Stinging Fly
The old Stinging Fly site whilst functional was begining to look dated and wasn't particularly straightforward to update. So our brief was to redesign the site to make it look more modern, easy to use for both Stinging Fly and site visitors with the addition of a blog and Twitter pull mechanism. This was obviously a site that Drupal was developed for.
Why Drupal?
In this particular instance using Drupal was a nobrainer, it provided 90% of the functionality that was required out of the box this especially so with Drupal 7. The abilty to create custom content types to store information on published books, articles and issues whilst using views to pull the information out is what Drupal does so well. This tied to the fact that it has blogging and comments as a core part of the product made it a fairly trivial excercise in creating the functionality of the site. Contributed modules also helped make the twitter integration painless and content editing using a WYSWYG interface a breeze.
The mainstay of the work was in relation to the design and coming up with a clean, crisp format that made the site easier to navigate and use.
The magazine were looking for a complete revamp of their online presence and required a style consistent with a leading publisher. They wanted to emphasise their literary background in a contemporary yet classic style with a focus on print influenced serif typography.
After exploring a number of concepts the above design was decided apon - a minimal newspaper style in an off white setting to allow easy reading for the viewer.
The magazine logo & signature font was then updated and reworked to fit in with the new direction and the masthead changed accordingly.
Outcomes
The Stinging Fly is now very easy to navigate for visitors allowing them to concentrate on the content and the litterary information that the site offers, at the same time it makes the administration of the site very simple allowing the admin to add new content quickly, place it where needed and have it look how they expect.
Technologies
The Stinging Fly is based on Drupal 7. It relies heavily on the core modules of Drupal 7 and the ever present Views modules. In addtion to these the following are used, TwitterPull module to pull in Stinging Fly Tweets, the Nodequeue module to collect and provide links to selected featured content and The WYSWYG module to provide a richer editing experience for the site admins. Context and MultiBlock are used to aid in making the design work as expected whilst the Google Analytics module adds the famous web statistics tracking system to the website.