built a basic website for an Austrian football club.

Second session was “Reaching your audience with an Accessible CMS” Shadi Abou Zahra presented on how to make Drupal more usable and high quality. Explained the purpose of W3C and WAI initiatives. Accesibility means that people with disabilities can use the web. He pointed out that any content on the website must be: Percievable, Operable, Understandable and Robust.
Key features of accessible web:

• Semantic structures using supported standards
• Images, videos and audio with alternative text
• Layout and font sizes that can be used by keyboard
• Forms and controls that can be used by keyboard
• Consistent and predictable navigation and usage
• Device and browser independant operability

Semantic Drupal is a big thing at the moment and the third session “Getting Your Site Ready for Web 3.0: The semantic Web and Drupal” was a good example of it. Lin Clark explained what the basic principles and benefits of semantic web are.
Core benefits:

• Programs and sites can exchange information
• Search engines can display more relevant information in results
• Data mashers can combine data from different datasets to find new and astounding things

Lin also pointed out different approach of Mmachine understandable, RDF, SPARQL, Linked Data, Federated datased, Giant Global Graph and how to use them all to get the best results with Drupal. RDF will be a part of Drupal 7 core, that will make Drupal more semantic.

Christian Ziegler shared examples of “Intranet, Collaboration and Project Managemeng in Open Atrium”, explaining why is Drupal easy to use with social networking. He did a short demo of OpenAtrium.com a Drupal Project management and collaboration installation, Organic groups, Features, Storm project management module, CiviCRM.
Watch this video to get a better picture of what cloud computing is.

“Productivity without web with CCK, VIEWS, PANELS” session by hagengraf was filled with great tips for building Drupal website. Use CCK, Views, Panels as a Lego blocks to create Drupal website as a Lego building, plugging in different features and modules. Modules mentioned: Galleria, Mp3player, Emfield for videos, image, audio or podcasts, Node Relationships.

Fago’s session “Rules: How to leverage rule-based automation” presented great workflows to save clients money, developers time and make users happy with creating Rules for automation process. He demonstrated a automated process of notifying and blocking inactive users.

“Securing your drupal site” by pivica presented some best practices for having a secure drupal site. Some examples:

• Enable update module
• When using contributed module, check if module is popular, actively mainainted , developer, security holes in past, using db_query, check_plain?
• Consider using captcha; login_security; persistent login; single login; password policy; Salt; Phpids; httpbl modules
• If you don’t know what you are doing don’t use php input filter; Never trust a user input
• Consider disabling logging to web browser on production sites
• Check_plain($text), Check_markup(), Filter_xss(), l(), t()
• Never write and/or execute sql commands manually, use drupal db layer; Use db_query() properly; Use db_rewrite_sql to respect node access restrictions
• Forms api protects you from invalid form data, against CSRT
• Don’t trust js for input validation
• When using ajax use drupal_get_token and drupal_check_token
• Respect and define new permissions, Use menu access arguments
• Be safe in your themes, Write clean template files; Provide custom variables in preprocessor functions

To feel the atmosphere of DrupalCamp Vienna take a look at pictures, tweets, and this amazing Flickr Twitter mashup

Last note: there are multiple DrupalCamps coming up in Europe in coming months in Bratislava, Ghent, Essen, Munchen. Looks like Europe discovers Drupal :)

• Powerful Use of Typography In Christian Motion Graphics
• Beautiful Hand Drawn Websites
• The Making of “Constant Slip”
• 40 Seriously Funny Print Ads
• 54 Cool Examples of Custom Error 404 Pages
• 40 Beautifully-Designed Navigation Menus
• 20 New High Quality Free Fonts
• Designing “Coming Soon” Pages
• 30 Web Designs with Amazing Attention to Detail
• Dissection of Holy Websites: Modern Church Web Design Trends & 88 Inspiration
• 50 Inspirational and Fresh Minimally Designed Web Sites
• 60 Trendy Web Design Interfaces Created In October
• 20 Do’s and Don’ts of Effective Web Typography
• The Ultimate Ugly Showcase of Current Government Websites

Development

• How to build a Social Networking Website with Drupal
• 26 Must Have Resources for the Web Developer’s Toolbox
• What Beautiful HTML Code Looks Like
• Coding a Web Design for Speed and Quality
• The History of the Internet in a Nutshell
• Top Five Best Database Management Tools
• Top 20 Essential Firefox Add-ons for Web Designers
• 5 Damn Easy Ways To Improve User Experience
• 10 Tips for Writing Better CSS

Blogging

• 16 WordPress Sites to Help You Build a Better Blog
• iPhone Blogging Tools Roundup
• 12 Essential Plugins for Your Wordpress Design Blog
• 10 Ways to Find Inspiration for Your Writing
• Three Types of Commentators – And How to Deal with Them
• Five Ways to Be a Trendy Blogger

Freelance

• Does Freelancing Make You Happy?
• Taking Your Business on the Road: How to Work While Traveling
• How Freelance Businesses Can Measure Social Media Results
• Take Control of Your Finances with the Web
• Kristina Halvorson on Content Strategy for the Web
• 101 Essential Freelancing Resources

A time for another giveaway on Mogdesign.eu has come. We are giving out 30 Google wave invites to 30 Drupal developers. Comunication is a core condition for each succesful development project, and Google Wave is a tool that makes real-time communication and collaboration easier and more effective. Enjoy!

Source: Flickr.com

About Google Wave

Google Wave is an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration. A wave can be both a conversation and a document where people can discuss and work together using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

• A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.
• A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.
• A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.

How To Enter

1. Leave a comment at the end of this blog post, including your Drupal.org ID, which must be registered before November 13th, 2009 (latest on November 12th).
2. If you have a twitter account please tweet this message: 30 Google #Wave Invites Giveaway for #Drupal Developers by Mogdesign.eu – @jojototh http://bit.ly/3ODqqb

Prize

• Each winner will recieve a Google wave invite.

Rules

• Give away will end November 19, 2009.
• Winner will be announced on November 20, 2009.
• Participants must leave contact information: email and Drupal.org account ID, which must be registered before November 13th, 2009 (latest on November 12th).