VisitPMR.com: quick site building with Drupal
Drupal-powered sites don't have to look like Drupal at all. The brief for developing www.VisitPMR.com (a travel information site for the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic) called for a commercial look to compete with official tourism "brochure sites" from other countries. At the same time, we wanted Drupal's taxonomy features, ease of editing content, and ease of adding new content.
The site was done by two people in just five days ... thanks to the magic of Cascading Style Sheets and the even bigger magic of Drupal.
We started by making a design and then incorporating it into the phptemplate engine. Then we added just five modules: Feedback, front_page, image, img_assist, image_exact; all of them standard without any modifications. In the design template, we placed the left hand blocks underneath the main content (rather than to the left), and let the right hand blocks stay on the right. This required a simple copy-paste edit to page.tpl.php to overcome the 4.6 limitation (in 4.7 you can place blocks anywhere, as this layout required, but at the time of building we wanted production ready rather than a beta).
In less than a week's worth of work we launched a site that would have taken a month, and more manpower, to build otherwise. Within days it already started ranking high in search engine results; raising awareness about the new country as a potential travel destination.