India Business View

Client Requirements: 

India Business View is a business news site from India. The prime objective of the client was to be able to enter and present business news in an easy and seamless manner. The site would have various sections based on the type of news and would also have to be Search Engine friendly.

Why Drupal: 

When we planned the website, we wanted a content management system that was easy to build at the start up stage, but can be customized significantly in future. After evaluating other options like Wordpress as a platform, we zeroed in on Drupal. Drupal was an ideal content management system for this site. It gives an excellent framework to enter, categorize and manage content. Seeing the number of online news sites that use Drupal also aided our decision. The site was developed on the foundation of the views, cck, panels and the core taxonomy module.

Implementation Details: 
The 'news' content type was created using the cck module. The content type was then categorized by using different vocabularies for the type of news (Company, Finance, Policy etc), the company and the industry. A free tagging vocabulary was also created to let the editor enter tags while entering the news. We used the pathauto module to generate path aliases instead of the default paths. This done, we used the powerful views module to 'pull' out news for various sections of the site. We used the nodequeue module for certain sections like 'Top Stories' to let the editors of the site decide the order in which news stories would be displayed in the section. We also found the 'Attachment' feature of the views module very useful. This helped us create very flexible blocks for different sections by creating views and implementing a custom template to override the default views template. The main pages of the site including the home page were implemented using the panels module. The look and feel of the site was implemented by creating a custom theme. Drupal's themeing layer is very flexible and allowed us to override themes created by other modules.

Thought behind Search Engine friendliness

The content on indiabusinessview.com will be discovered primarily through search engines. This is true of any online news site, for that matter. So, the site had to be search engine friendly, particularly the story page. After finding out which modules would be needed, we implemented some of them to do particular functions. For example, to allow us to insert page titles on all pages and automatically give keywords and meta description for story pages. The initial results have been good with search engines beginning to pick up the initial stories.

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