Today at the first annual FLDrupalCamp I presented a talk on searching Drupal, covering some gotchas, tips and how to best set up your site for both internal searching (searching when on your site) and external searching (someone searching via e.g. Google). This was knowledge built over my career as a web developer, but primarily during the past eight months working on SkiNet.com.
Anyone who has February 7th (2009) available, and who isn't already going to the excellent Acts_as_Conference, should take a trip to Altamonte Springs for DrupalCamp Florida! This new event promises a day's worth of free presentations on all things Drupal from some of Florida's best consultants and advanced users, including the exceedingly talented Ryan Price.
When building a new site in Drupal, unless you've got a large team of developers, one of the first things you're going to want to do is pick a new theme, i.e. a site template. Thanks to the efforts of hundreds of developers from around the world, there are over 170 themes for you to investigate for Drupal 6 (even more if you're stuck with Drupal 5), each one with its own set of traits.
I recently re-launched a site of mine, breastfeedingfordads.com, which I migrated from Wordpress to Drupal. It took a bit of work to get the basics the way I wanted, and replicate the functionality of the plugins I was using, but it seems to work well.