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Parent Category: Website Design Ottawa

Ottawa Networking Events

• Invest Ottawa (former Ottawa Centre for Research and Innovation or OCRI)
  Invest Ottawa is one of Canada's most successful partnership organizations. Through its more than 600 members, OCRI brings business, education and research together to create the winning economic conditions that allow Ottawa's companies to thrive locally and compete globally.
• Ottawa Capital Network
  The Ottawa Capital Network assists in creating efficiencies in the capital market through programs aimed at educating the entrepreneurial community, creating linkages among the investment community and providing knowledge and support to the business community. The Ottawa Capital Network (OCN) is a program of OCRI’s Entrepreneurship Centre. OCRI is a not-for-profit organization that builds on the strengths of the region to advance research and development, lifelong learning, professional development and community infrastructure.
• The Ottawa Network
  The Ottawa Network (TON) is a grass roots, community based, volunteer organization founded in the fall of 2001. Since then, The Ottawa Network has been very successful in creating a community of budding Ottawa entrepreneurs that support and learn from each other. There were over 700 members of the “network”, as of the fall 2003, including entrepreneurs, professionals and supporters.
• Ottawa Wireless Cluster
  The Ottawa Wireless Cluster holds regular events that include networking and presentations from industry experts on topics ranging from wireless technologies, business models, marketing and investment.
• Ottawa e-Business Cluster
  The Ottawa e-Business cluster (EBC) is Ottawa's primary e-Business and e-Commerce hub. Events and resources are meant for companies engaged in online business as well as for providers, suppliers and support services to the e-Business sector. The primary mission of EBC is 'virtual' economic development and stimulation. All feature speaker and network events are free. EBC is an OCRI supported cluster.
• Ottawa Manufacturers' Network
  The Ottawa Manufacturers' Network (OMN) provides a networking environment for area manufacturing companies, large and small, from all sectors of industry, companies supporting manufacturing, and other relevant government and educational entities.
• Zone5ive
  A speaker series designed exclusively for Ottawa's technology marketing community.
• Ottawa Talent Initiative
  The Ottawa Talent Initiative (OTI) provides the Ottawa high-tech community with career search and business setup services

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Parent Category: Website Design Ottawa

What Your Hosting Company Needs to Have to Host a Joomla Website

If you are considering a new Joomla website or converting your old website into a Joomla website, start with finding out whether your current hosting provider supports Joomla properly. Joomla runs best on the *nix apache type of servers (not Windows apache), Linux apache is the best choice if you are getting a Joomla-driven website.

Most hosting companies say that they "support Joomla", but in reality they often support only "plan vanilla" Joomla but for more advanced requirements they implement "work-arounds" or don't support them at all. For example, a search engine friendly URIs, like the ones you see on this site, in the browser bar, with words in them, this SEO-related feature is not supported natively by Windows IIS or Seuz servers and require tweaks. Some advanced Joomla security components do not run well on these servers. In theory, you can add plugins and customize configuration on any server to get it all working, but in practice - it results in endless communication, hosting support folks are not always knowledgeable, and in some cases, additional tweaks destabilize the site and can even break it.

It is best to do things in the right way right from the start. Get a Linux apache server to host your Joomla websites.

Joomla Website Hosting Requirements

1. LAMP server: Linux + Apache Server + MySQL + PHP/Perl
2. PHP scripting available (PHP Version 5.3.10+, 5.5+ recommended)
3. Access to MySQL database. MYSQL Version 5.1+
4. FTP/Control Panel Access. Database access.
5. Support for mod_rewrite (for SEF) - a Linux apache server supports it natively
6. Support for apache/PHP modules: mod_zlib, mod_sql, mod_xml, curl, curlwrapper, GD library, ionCube, rewrite.

To be sure, please review the official Joomla Technical Requirements page.

