Stephanie Pakrul and Chris Fassnacht from Top Notch Themes discussed Return on Investment and Ubercart. These are my notes from the presentation. I also took video that is broken up into four pieces at the end of this post. I was at the back of the room, so the sound is a little quiet. Hopefully it is still helpful.

They started out by talking about the strongest feature of Ubercart is its automatic integration with Drupal. That makes things relatively easy for the developer.

75% of users make a judgement about your company based on the design of a site. Business metrics can improve drastically with a good design. Quite simply good design can improve your conversion rate and improving you conversion rate is the investment that keeps on giving.

Happy Canada Day to all my family and friends back home.

I've lived in the United States since 1995 when I moved to Virginia to go to graduate school. I married a terrific lady from the U.S.A. and we decided that we would make it our home. Since then we moved to Colorado - which, by the way has quite a large Canadian population - living in a little house with our girl and three dogs.

Every year at this time, as Americans get ready for Independence Day, I quietly reflect on who I am and the traits that being Canadian has imparted on me. As the American Flags go up and people begin to fire off fireworks days before (and after) the 4th of July, I take a few minutes to think about my time in Ottawa and Lennoxville. I think about the great times I had on Parliament Hill watching the amazing fireworks display. I think about my friends from University. But most of all, I take the time to enjoy my fond memories of my family.

So, Happy Dominion Day! Be proud to be Canadian.

Jono Shuster, the ED of the Entrepreneurial Standards Forum (http://es2f.org) did a session on Entrepreneurs and Drupal. These are my notes from that session and the marginal video I took during the presentation.

Jono started his comments by making an observation about the Denver Boulder User Group (DBUG) - half of them are entrepreneurs. He made the connection that Drupal and entrepreneurship is a natural fit. That led him to propose this presentation.

Last week I ordered 100 little cards from Moo.com. The site allows you to create cards, stickers, mini-cards, and greeting cards amongst other things. I wanted the little cards for TraumaAdoption. It seems like when I'm out and about, there are people who I meet who have interest in the little site that my wife and I built in Drupal and of which I have become the defacto community manager.

I ordered the cards about 10 days ago and today they arrived in a little padded mailer inside a very sturdy plastic case. The cards have a nice feel to them - the stock seems thick and has a bit of a shine. My only real complaint is the lack of ability to design the back where you lay text. Basically you have the choice of three fonts and the option to centre, justify left, or justify right.

Still, the little cards weren't too expensive and each one seems like a tiny piece of art. All in all, I'm pleased and will order them again.

I've submitted a proposal to Drupalcon Paris. It is titled Build A Community Site - No Coding Required and is focused on new-comers to Drupal. When a person is looking to create a small community site or blog, there are different options out there ranging from Wordpress, to Joomla!, to Blogger, to Drupal.

When a new user approaches Drupal, there is often a sense that the software is overwhelming. In truth, when you break Drupal down, much of it is fairly simple and straight forward to develop a basic site.

Ben Finklea from Volacci presented SEO optimization for Drupal 6. These are my notes from the presentation. Below that are several videos from his presentation.

Ben started out by underlining that anyone can do Drupal SEO. There are plenty of good modules that you can use to help. There are videos and books that can also help you create a rocking SEO plan.

10 reasons that Drupal is the best platform for SEO

1) Configurable
2) Flexible
3) Stays optimized
4) No duplicate content
5) Clean code
6) Easy to integrate with 3rd party SEO services
7) Fights Spam
8) Allows for landing pages
9) Community Features
10) Thriving Ecosystem

A Case Study of http://shop.usafa.org, the theme, the modules used, and Some great customizations that allow us to do more than used to be possible with our previous e-commerce web application.

The best stuff is in a custom panel that integrates with the checkout process, and does some Magic with our proprietary "Raisers Edge" database.

These are my notes from the session-forgive the speed at which they were taken. At the bottom of the notes are four short YouTube videos that I took during the presentation. The sound isn't great, but you should still be able to hear the discussion.

Carl Wiedemann did a basic session on basic Drupal usage as a live demo. These are my notes from the presentation, such as they are. He had a drupal instance set up where he:

We'll explain how high-level user needs translate into Drupal concepts. We'll start building a simple Drupal site with common features such as news, events calendar, downloads, and contact forms.

Today was the first day of Drupalcamp Colorado. I attended several sessions including:

• Welcome to the Jungle! Basic Drupal Recipes and Best Practices for Beginners
• Functional Interactive Design
• Starting Your Own Drupal Business: What's It Take?
• Modules You Should Use On Every Site OR Stump the Chump
• Increase ROI with a user-friendly, great looking Ubercart store
• Getting the most out of Drupal's taxonomy system

The day began with the opening session. There were roughly 200 people in attendance.

Do you want to learn a ton about Drupal? Do you know what a node is? Have you ever heard of a tpl file? Does the idea of creating an ecommerce site from scratch without (or with) having to code a single line appeal? Can you see yourself hanging out with a whole bunch of cool, nice, and geeky people (about 200 so far)? Interested in creating custom work flows? Ever heard of Apache Solr? Do you want to? What the heck is a Skinr? Or Studio? Explore APIs. Learn about SEO. Discover beautiful Drupal design! How do you use media? Agile Project Management best practices. AHA!

Sound fun? Are you going to be near Metro Denver this weekend?