I love drupal. It rocks. I really like what some people have been able to do with the sites that don't have the "drupal look". When clients want a site, they want what they find else. And that's the situation I'm in. I've got a request for a news portal. I've look at a lot of the news sites, and they all look great. Wouldn't it be cool if we could pool all of that knowledge - from having images instead of "Email this page", insert ad's into the node someway down, having images with captions, first taxonomy term specific blocks etc - in a single place.
That's my challenge. Take a simple news site in New Zealand like www.nzherald.co.nz for example. It's based on taxonomy's. It's not drupal, but it is quite similar. Can we replicate it?
I can't paste a table layout I made to reference to it, but please visit the page and I'll explain the sections of the page (and add some little extras in)
Node
1. The page is taxonomy based
2. First taxonomy term with RSS feed
3. Images with print page, email page, comment on page
4. Attached image with caption and photographer (not in website)
5. Inline advertisement half way down page taxonomy term related
6. Not in this website, but a google style related news stories (i.e. other articles about the exactly same topic/news item, i.e. from different news sources on the same topic)