Additional Hosting Considerations

Joomla Bliss does not provide hosting services directly, nor do we engage in a hosting reseller activity. However, we are pleased to make our recommendations and put forth factors that you clients might want to consider when selecting a hosting provider:

1. Do not put all your eggs into one basket. Mitigate risks. Initially, it may sound appealing to have one service provider for all your website needs. But if you consider how the process works you will quickly see that it is not good to have hosting and web design provided by the same company. To provide the best quality of the hosting and achieve best numbers of the servers uptime the hosting company should  make large investments in communication channels, powerful servers and top-notch network equipment as well as hire and pay salaries to qualified support personnel, maintenance and systems engineers. Small companies can't make such investments which inevitably leads to problems with service quality.This hosting infrastructure is not connected with website design at all and companies that provide best hosting are in 99% cases specialize in hosting only. When smaller hosting companies sell web design services, in reality they usually outsource the design or hire 3rd-party designers. In fact, we often get website design requests from smaller hosting companies. Furthermore, hosting companies know that changing hosts is an unpleasant process to the clients, so once they get your contract, they gradually cease to provide quality support. When you use two service providers, both parties do what they do best and they also "look over each other's shoulder" and make sure that their response rate is not worse than the "other guy", so in the end, the end client enjoys a better service. And to avoid excessive communication between the two providers, all you need to do is to "add" your website designer to the list of trusted account holders and they will be able to communicate with the host directly on your behalf.
2. Location of the data centers of your hosting company. If your primary market is in the USA, then it is better to select a hosting company with data centers in the States. This, however, is not a critical requirement.
3. Native hosting companies are better than reseller hosting companies. Find out if your hosting companies own their data centers.
4. Domain name registration and Canadian domain name registration. Find out the limitations and differences in costs. Note that when you change hosts, the new host will require you to transfer your domain name to them, and this adds to the cost. Canadian domain names are also more expensive.
5. Live support via chat or phone 24/7 free of charge. Many hosting companies possess similar technical capabilities, so what really matters to end users is support. Some hosting companies only correspond with you by email or require you to submit a ticket - and then take 24-48 hours to reply to it. This is not acceptable.
6. Backup, Fault Management and Disaster Recovery. Does your hosting company conduct regular backups of your website? Does your hosting company keep an error long and, if yes, for how long? Can you obtain this error log if necessary? Make sure you read the fine print. Some hosting companies are not available for assistance even in the event if the site goes down or gets hacked. It is important to find out if the hosting company can be hired for this service (additional fee will be required), and if yes, what level of service you can expect from them.
7. Virtual Servers (VPS). It is good to sign up with a VPS hosting account right from the start. Because if later you would like to “upgrade” your basic hosting plan to a VPS plan, the account transfer procedure will be similar to signing up with a different hosting company (new DNS pointing, etc.). VPS accounts are more expensive, they are not for simple sites, but if you expect significant traffic and if you have a lot of contents translated to many languages, it is best to get a VPS hosting right from the start.
8. Fine print limitations. The main limitations concern allowed disk space and allowed file numbers. A lot of hosting companies advertise “unlimited” disk space, whereas in reality, there is always a limit (so please request their terms and conditions and read them carefully). You may never end up exceeding these limits, but you need to know about them in advance, especially if scalability is important and you may want to add dynamic and bandwidth-intense features later on (like e-commerce, job board, etc).
9. Buffer overflow. This items requires special consideration. A buffer overflow is a type of a hacking attack that literally over floods the server with millions of requests, and this brings the site down. There are several ways for hosting companies to deal with buffer overflows and take preventative actions. It is a routine procedure, but surprisingly, many hosts do not conduct them properly, hence, you need to ask them about it and check to see that it has been implemented. Buffer overflows are solved at the server level. It can happen on any platform.
10. Website monitoring. if you don't have a website maintenance plan with your design agency and if your hosting plan is simple, you need to ensure that you monitor your site by yourself. There are free and very neat tools that allow you to monitor the online status of your website. One of such tools is a free site monitoring tool Monitis. Sign up with them, enter your URL and then if your site goes down, this tool will send you an email within 5 minutes. You can then use forward emails from this "sender" to your phone and assign a specific ring tone to it so that you know when it is an urgent website issue. Many hosting companies charge you for this service, but you can get it set up yourself. If you don't mind paying for maintenance, then make sure that you have actually signed up for this service, as 24/7 website monitoring is not always part of basic-level maintenance packages.

