Please pardon if these thoughts are a bit rambling, but I've excerpted them from an email exchange with one of our e-branch participants:

Recent discussion has caused me to consider much of the underlying decisions made when putting together the e-branch system, and I thought I'd communicate those decisions. I hope I don’t start to sound too passionate, but, hey, this is what I love, and I think it’s important for folks to understand that we’ve attempted to orient our e-branch system towards the big picture of what’s happening in the Internet and also to bring the web-equivalent of library values into play in the structural decisions.

Drupal is biased towards text. There’s no doubt about that, and really, what more should one expect from a “content management system”? To have utter and complete control over a page’s design – well, that’s where people need to learn HTML and CSS and graphic design and how to make all three work together (which is a full-time job – I’m evidence of that) and do it themselves. That route, the one where you can “paint with color” on the web, of course wouldn’t work within our e-branch system for practical purposes and in fact goes counter to what the whole system is about - making it easy for libraries to manage their web sites with a minimum of technical knowledge.

I’d caution against participating libraries using hacks such as adding white images that blend into the background to push images to the left or right "invisibly" to make a page look a certain way. We’ve striven to make the e-branch system semantically correct (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web) and standards-based, and adding hacks muddies it up. Just as cataloging books has its MARC records, web design has its XHTML Strict, CSS, and semantic design principles. And just as bookstores may merely put books on shelves in groupings in alphabetical order and libraries catalog books and shelve them according to exact specifications, many web designers just hack pages together without regards to standards while others, with a librarian’s attention to detail, attend to the standards and issues of accessible design. If designed right, web pages are accessible to and navigable by users with visual impairments – and this is important not only for libraries but for everyone: http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/060907/cgth051.html. And if designed right, web pages mean something to search engine spiders and they can discover subject matter and rank pages with more relevancy.

Unfortunately, just as great cataloging is not noticed, high-quality web coding is not seen by most folks either. It does matter, however, and the results don’t have to be unattractive.

Our initial focus with the e-branch system has been the bigger-picture integrity of the project, the system, and the code. We do however want to provide libraries with themes they can enjoy and feel proud to display. Yet we are faced with the fact that many advanced layouts and techniques are likely so specific to one location that were we to implement them, we’d end up with a theme only appropriate for one or two libraries.

So we’re faced with a balancing act.

If you’d like to request a specific style of theme, let us know. We will be developing more themes and your feedback is very helpful. Perhaps you have a color palette you’d like to see incorporated?

Now you can definitely spice up your site with more graphics and imagery (see http://icfl.idaho.gov/page/working-with-images), and we encourage you to do so, but it’s a reality that there are limits. We’d be happy to help you see how far you can push those, though. We want you to be proud of your site.

And always, of course, _please_ if you’re unable to accomplish something in Drupal – let us (Eric or I, specifically) know. It’s likely we can help put you on the right track, make an update to the system to allow you to accomplish your goal, or explain your alternatives – or if it’s a bug, we can fix it!