Experience with Drupal 8 - Creating a new Company Website

I took up an interesting job this August - to completely redesign from scratch using drupal cms, our company website Sree Murugan Tile Works! When I created the site during 2004, I did it too as a DIY site, with HTML and some PHP code for layout. I chose plain, clean and no-fuss design. Just a few products were listed.

Now I wanted to develop the new site in parallel without disturbing the existing site. I chose to register a new domain name tileworks.in - so that I can redirect to sree-murugan.tileworks.in. I registered the domain with GoDaddy and added a hosting account. Installing Drupal 8 was a breeze, GoDaddy's cpanel let me choose my required PHP version. 

Back in 2004 when I created my company website, people visited websites from computers. Mobile or tablet users were practically non-existent. Today, after 12 years, the world has transformed beyond recognition! Here is the data from Google Analytics: 88% visits from mobile and tablet! Users using Computers are just 12%. 

Designing for mobile is entirely different: accommodating to smaller screens, layout that responds to screen orientation changes etc. I tested Bootstrap theme for Drupal. Though very promising, I wanted to keep coding to the minimum. So I chose Adaptive theme which is specifically for people who are shy of editing theme files. The on-screen configuration supported by Adaptive Theme proved to be a good scaffolding until I developed the courage to edit the theme code and css!

Once the new site was developed enough, I redirected the old domain mspvtiles.com to tileworks.in - the new site for Sree Murugan Tile Works is online! Please do visit the site and drop your comments!

Adobe Lightroom CC - A Must for Photographers

Buying a new Nikon D5500 SLR Camera posed a new challenge - to organise, edit and scale photos. I stumbed upon Adobe's new offering Lightroom CC. Available as a Photography bundle comprising of Adobe Photoshop CC and Lightroom CC for just over Rs550 per month. Give it a try, its worth it!

Toyota Plant Visit

Visited TKAP, Bangalore.
Awestruck by the profoundness!

Am back!

Has been a long while since I wrote here. A lot has happened but somehow never found the time to share.

I have found DropBox.com very useful to share files among all devices like PC, Android, iPhone & iPad. So far, it is the easiest way for me to quickly upload small documents to my Apple devices - much more simple and convenient than iTunes.

Give it a try.

Thoughts...

A few thoughts inspired by famous quotes:

Anyone can give up. Its the easiest thing to do.

“No one can persuade another to change. Each of us guards a gate of change that can only be opened from the inside. We cannot open the gate of another, either by argument or emotional appeal.”
Be willing to surrender what you are for what you could become.”
“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

Commom Sense is Not Common

Why is it called common sense anyway?

A lot of business sense and expertise is common sense. Many excellence programs distill to common sense. ISO 9001 QMS, TPM, 5S, Six Sigma... You name it. An essential and substantial ingredient of all these is common sense.

Most important insights are plain common sense. Or so they see, after you learn it. Like Peter Drucker's insights on business for example.

But Common sense is not commonly present. Most of our life experience is about aquiring this common sense. Why call it common sense if it is not common anyway? Perhaps the 'common' does not mean 'present everywhere', it probably means 'applies universally' to many things.

Morning Coffee

If you are using FireFox, Get this Add-on called Morning Coffee.

It lets you open all your favorite sites in multiple tabs one click. You can define which sites to open depending the day of week.

Download here.