Best Joomla Hosting Companies

Almost all hosting companies claim to support Joomla. But in reality they often support vanilla Joomla and do not have proper servers or the right configurations to support various Joomla extensions, such as enhanced security, search-engine-friendly URLs, etc.

The two hosing companies we can recommend are: HostGator and Rochen. Please note that Joomla Bliss is not a reseller or partner of either of these companies.

HostGator

We have been hosting our own and some of our clients' website with HostGator for the past 3.5 years and have had fantastic experience to date. This host is characterized by the following:

• Specialized in Joomla
• Data centers in the States
• They own their data centers (not a reseller)
• Fantastic support 24/7 via chat, email and phone
• 24/7 website monitoring even with the smallest plans
• Offer cloud or VPS hosting

What Hosting Plan to Select

When selecting a hosting plan, the main consideration is size. The size is primarily defined in terms of traffic and number of documents stored inside the website.

1. Dedicated Server. If you expect huge traffic and your site contains thousands of documents, a dedicated server maybe more appropriate.
2. VPS Cloud Server. If your site contains over 500 documents in various formats and receives roughly 2000 visitors per week, a cloud VPS hosting is a good way to go.
3. Shared Server.  If your site is small and does not need to hold any significant or number of documents, then a regular business plan on a shared server is good enough. Just don't select a baby-level plan if your site has functionalities like e-commerce or document management system. 
4. Baby Plans (Level 1). Select this option is your site is very small and very basic: 20-30 pages of contents, 30-40 images, maybe 1-2 videos, a registration form, but no other dynamic functionalities that involve users submitting data or downloading data. It is always safer to go wtih Level 2 since the price difference between Level 1 and Level 2 is usually insignificant but you do get better options.

Hostgator’s basic dedicated server plan offers fantastic combo: full server access, SSH, Apache, etc. with a whooping 10TB bandwidth at $137/month. That eliminates all the worries about the bandwidth for 95% of websites. Hostgator’s VPS Level 3 and Level 4 plans are much cheaper and also offer sufficient bandwidth for 70% of websites. For example, Joomla Bliss is a website for which a VPS Level 3 is appropriate. 

Apart from our own excellent experience with Hostgator, random reviews and discussion threads on this hosting provider rate at approximately 8:1 good versus bad. That is a much better rate than all other big hosts.

Rochen

Rochen is the official Joomla hosting company. No more description is really necessary but there is a good overview of their main competitive advantages on the Rochen website.

Rochen maintains data center locations in both Dallas, Texas in the United States and London, England in the United Kingdom. Rochen allows you the choice of hosting on a US or UK server. Their cloud virtual hosting plans start $150/month.

Rochen is slightly more expensive than HostGator.

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Parent Category: Website Design Ottawa

Part-time Web Designer

When we say a "web designer", we don't mean it in the way you're probably used to. We mean: when you work with us, you really are a designer; you "own" your web project. You help us assess client requirements, decide on the best directions to take in terms of implementing various features and functionalities; you pick your own pace and time to work; you take keen interest in our clients’ business success; and you go out of your way to make them happy. And, of course, you are compulsively obsessed with Quality Assurance. If you wake up at night thinking you forgot to change the hover effect on a link, then you are the kind of designer we want to hear from <smile>.

We Need You to Have:

• Fascination with open-source software in general and Joomla CMS in particular
• PHP, CSS, HTML, and all other related abbreviations
• Excitement about sourcing and mastering new components, modules and plugins
• Supreme comfort with learning new tools 
• Appreciation of QA and ability to test your own code
• An ability to brainstorm and come up with creative ideas 
• Structured project management behaviour and professional Skype manners
• Civilized email behaviour with replies received from you within 12 hours 
• The appetite and capacity to complete projects from cradle to grave
• Knack for empathy: to really understand what our customers want and think yourself into their shoes 
• Ask-first-get-upset-later attitude
• Convivial, bullet proof personality 
• Good eye for minor graphics creation 
• Basic written and verbal communications skills (English)
• University degree is highly desirable
• Comp sci students, especially Master's students - you will be worshiped

Think you have what it takes to join Joomla Bliss?

What We Offer:

We look forward to hearing from you!

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Parent Category: Website Design Ottawa

Website Design Ottawa Special

We are pleased to offer a special promotion on our website design services to all Ottawa clients:

• New website loaded with modern features and up to 20 pages of content and 20 images (formatted)
• All features of our Gold website design package
• 2 hours of training
• 3 hours of support post launch
• Moving your new site to a live host (your hosting company needs to have a proper support for Joomla)
• $1599 plus tax
• Add $5-8 per month for hosting by Hostgator (we are not their resellers)

Website Design Ottawa

Ottawa seems to have more website design shops per capita than any other city. So how do you chose which website design firm in Ottawa to select? Here are a few things for you to consider: 

1. Does your website design Ottawa firm rent an office space? If yes, their prices will reflect that.
2. Does your website design Ottawa firm have an in-house designer? We often receive calls from agencies who are looking to outsource their website design projects because they don't have an in-house expertise.
3. Does your website design Ottawa firm use pre-made templates but charges you for custom design? It is very rare these days to create a website from scratch. Most website design firms use pre-made website templates which they modify to reflect a particular set of design requirements. But template modification and customization is a much simpler project than a custom website design from scratch. Find out what you are paying for.
4. Can your website design Ottawa firm justify a custom design? How complicated and unique your requirements? There are hundreds of pre-made website templates with very professional designs, clean and attractive layouts that can be customized to achieve almost any desired look. Sufficient customization makes the original template virtually unrecognizable. Most website design firms have access to hundreds of great web templates.
5. Does your website design Ottawa firm offer you a number of mockups? How many? At what additional price?
6. Does your website design Ottawa firm offer support? For how long? At what cost? What's included?
7. Does your website design Ottawa firm offer training? How many hours? What is covered?
8. Does your website design Ottawa firm offer SEO services? What is the point in having a website if users can't find it?
9. Does your website design Ottawa firm really specialize in SEO? Most website design firms claim that they specialize in SEO, whereas in reality their SEO expertise is often very limited. Make sure to ask for at least three SEO-ed website references. Check how competitive the keywords were. To find out the level of competition, a quick way is to query your keyword/keyword phrase in Google and record how many results pages this keyword generated (SERPs). The higher the number, the higher the competition for this keyword.
10. Does your website design Ottawa firm charge you a monthly fee for SEO? For how long? Note that once SEO work is done, there is very little maintenance involved to maintain it, and it can't be undone, so by paying a monthly fee, you maybe overpaying by a large margin for what your SEO is worth. It is often better to pay a flat fee instead.
11. Does your website design Ottawa company offer you a detailed quote? How specific is their quote? As a rule, the official quote represents the amount you'd expect to invest in the project.  Exceptions are possible, of course, but they need to be discussed in advance. Don't be lured into a project by a low quite only to find out that the final costs will be much higher (beware of the danger of "per-hour" billing).
12. Does your website design Ottawa firm offer customer testimonials with a full contact information of their clients? This is very important. Anyone can post a testimonial to their website. How true is it? A quick phone call can save you a lot of trouble.
13. Does your website design Ottawa company offer additional services? Can you get a turn-key solution from them? Website design, professional SEO, content creation, support for PPC campaigns, link building, etc.
14. How long has your website design Ottawa firm been in business?A few years is a must. For SEO, you would want 7 years of continuous expertise, and don't forget to check the number of websites optimized by this website design firm.
15. Is your website design Ottawa firm a member of any professional association(s)? This shows how serious they are about their business. Anyone can register a website design agency, but it takes time and expertise to get recognized.

Those are a few factors that are important to consider in the process of selecting a website design firm. At Joomla Bliss we are proud to satisfy all of these requrements as well as the most stringent requirements of quality website design, SEO and customer service. Contact us for our customer testimonials!