Welcome To The New HollyIT

Not being a graphic designer is hard when you want to make your own site. I can do all the inner stuff to make a site hum, but when it comes to the actual presentation...well with that I am color blind. So this has been a serious project I have been involved with for a couple of months. I can't even begin to tell you how many designs I have had and thrown away before finally coming up with this one.

First off, the front page has totally new layout. Using Views and Panels, I came up with a design I really like. The top rotating banner section really took some figuring out. I wanted to keep the site with mostly contributed modules, so I had to look through all the great slider module Drupal has to offer. I was finally able to get it working with Views Cycle. I had to do a little custom CSS to get the pager in there, but it all worked out great.

I have also integrated my client support system into the site now. I actually moved from using Trac to using the Drupal Support module. Out of all the ticketing systems available for Drupal, Support offered what I wanted - total simplicity. Add to that the ability to create and respond to tickets via email and I was sold. I did do a little bit of customization to the module, but I was able to achieve that without touching the module's code. Instead I did everything in it's own separate module.

I'm not totally decided on if I want to leave the support system integrated with the main site or move it to it's own subdomain. I am leaning towards the later and moving it off to a dedicated server, while keeping the main site on the current shared hosting. One of the main reasons for that is that I'm considering setting up server monitoring for clients and that would require a dedicated server, which I do have access to. On top of that, the reliability of a dedicated server would be a great comfort to a very important part of my business (even though the shared hosting this site is running on is extremely reliable). So there might be some more changes over the weekend, but nothing that will be really noticeable to the general public.

Anyways, I hope you all enjoy the new design and layout. I'm sure I'll be tweaking it as time goes on, but after a couple of years, I finally found something I am happy with.