Building an enterprise website involves various risks, but understanding them and implementing effective solutions can help mitigate potential issues. Here’s a breakdown of major risks and corresponding solutions:

1. Complex Requirements

• Risk: Misunderstanding or overlooking critical functionalities can lead to project delays and increased costs.
• Solution: Conduct thorough requirements gathering with all stakeholders and use clear documentation. Regularly review and update requirements throughout the project.

2. Integration Challenges

• Risk: Difficulty in integrating with existing systems (CRM, ERP, etc.) can disrupt workflows.
• Solution: Choose a hosting provider that supports robust APIs and integration tools. Plan for integration early in the project and involve IT teams in the process.

3. Scalability Issues

• Risk: The site may not handle increased traffic effectively, leading to slow performance or downtime.
• Solution: Select a scalable hosting solution (cloud hosting or dedicated servers) that can adjust resources dynamically based on traffic demands.

4. Security Vulnerabilities

• Risk: Data breaches can compromise sensitive information and damage reputation.
• Solution: Implement strong security measures, including firewalls, SSL certificates, regular security audits, and data encryption. Train staff on security best practices.

5. Poor User Experience (UX)

• Risk: A complicated or unintuitive interface can frustrate users, leading to decreased engagement.
• Solution: Conduct user research and usability testing to inform design choices. Prioritize a clean, intuitive user interface and provide clear navigation.

6. Content Management Challenges

• Risk: Keeping content up to date can be difficult, leading to outdated information.
• Solution: Implement a robust content management system (CMS) that allows for easy updates and role-based access for content creators.

7. Stakeholder Misalignment

• Risk: Conflicting priorities from different departments can lead to project delays and scope creep.
• Solution: Establish a clear project governance structure with defined roles and regular communication channels to ensure alignment.

8. Inadequate Testing

• Risk: Launching with untested features can result in bugs and a poor user experience.
• Solution: Develop a comprehensive testing strategy, including unit, integration, and user acceptance testing (UAT). Use automated testing tools where possible.

9. Budget Overruns

• Risk: Underestimating costs can lead to financial strain and project delays.
• Solution: Create a detailed budget with contingency plans. Regularly track expenses against the budget and adjust as needed.

10. Ongoing Maintenance Needs

• Risk: Neglecting regular updates can lead to performance degradation and security issues.
• Solution: Establish a maintenance plan that includes regular updates, backups, and performance monitoring. Allocate resources for ongoing support.

Proactively addressing these risks with targeted solutions will not only help in building a robust enterprise website but also ensure its long-term success and adaptability. If you need more information on any specific risk or solution, just let me know!

When selecting hosting for an enterprise website, several critical requirements should be considered to ensure optimal performance, security, and scalability. Here’s a breakdown of key hosting requirements:

1. Performance and Reliability
   High Uptime: Look for a hosting provider that guarantees at least 99.9% uptime to ensure your website is consistently accessible.
   Fast Load Times: Choose hosting with SSD storage and content delivery network (CDN) integration to improve loading speeds.
2. Scalability
   Flexible Plans: The hosting solution should allow easy scaling to accommodate increased traffic and resource needs.
   Auto-Scaling Features: Consider platforms that offer auto-scaling to manage sudden traffic spikes without downtime.
3. Security Features
   SSL Certificates: Ensure the host provides SSL for secure data transmission.
   DDoS Protection: Look for hosting that includes DDoS mitigation services to protect against attacks.
   Regular Backups: Automated daily backups are essential for data recovery.
4. Compliance and Regulations
   Data Protection Compliance: Ensure the hosting provider adheres to relevant regulations (e.g., GDPR, HIPAA) based on your industry.
   Location of Data Centers: Consider where data centers are located to comply with regional data sovereignty laws.
5. Support and Management
   24/7 Support: Choose a host that offers round-the-clock technical support via multiple channels (chat, phone, email).
   Managed Services: Depending on your team’s expertise, consider managed hosting options that handle server management and updates.
6. Resource Allocation
   Dedicated Resources: For larger enterprises, dedicated hosting or VPS solutions provide guaranteed resources without sharing with other users.
   Custom Configurations: Ability to configure server settings and install custom software as needed.
7. Content Management System (CMS) Compatibility
   Optimized for CMS: Ensure the host is optimized for the specific CMS you plan to use (e.g., WordPress, Drupal, etc.).
8. Cost and Billing Transparency
   Transparent Pricing: Be aware of any hidden fees and ensure the pricing model is clear and predictable.
   Flexible Billing Options: Choose a provider that offers flexible payment plans (monthly, annually).
9. Monitoring and Analytics
   Performance Monitoring: Hosting that includes monitoring tools for traffic, uptime, and performance.
   Analytics Integration: Ability to integrate analytics tools for insights on user behavior and website performance.
10. Environmental Considerations
    Green Hosting Options: Consider providers that use renewable energy sources or have sustainability practices in place.

Choosing the right hosting solution for an enterprise website is crucial for success. It’s essential to carefully evaluate potential providers against these requirements to ensure they can meet your organization’s needs both now and in the future. If you need more specific recommendations or further details, feel free to ask Joomla Bliss!

What is a Content Management System?

For a new modern website a Content Management System (CMS) is a must. A website CMS allows you to update content on your website without knowing HTML, CSS, PHP or any other web design elements. You can access your website via your browser and update its contents the way you work with your Gmail or Yahoo or Hotmail accounts. 

What most clients ask for is a CMS recommendation for their future website. Expert opinion is highly sought after because most marketing folks do not have first-hand experience with more than one CMS.

CMS Evaluation and Recommendations

Our approach to any task is simple and always the same: provide the best quality at the best prices and make things work well in the long-term with minimum effort. Our approach ensures that future scalability of features and functionalities as well as support is easily attainable and that a website’s future is as “predictable” and scalable as possible. These were the reasons why we decided to specialize in open-source software in general, and Joomla CMS in particular.

There are many open-source Content Management Systems (CMSs) for websites, but the two leaders nowadays are Joomla and Drupal, with WordPress still being predominantly used as a bloging platform. There is also a rising use of Sharepoint as a website CMS.

Sharepoint

In our view, Sharepoint is not an appropriate CMS to build websites. Sharepoint was designed to be an Intranet document management system and when used for websites it presents a very high learning curve for users. Furthermore, Sharepoint requires the skills of an Architect and Business Analyst to set up a proper infrastructure – and this adds cost to the total cost of ownership (TOC) of the project.  Customization of visual skins (web templates) via Sharepoint requires more programming time as well. Overall, while any software can be adapted to do whatever is necessary, and so can Sharepoint be adapted to build websites, we do not recommend "forcing" software to do what it was not meant to do and hence, we do not recommend Sharepoint as a website CMS. 

WordPress

WordPress was designed to be a blogging platform for simple websites. While its functionalities have been improving greatly and may one day become on par with Joomla and Drupal, as of now, it is safer to avoid using WordPress if more than static content is required and if scalability is important.

Improvements in WordPress require changes to its core, and hence, when version upgrades are implemented, existing components often break. 

The interface, while being famously simple, often becomes confusing when various functionalities are added into the site. The blogging features are always on the way. A lot of "simple" management ends up being done at the code level.

WordPress requires little training time, but in the long-term, its total cost of ownership is on par with Sharepoint. The available out-of-the-box extensions are numerous, but their features are not as granular and always require manual programming and customization even for very simple things. We speculate that this is, perhaps, the main reason why so many web designers push WordPress to their clients – more customization generates more revenue for them.

Drupal

Drupal is one of the best open-source website CMSs. It competes head to head with Joomla in all key areas: performance, speed, security, maturity, quality of extensions, etc. Even the infamous “difficult” user interface and admin flow of Drupal is gradually improving and might soon become history.

However, compared to Joomla, Drupal’s total cost of ownership is significantly higher. Drupal developers are also more expensive, 15-20% more expensive than Joomla developers, when all costs are factored in. Furthermore, quality of available templates is much lower and the development community is much smaller than that of Joomla. The number of extensions is also not as vast and as a result more specialized knowledge is required to source the right set of components and plugins to enable specific set of features and functionalities and ensure scalability for the future.

With Joomla, one can type a question in Google and find the answer to it with a screen shot illustrating every step within seconds! Not so with Drupal, hence support needs to be purchased more often and even small tasks will require more time to learn and implement. In other words, the learning curve is rather high with Drupal and, again, more training and support will be required in the long term.

Overall, Drupal is a great CMS but the total cost of ownership as well as the still-not-so-easy management makes it less attractive than its main competitor Joomla.

Joomla

As of 2012, Joomla is officially considered the most popular open-source CMS. It is also the fastest growing one. Over 15 years old, Joomla is very mature and stable. It has the largest and strongest design community, offers the best templates, and the largest number of quality third-party extensions that often require no customization at all – all of which together allows for a fast development, cost-effective scalability, and minimum support.

Joomla has no technical or usability disadvantages if compared to any other CMS, and yet it offers the lowest cost of ownership the long-term. This is the main reason why we selected Joomla for our web development projects.

The learning curve for new users is minimum. Training can be conducted in a swift and efficient way and usually takes 60 min or less. The maintenance level (SLA) required to support even large complex sites is usually one of the lowest.

We believe that Joomla is the best choice for 90% of websites. It offers the highest quality and the safest implementation of all types of requirements, even some very complex ones, and yet it bears no compromises in any aspect of a web design and development project. Joomla is exceptionally powerful, scalable and yet easy to use, and its total cost of ownership is the lowest.

Below is a CMS comparison table that summarizes the information we presented in this section. Note that rating is on the scale from 1 to 10 wherein:

• 10 stands for the best performance or the lowest required expenditures in time and/or cost,
• 1 stands for the worst performance or the highest required expenditure in time and/or costs, and
• half star = 1 point

More stars means better performance

Note that for some items, such as, frequency of upgrades required, for example, more stars means better performance, which means "upgrades required less often". Likewise, for the architectural design skills item, fewer stars means worse performance, which means "more architectural design skills are required, hence higher costs".

When selecting a web design agency for your website project, apart from looking at their portfolio and reviewing their client testimonials, the following ten topics are a must to include in your checklist:

1. Content Management System (CMS) - open source or commercial? Commercial CMSs would lock you into a contract with maintenance fees. Best open source CMSs are Joomla and Drupal. WordPress is still suitable for simple websites but not recommended for more complex websites. Read more about differences between these CMSs in this blog post. Most open source CMSs are easy to use and do not require a lot of training. They also allow users to manage and update content on their website without the help of a web developer. However, you need to keep them up to date. With Joomla, for example, upgrades after version 3.0 are extremely easy to implement. For most CMSs, upgrades within a given release can be implemented with a click of a button. But this is not the case when a new release version becomes available.  Make sure you ask whether your web design agency provides regular CMS upgrades and what the terms and limitations are. 
2. Website Hosting - it is not advisable to store all eggs in one basket. It is best to select specialized service providers, i.e. those who specialize either in hosting or in web design. Find out if your web design agency can recommend a trusted website hosting company. Most hosting companies look equally qualified when you read information on their websites, but things can be very different in practice. Find out if your web design agency will assist you with moving the website from one hosting company to another if necessary.  Sign up for a free website monitoring service (such as GTmetrix, for example).
3. Security - security issues can originate with your website and with your server (hostig). Some hosting companies provide sufficient disaster recovery services in case of a hacking attack. But some don't provide any. Find out what is included in your package. In terms of your website, find out what security measures will be put in place by your web design agency and what support you can get from them - and what the terms are - in case of a hacking attack. 
4. Speed - if you are using a web content management system (CMS), any CMS, your website will be slower to load because advanced CMSs contain a lot of files. This is normal and to be expected. However, if a website is large and contains a lot of images and if your hosting plan does not provide for optimized speed, your website may load at a sub-optimum speed. In order to remedy this, there is a number of techniques that can be implemented on your website that can improve its loading speed dramatically. Find out what is included with your website package.
5. Mobile and Tablet Technologies - find out what optimization your website agency provides for mobile devices. Make sure you understand the difference between a "custom mobile layout" and simply a "responsive" website. Both are good options, but you need to know what you are getting and for what price. Joomla Bliss' customers do not pay anything extra for a responsive website (we provide this by default) only for a custom mobile layout.

Why free open-source software products are so good?

It is somewhat counterintuitive to accept the fact that open-source web content management systems (CMS) or other open-source projects, for that matter, are actually of higher quality than their commercial counterparts. There are several reasons behind this phenomenon, representing a peculiar mix of social and technical factors. 

Planning on undertaking a website design or website redesign project? Allow us to present the ultimate website redesign checklist.

1. Kick off the project. Get executives on board
   • Schedule informal one-on-one meetings with your key executives and ask them what they would like to see in a new website.
   • Then schedule a group meeting with all key executives.
   • Get their consensus on all main points regarding the future website's usability and look and feel
   • Define roles and get proper authority for yourself. Get your executives to officially appoint you as the Project Lead by sending an email announcement to everyone in your company who maybe involved in this project.