Modern and accessible
by Bob Snodgrass, March 20, 2026
Today, we launched a new look for net2Community, Inc. This step is the first in a series of changes we are making within our company. Our industry, like many others, is experiencing dramatic change. How businesses and organizations use their internet properties has to change with it. We are in the business of delivering results for our clients by building things on the internet, which also has to change.
We are usually building things for other people and NOT working on our own website. We are the proverbial shoemaker's kids, remember shoemakers? (I'm sure you've at least seen movies). So it stands to reason, our first change is this new look. Our last refresh was back in 2017, it didn't look good, and it was certainly way past due. It looks much better now!
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How we did it
Let me tell you more about this little project. It was really quite simple. Timing is everything, so we waited to take advantage of some newly released tools, specifically Drupal Canvas. This saved a lot of time and allowed us to learn more about the new Drupal Canvas page builder. We purchased the Neonbyte theme from Dripyard; the cost of the theme and annual support was well worth the cost, and will continue to save costs as we make further improvements.
Our main objective was to get a fresh look and make our site fully accessible, so we didn't feel the need for a complete graphic design and style guide. Instead, we used AI to develop technical specifications based on some design examples. We kept our original theme in place as we developed the styling for our new sub-theme. We proceeded to make changes to content page templates, display lists used on some pages, and build some landing pages with Drupal Canvas.
More details
Our original theme was a custom sub-theme based on the Neato base theme. We were using Layout Builder as our page layout tool. We used the theme switcher module, which provides the ability to set rules to swap out which theme a URL uses when it is rendered to the browser. We used the Neonbtye base theme and modified our Neonbtye sub-theme for the styling changes we needed.
We used Drupal Canvas for the page builder for landing pages such as our new front page, the about us page, and our services page. Neonbyte comes with an extensive collection of Single Directory Components that we used in our Canvas pages, along with existing blocks and views. Drupal Canvas does not yet fully support layout for content type templates, so we turned off Layout builder and adjusted the twig template files for Neonbyte. We had just a few views that needed to be modified to work with Neonbyte. The documentation provided by Dripyard for their themes makes it very easy to adapt styles for views theming. We have also used the Editoria11y module to help us maintain accessibility as we edit our content.
What's next
Our new theme is a big improvement over what we had, and at this point, we can make improvements as we build out new functionality and content. After DrupalCon next week we will revisit our plans and add an update here, so come back and visit.
Thanks to the folks at Dripyard who provided the base theme, and Michele Redway for all the work on the sub-theme.