The second post in our ÜberTip series (read/download the full guide) is an important attitude for any e-commerce site — keep it simple!  Drupal can be prey to "open buffet syndrome" on modules and features.  All that exciting functionality is there at your fingertips, an enabled block away!  But when you’re trying to encourage your customers to part with their hard-earned money on what you’re selling, you don’t want to distract them from that primary goal.

Dealing with Drupal’s defaults

Unless you’re running a social networking site with chat functionality, do customers really need to know who else is logged in?  For that matter, Drupal’s default Navigation and User Login blocks are unnecessary for most e-commerce sites.  Disable whatever blocks aren’t absolutely necessary, especially once the user gets to the checkout pages.

Focus on essential information

Beyond blocks, consider the content of individual pages. Ruthlessly cut words and graphics that don’t serve your purpose. That’s no easy task, as was illustrated by the writer Edgar Allen Poe when he turned in a novel on deadline: "Here it is, at 400 pages. I could have made it 300 pages if you’d given me more time."

Make the buying process obvious

Assuming that your purpose is to sell products, make sure that customers are never more than a click away from buying — and make that button big, unambiguous, and attractive.

Übercart does some of the work for you by providing a Shopping Cart block that you can (and should) make visible on every page, but you can do more by emphasizing the "Add to cart" button on product pages.

You can make your own adjustments by tweaking a theme’s CSS according to these instructions.

Market Share is something a little bit different — we’ve built a (optional) multi-layered banner area with a background texture, custom menu theming, and two photo areas. Shown here is the default that we would imagine for a store selling mobile devices: a happy couple connecting with their cell phones, and a glamor shot of products involved. Your site’s mission statement can also appear in this area, which makes for an easy way to showcase a current promotion, since this field allows HTML. These are collapsible regions that will disappear gracefully if you don’t want to use them for your site, or easily change the (included) stock photos to something custom for your own needs.

While this theme comes with plenty of custom styling for Ubercart, its sleek and professional appearance would also make it excellent for any corporate Drupal 6 site. See the product page for lots more details and eye candy!

Ruby Sands is perfect for you if you have a lot of information and navigation. Again with a ton of collapsible block regions, this theme has extra special TLC for different styles of menus and blocks. This would be great for a blog or news site, non-profit, technical provider, community group, etc. The upper regions are very configurable so you can easily create a custom look for different landing pages vs. content pages.

An organization using one of our themes recently remarked that it “was so flexible that we must have reworked the look of the home page about ten times”! That’s a compliment, not a complaint if you ask us! :)

It’s clear that from now on, we won’t be relying on big companies living at the fat end of the tail for job security. Seniority, talent, productivity, and loyalty have proven to be no guarantee that you’ll keep your position when things get this bad. That’s the bad news.

The good news? Maybe your employer is doing you a favor by handing out pink slips. Because you really only have control over your economic destiny when you cut out the middleman (your employer) and become your own boss. Then, whether or not you succeed is only a result of your willingness to learn and your persistence. In fact, that’s the new secret to success: be willing to learn everything you need to know and then apply it repeatedly.

It used to be that it took a lot more: a prestigious education, lots of capital, connections in the Old Boy network, equipment, office space, employees, and lots more. But the internet and applications like Drupal have changed things dramatically for the better. So here are the top 10 reasons why now is the best possible time to start a business—specifically one using Drupal.

1. Your time is free

Your unemployment insurance or severance package is a rare opportunity to buy the time to learn how to get a business website up and running.  Even if you end up looking to work for someone else, the fact that you started an online store, consultancy, or other enterprise will show a prospective employer that you have both initiative and valuable skills. It’ll be either your ticket to independence or a respectable interlude between your last job and your new one.