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.

Ahhh, images in Drupal. A lot is being actively developed this area, with numerous modules available, which usually get all the attention. But sometimes you just need a quick and dirty way to easily add images that just work to a Drupal node. This tip is from our "How to build a great Drupal website" Quickstart Guide, available for download as a PDF.

This process we’re going to show you first is frankly a bit of a workaround, but it’ll introduce you to a simple way to add images and formatting to a Drupal page using only Drupal’s built-in modules. The guide goes on to show you another way to create the same page with CCK + Imagefield.

You’ll have to be logged in as a user that has access to the "Full HTML" input format. By default, Drupal only gives that access to the "superuser" — that is, the user created when you first installed Drupal. You can give that access to other users on the "Input formats" administration page at example.com/admin/settings/filters; for more information about permissions and roles, see drupal.org/getting-started/6/admin/user/permissions and drupal.org/getting-started/6/admin/user/roles, respectively.

New users to Drupal can be the greatest education in the world. We’ve learned so much from helping others in Drupal’s online support chat, maintaining issue queues, and fielding customer support requests from people implementing their first site with a TNT Drupal theme. 

It quickly became apparent that we were seriously lacking in the documentation department. So a few new things have come of this recently, which we hope will become great resources in the Drupal community at large:

TopNotchThemes Quickstart Guide: Build a Great Drupal Website - this is a free, illustrated, 24-page guide for that stage of Ok so I have Drupal installed — now what? It also serves as a guide to using some of the special features of our themes, but walks you through creating content with images, blocks, menus, organizing nodes with taxonomy, theme settings, and simple step-by-step examples of CCK and Views.

Theme handbook: Acquia Marina - this theme does some things a bit differently than themes you might’ve used before. It’s powerful, but some of these features need a little further explanation. We’re hoping this handbook page will address some of the most common questions (such as the collapsible regions creating different layouts, theme settings, block icons, PNG fix for IE6, etc) and also serve as a study for those looking to create their own complex themes.

It’s been three months now since we released the Acquia Marina theme, a free Drupal theme developed for Acquia’s Drupal distribution and released on drupal.org.  It’s been an amazing ride of feedback so far, and widespread use and testing by the community has made both it and all our themes so much better (and has kept the issue queue very busy, which Jay has done a remarkable job of handling).  For that we send a big THANK YOU to both Acquia and the Drupal community!

3,000 people are using Acquia Marina, according to the usage stats, making it the second most popular contrib theme (after Zen, naturally) on drupal.org!

We’ve come across some great uses of it in the wild and wanted to share a few favourites:

Intelligent Sustainable Energy
A very clean interpretation, changing the blue to grey and a logo to match.  Kudos!

Mommie 911
Wow, Marina with a completely new colour scheme!

EarthShare Washington
There’s not a whole lot of Marina left here, but you can see it — nice job on making it your own and great colours.

Acamdex
This one is my favourite unmodified (as far as I can tell at least) use of Marina.  Great use of the preface regions with the checkmark bullets for key points.

Town of Williston
Ok, this one almost makes me wish we’d done it in grey to start with — simply beautiful!

SpreadThunderbird