Sister 2 Sister magazine, a black entertainment and celebrity lifestyle magazine that targets black women, recently relaunched its website using the drupal platform. Drupal is a great out of the box open-source solution for building communities and blog networks, that’s if you have a developer that knows how to customize it.

I was excited to see the new site and explore what it had to offer. So let’s start with the good. One of the first things I noticed was the ease of navigation. I didn’t get lost and it was easy to find my way back to the home page. The color scheme — particularly its bright blue background — was unsettleing at first, but it has grown on me. Overall, the design was a departure from the run-of-the-mill, and I was happy to see that they stayed away from many of the Web 2.0 design trends.

The site also features a nice blend of content. They cover a little bit of everything, with a main focus on celebrities. And they have even customized their own video player. Even though I am an advocate of using services like YouTube so that people can find your content via other means, it still makes sense for the site.

Now here’s the stuff that’s not so good. The fist thing I noticed when I visited the site was that the header image needs to be cleaned up. There is a gray area behind it that really takes away from the overall aesthetic of the page. I think that whoever made the image forgot to turn off the background layer in Photoshop when they saved it. Also, the image is rather large, with a bunch of blank space. With the search bar being in there it isn’t big enough for a 728×90 ad unit so I’m not sure what the justification for it is.

Another thing I noticed was the featured content module with its gray sort nav that is displayed at the top of the page with the title overlays on feature images. It isn’t completely stylized and the red button and the text don’t go with the rest of the site theme, at all. Besides it sort of does more than just overlay the photos — it completely covers about half of the photo. It kind of sticks out like a sore thumb, which isn’t good because it isn’t completely functional. When you click on the story links from the side bar, they don’t go anywhere. They just bring the story up to the main module window. That is one click too many to get to the actual story for me.

The next issue was with the Jamie’s Kitchen section of the site that features video. While I enjoyed the videos, they are all on the same page rather than individual pages with their own comment sections. It just isn’t the most user friendly experience, plus, videos on multiple pages = more page views.

There were a few other small things, like the break where the breadcrumbs are and the color choice there making things get lost, and the lack of ad space, but, overall, I think they are off to a good start. They have a few things that need to be fixed, but once those are done, the site has the potential to be a nice supplement to their print offering. They have lots of good multimedia content and an e-commerce offering, though I’m not sure what they’re going to sell as it is empty right now. But I’ll check back regularly to watch their progress.