Okay, so the last new look wasn't the last. But there's nothing wrong with being a perfectionist, right? This new design is all about combining the clean approach the site had with the last design with the level of aesthetic appeal of the first design. The previous look was a little stark, and ultimately didn't provide the kind of space I wanted to showcase my portfolio.

It's not just a facelift; there are changes under the hood too: the site has moved from TextPattern to Drupal for content management. I'd played with Drupal before, but never really explored the wealth of modules that are out there. I love open source! Apart from a little wrestling with the Views2 module to get the portfolio to display how I want it, the building of the site was painless; simply a matter of copying over the content (luckily there wasn't much, though I'm sure someone out there has figured out a more-or-less direct import method) and creating the site theme.

Given the incredible range of modules available, it would be a shame to not make use of them. With that in mind, in the near future I'll be adding a 'client area' where those wonderful people we call paying customers can settle their accounts online and track their invoices.

Drupal is an amazingly flexible system; the possibilities for community-based/social networking sites are endless, as well as e-commerce sites for various different business models. If you're interested in having us work on such a site for you, please get in touch and we'll be glad to help. In the future we may be offering custom drupal themes as a specific service, so if you blog a lot and want a distinctive look, or want your business site to run on drupal, we can help!

Through the various revisions of this site, I've learned to always check if someone hasn't already invented the wheel; it initially ran on a homegrown CMS that, while fully functional, was not the feature-rich platform that Drupal or even TextPattern turned out to be. Still, it was probably for the best; the majority of my PHP programming skills were gained through endless nights of creating a system that I would be happy to have both my website and my clients' running on.