I'm sure most of you who are reading this are in love with Drupal and so am I. But I'm about to share with you one of the hard learned lessons about Drupal. That is, sometimes not doing it in Drupal is a better idea.

1. Design in Photoshop instead of Illustrator

While some designers will disagree that Photoshop should be used for design, almost every web designer I know creates concepts in Photoshop. The advantage to designing in Photoshop is less to the designers and more to the developer. It is much, much easier to crop, hide layers, measure pixels and optimize graphics using Photoshop. It also provides a much more realistic representation of the web site concept considering Photoshop uses pixels and Illustrator does not.

I learned how to use Drupal by watching videos. I was linked to UNT's webmaster site where I discovered that they offer Drupal training via video screen casts from Lullabot. I watched them all— Understanding Drupal, Administrating Drupal, and Learning Views— and gained a good understanding of what Drupal was all about. I found out later that each of these series costs money, and I got to use them for free— lucky me (Thanks UNT!).

Do you own or have you ever owned a car? If so, then you're no stranger to the fact that a vital part of keeping that car running properly is routine maintenance. Air in the tires or an occasional new set of tires, fresh oil and a new oil filter and even some new windshield wiper blades for the occasional rain storm; guess what those all cost money! Now outside of a few luxury dealers that now include that, odds are you had to pay for all of those things and if you don't you're car won't run properly and could need major repairs.

Henry Ford had a vision based on customer demand. In 1908 the Model T was introduced to the world and produced in a small, rented factory on Mack Avenue in Detroit, Michigan. Early models were produced at a rate of only a few a day by groups of two or three men working on each car. By 1913, Ford Motor Company had not only increased its man power, but also increased its efficiency by creating a moving assembly line which boosted annual production to 202,667 that year. Henry Ford’s vision and the Model T’s demand had developed the basic techniques of mass production.

If you have ever tried to run a site without any caching at all, you will pretty quickly appreciate the value it brings to a site. Caching is basically storing previous information requests and calculations and checking to see if it has already been done before doing it again. For example, if I asked you to look up a name in the address book and you put your finger there and closed the book, if I again asked you for the same name you could very quickly look it up. This is very useful for common tasks and lookups since it can save time and resources that can be dedicated elsewhere.

I have found that one of the best way to introduce people to Drupal is through case studies. Case studies, on Drupal.org, are complete breakdowns of newly built, or converted, Drupal websites written by the site's developers. In these case studies, developers generally discuss the project and why they initially chose Drupal, the site design and architecture, functionality, and challenges they faced along the way.

I've just discovered my latest favorite new feature in Drupal 7. Cron Queues. Previously when trying to process large amounts of data (like sending 10,000 emails) we were left with trying to get Batch API and cron to work together. Not the easiest thing in the world.

One of the things that always gets my gander up when I get comps and mockups back from designers is when there are buttons in places that links should be. For whatever reason many designers/UI people really like buttons and put them all over the place. There are pretty defined guidelines for when to use buttons and when to use links and these are often not followed.

Online surveys, such as those offered by Surveymonkey and Zoomerang, are excellent tools for collecting targeted opinions from employees and consumers. Their ease of use and user-convenient accessibility allows you to reach large groups of individuals across the globe with minimal financial and time commitments.

Advertising and marketing firms utilize these tools to gather valuable brand and industry insights, and businesses of all sizes can increase efficiency and productivity if the surveys are used efficiently. Here are some tips on how to do just that: