Planning Your Drupal Site
To figure out which Drupal modules features to add to your site, you need to have a clear idea of its purpose and plan accordingly. Knowing this will help you pick the right features for your site.
Understanding the purpose of your site is the first step in creating it. Your site probably falls under one or more of these categories:
Blog: Blogs allow you to share your view of the world on some particular topic. They're also good advertising tools for getting news out about a company. They're often one part of a larger site.
Brochure: These sites are largely static advertisements or information about a business or service.
An example of a brochure site is Thealamo.org. While this site does have a calendar and gift shop, its main purpose is to serve as a brochure with rarely modified information.
Community: These sites exist to attract people with something in common. They typically encourage discussion of a topic with forums. Drupal for Dummies falls under this category.
Image gallery: Now that most people have digital cameras, photography has never been more popular. You may want to build a site (or portion of a site) devoted to showcasing your images.
Information or news: You want to send out frequent news updates about a topic. You may also want to aggregate information from other websites.
Storefront: You have a product to sell and need an online shopping cart system to allow site visitors to order your goods.
Your site may fall under several of these categories. For example, you might want to sell things and also blog about your company to let your visitors know about sales or new products. Or you may want to create a community site that allows members to post images.
Web Design & Development Glossary
