TopNotchThemes is proud to be a Gold Sponsor at DrupalCamp Colorado, coming up in ten short days! Most of the TNT team will be there, and we’ve got two sessions proposed:

• Increase ROI with a user-friendly, great looking Ubercart store — if you want to hear about the handful of easy changes we made to our Drupal/Ubercart store on TopNotchThemes.com that doubled our conversion rate, this is a session you don’t want to miss!  We’ll be talking about design and e-commerce best practices for improving customer experience.
• Are Panels and Skinr the future of point-and-click Drupal theming?  Skinr (along with the Studio theme) got a lot of buzz at the recent Drupal designers (D4D) camp, and we’ll be talking about this approach, along with Panels 3 theming to give you a taste of what UI-selectable styling in Drupal can look like.

The sessions are still yet to be chosen, so please add your vote (two days left!) if you’d like to see them at the camp.

We’ll also be demoing the first (semi-)public preview of something very exciting in the works from TopNotchThemes…

Photos are the face of your products for your online store. Any photo is better than no photo, but improving your product images can have a huge impact on sales, reduce customer support requests, and minimize refunds or exchanges. Here are some tips for showcasing your products at their best in Übercart.

Make product images clear and consistent

Print catalogs typically hire one illustrator or photography studio to create all the product images in a section; at the very least, they have an art director to ensure that the tone and style are consistent. Even if you don’t have that luxury—if you get your graphics from multiple sources, for example—a few minutes in Photoshop can turn a visual jumble into a collection where all the pieces look like they belong. You can do this by processing all images to have the same proportions, or be the same apparent size, or have the same effects (such as a drop shadow or glow). 

Which one of these more clearly shows what’s being sold?  With the one on the right, there can be no mistake.  Imagine your customers trying to quickly scan over a page full of product photos like the one on the left!

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! :)

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.

I made no secret about our positive thoughts on the new O’Reilly book, Using Drupal. But in case you weren’t sure just how much we love this book, we’re offering you a special treat:

Anyone who buys a premium Drupal theme from TopNotchThemes this month will get a free digital copy of Using Drupal, on us!

All you have to do is ask for it! This applies to anyone who purchases a theme before midnight PST on Dec 31st 2008, and anyone who’s already bought a theme in December – just shoot us an email.

Based on the great feedback and questions we’ve had from TNT theme users so far, this is the handbook for Drupal we wish all our customers had, so for a short time we’re going to make it happen. If you’ve had that idea for a side business or site upgrade on the back burner, now’s a good time to snag a freebie along with a new look and feel for your Drupal site :)

PS. We’ve got more themes now updated to Drupal 6, and new Ubercart themes (for Drupal 5 and 6).

Photo: PingVision