AT Koda Drupal 6 Theme

At the beginning of this month I wrote a post about Fusion or AdaptiveTheme and the Drupal 6 theme AT Koda.

What I liked about the original design done by Kodamera and ported to Drupal by Adaptivethemes was the clean lines.

In many ways it looked a lot like one of the early designs I had used for the one of my websites. A site that I always wanted to bring over to Drupal but was reluctant to do so.

The website in question network-marketing-works.com has ranked in the top ten since 2003.

Since it started as a static website and later added wordpress and ultimately the Thesis theme for wordpress I was concerned about maintaining the rankings.

After looking at the clean and minimal code output by Jeff’s Adaptivetheme combined with AT Koda I decided to take the risk even though Koda is still in the dev stage.

A theme in the dev mode to me really doesn’t mean too much; it allows me to modify it to my hearts content.

Moving to Drupal was a time consuming process, yet thanks to modules like WordPress Import it simplified the process.

Pulling in all the static pages from the site where done manually by hand. I did in my research find scripts to import it I wanted more control.

The final stage was to make it as fast as possible, my gut feeling is the search engines as they’ve already stated are and will be factoring this into their algorithms.

They say it’s for a better visitor experience which is true but I also believe it’s for a substantial energy reduction “carbon footprint!”

After the move I had the index page sitting at 282k with Drupal’s standard performance setup. With a Yslow score for small site – blog of B 85, most would probably be happy with that.

I added three modules that made a huge difference CSS Gzip, Javascript Aggregator, and Boost.

After all the changes and a few other tweaks Yslow is now sitting at small site or blog A 99 and google’s page speed of 94/100. I can live with that!

The site has been live with Drupal now for several weeks, no change in rankings even though the link count on the home page has gone from 19 to 70.

Next on the agenda is to implement semantic views, overall I like the clean implementation provided by Adaptivetheme & AT Koda. Now maybe I can get back to writing.