Artopa, LLC
Artopa is my design company. I offer print design and web design. I specialize in developing dynamic web sites powered by the open-source content management system Drupal.
I've always did freelance work as a designer, but four years ago I decided it was time to make it official and open my own company. The business has been doing really well with strong sales growth every year.
The majority of the work that Artopa, LLC handles is web design. For most of my clients, I handle the entire process starting with designing a general look to the pages and then coding them to work with the CMS. I've worked with a variety of CMSs (Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress, Typo3, and some other smaller ones). I've been using Drupal exclusively for over a year now. It's definitely my preferred CMS. I settled on Drupal after working with the others mostly because of the ease at which I can theme a site. With Drupal I have a lot of control and find the API easy to understand so I can add logic to the theme when required.
I also work with my clients to determine what functionality they'll need on the site (forum, blog, video, CRM, e-commerce, etc). I then install the needed 3rd party modules and configure them to work on the site. I have written a few very basic modules for Drupal when there wasn't a 3rd party module that would work. My skills with PHP are basic though. I can code a little logic for a theme, tweak existing code in a module or write some simple functions to query the database or create forms to collect some data, but if there was a need to integrate with a backend system, I would look for help from someone who has better PHP skills to assist me.
After I understand the needs of the site and the audience it's targeting, I'll begin to create a few possible designs in Photoshop. Working with the client we take the initial designs and create a general look to the site. This design will cover a typical page with its navigation and side blocks, etc. After the client approves the design, I break apart the PS file in to the pieces necessary to create an HTML/CSS tableless layout. I code the site by hand in my favorite text editor, TextMate and handle the CSS using CSSEdit. I can use Dreamweaver, but I find it clunky and only use it when I'm building email templates or campaigns since they really still need to be table-based. At this point I also insert the PHP functions needed to pull data from the CMS. I'll install the CMS on the server and create the mySQL database. Once the site is roughly configured, I'll upload the new theme. I find it much easier to fine-tune the small details of the theme once it is on the site and I can populated the beta site with some placeholder copy that mimics the content the site will have.
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