In the first post, I revisited how we came to be building a new website and how we ended up with Drupal. And now to be continued ………

Initially learning Drupal was harder than I thought it would be. We couldn’t get our heads around how it worked, as it was so different to anything we had ever used before. We knew it would be challenging, particularly in choosing Drupal over Joomla, as it was known to be so. However, there were some frustrating moments early on, whilst we struggled with unfamiliar concepts.

Our plans to learn all about Drupal first and then build the website once we had, soon changed as we continued to struggle with the unfamiliar. In the end, we started transfering content over and learnt how to do things as we did so. When we came across something we didn’t understand, we looked for answers, in the books we had, on the Drupal forums, on other websites and on the odd occasion, from our ISP and more often than not, from my husband who has done work with Drupal.

As the new site continued to build, we became more comfortable with everything, the way Drupal was structured, how it all fit together and how to get everything working the way we wanted it to.

Of course, the things we wanted the most, the bling to make it all look lovely and appealing, were the hardest things to get working. It took weeks and trying out different methods and modules before we succeeded with the first of our trilogy of stumbling blocks – the Upcoming Events. Our new books images and events slideshow were the next and once we had the first, the second followed quickly. Our biggest struggle there was working out how Drupal works with images – the answer there: it doesn’t do it very well.

So anyway, it took 22 weeks from installation of Drupal on our web server to the point where we had a website ready for testing. We posted to the existing website, asking for users to check it the new website and provide us with feedback.

Our users were wonderful, happily giving us feedback, all which was constructive, encouraging and reaffirming of what we had built for them. Staff were also supportive and gave us some great suggestions and input. After a few weeks of leaving ourselves open to these responses, we closed down the test site and got ready for the official launch.

In Library Week 2009, we quietly launched our new website, with little fanfare (allowing for Murphy’s law of course) but with great results. We have continued to receive positive feedback from our users and as expected, have continued to refine and tweak the new site. There are still some bugs to be ironed out and there is a continual update process required with Drupal, but its not onerous.

Next step is to add some more features and to get some other staff editing and adding more content to the site. We will also do some more investigation into how the website is being used and by whom.

It’s been a challenge and an awesome learning process, which at times has been so incredibly frustrating, but ultimately very rewarding. Its not been easy, but with the resources we were able to find – print, personal and online, we have done it. A very satisfying result all round.