KIPP - the Knowledge is Power Program - is a network of free open-enrollment college preparatory public schools in under-resourced communities throughout the United States. KIPP Colorado opened its first Colorado school – Sunshine Peak Academy in 2002, and it’s second, KIPP Denver Collegiate High School, in August 2009. With the addition of a second school and plans for more in the future, KIPP Colorado needed a new website to help further its mission, with an objective of increasing support from the community in terms of volunteers and donations.
First, the theme
With a beautiful new design in hand from Bainbridge Studios, KIPP needed a Drupal shop to bring it to life. The site design consisted of a unique homepage layout, and a one and two-column sub-page layout. We started by creating the Drupal theme as a sub-theme of Zen. One of the more time-consuming aspects of theming this design was the implementation of graphic elements for the menus, including different colors for the rollovers:
We used the nice menus module for the drop-downs, and the menu class module to facilitate theming each menu parent individually.
Image links vs. text links
As is sometimes the case, design does not always serve functionality. When the site was themed and ready for the KIPP administrators to start adding content, KIPP realized that they needed to have control over the menu names, and that having to make new graphics for the menu text was not going to be feasible. We removed the graphics and styled the text as best we could, with the following results:
