Technical

Today, visitors discover your site on a mobile, small screen device and dig deeper when they are at a big screen device (like a notebook, tablet or desktop computer). The challenge with creating mobile sites is providing seemless integration with content and a consistent user experience. Although the big screen version of your site should still display correctly on phones, the site should be device-aware to present the best display for the device used. Visitors should automatically be redirected to your mobile site and given an option to view the full site, not the other way around.

Dashboards and control panels are commonly used to organize relevant information for the specific user in a format that is easy for the specific user to digest. We recently designed and created a set of visitor, citizen, and employee dashboards for the Pueblo County web site. This project has been one of our favorites.

A geographic information system (GIS) can provide an excellent source of useful data in the form of a web service to be displayed to users of a web site.  GIS data can make the user experience much more valuable and increase the amount of time they will spend on your site.

LDAP is hard to get working with your Drupal site. Luckily there is a module that helps with that (as there usually is). Unfortunately the module currently only provides the ability to log in through LDAP. You can not check to see if the user exists in LDAP, and if not, use the Drupal database. Many sites may want this functionality and it is quite easy to add.

CSS3 has become popular with the latest web browser releases and is increasingly being incorporated into web site designs, however, these features do not work in the older versions of Internet Explorer (IE). While we all would love for everyone to upgrade to at least IE9, many people are stuck with IE7 or 8 due to not being able to upgrade to Windows Vista or 7 at this time. CSS3Pie is a library created to help solve the issue of displaying CSS3 properties in IE6-8.

While security through obscurity is often looked down upon, it can really help your site against newbie hackers. By default, Drupal shows files such as CHANGELOG.txt, INSTALL.txt, and README.txt. These files contain information about your current Drupal distribution that could potentially be used to wreak havoc on your site.

A Views 3 style controls how the output is formatted and allows the user to set predefined values. Using custom styles, programmers can create very unique looking lists such as charts, graphs, and time lines. In the example below, I will explain how to start a Views 3 style using a simple timeline as an example. The timeline above is an example of using Views displaying individual nodes called Timeline Events in an attractive display.

I was so excited to get a Google+ invite.  (Thanks, Mark Jarrell!)  Alas: