By Ameex-Drupal Geeks on

The owner of CrossFit Long Beach was previously owner of a small web design company so all of the work was done in-house. We have in a few instances over the years hired out small maintenance work or changes that were too technical for the owner. Originally we needed a simple business site with blogging capabilities. Over the years many modules have been added and the content changes frequently. The theme is 100% custom built from scratch and has changed slightly but the general look has remained.

Visit crossfitlongbeach.com →
CrossFit Long Beach website screenshot
Why Drupal was chosen: 

We considered Wordpress and Drupal. We chose Drupal because it seemed vastly more scalable and themeable. The Drupal community is the best we have dealt with and there are so many good resources it was an easy decision. We knew this site might start small but would grow over time and it needed the flexibility to do that. The Drupal.org site has a lot of modules available which allows non-coders like ourselves to achieve complicated things that normally would be out of reach because we could not afford to have them done for us.

Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome): 

The original goals were:

  1. To make the site easier to use by staff so that it was updated more frequently
  2. To make the site easier for the end user to navigate, read, and communicate
  3. To set the site up for painless future growth without having to redo the whole site later

Thanks to the help of Drupal and its community all three of these goals were accomplished. We have now been using this site for five years with no major issues. We have added lots of features and modified the theme over the years with no problem. The site has always performed well and our staff uses it with no problems. Upgrading from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7 is the next major step.

Technical specifications

Key modules/theme/distribution used: 
Views (for Drupal 7)
Webform
Lightbox2
Backup and Migrate
Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen: 

There are really too many modules to name. They all serve a purpose, so it is hard to say which are key. I need them all. I think the most used though would be things like Views (can't have blogs without that), Webform (how we get feedback from our customers), Lightbox2 (makes the photos much more elegant), and of course we couldn't live without Backup & Migrate (not much is more important than constant backups). Other notables are IMCE and Contemplate. Contemplate is great for the no-coders like myself.

Community contributions: 

We have contributed feedback where we can and helped people in the forums when possible.

Organizations involved: 
Ameex-Drupal Geeks
Team members: 
chadcross
Sectors: 
Small business