Love it or hate it, but you can't deny that it's there. The single page web design is the most noticeable trend of 2022.  

When we ask our clients what website designs they like they send us samples of the sites that all have a few things in common:

1. Scrolling: One page (i.e. wall) design where the main menu tabs, if present, do not take you to new pages but jump you down on the same page. Scrolling can be quite extensive!
2. Flat navigation, i.e. no submenus visible
3. Excessive pagination, where one article is spread through multiple pages, making users click "next" multiple times
4. Sliding in and out of side navigational panels a la Windows 10
5. Zigzagging of on-page information by presenting a chunk of it aligned to the left and then the chunk that follows aligned to the right
6. On-page boxes instead of the traditional navigation with the main menu on the top or side bar
7. Use of imagery, icons and buttons of huge dimensions; use of huge font sizes; use of contrasting bright colors
8. Use of transparent background with overlayed images and buttons
9. Stacking links to key information points in the footer area, with no site map
10. Limited amount of information presented on a page

Take a look at some of the examples that illustrate this web design trend:

One-page desing with zigzagging of information

Huge overlayed images with transparency work

Large images, large buttons, centering small chunks of information

Oversized images, fonts, buttons, and boxes

As with everything, there are pluses and minuses of this web design trend.

Hi from Joomla Bliss, a web design agency in Ottawa

This post is a review of one of our favourite website template designers Yootheme. The company is based in Hamburg, Germany and run by a team of young designers and developers. They build their templates using Warp framework . 

We like their style. Their website templates come loaded with a suite of neat widgets. We find that for North American business environment their templates are best suited for small businesses and consultants, and not for medium or large corporations.

They stay in synch with times and add new templates often. The demo site is very easy to use, each site comes in several color schemes. Their website templates are designed for Joomla and Wordpress. 

The prices are higher than average and the Euro conversion makes their templates adn subscription almost double of those of Rockettheme or Joomlart.

If you are interested in finding out more, contact Joomla Bliss via this site or give us a call at 613.231.6308.

Hello from Joomla Bliss, a web design agency in Ottawa

This post is a review of one of our favourite website template providers Rockettheme. The company is based in Denver, Colorado and run by a team of experienced web designers and developers. They build templates for Joomla, Worpress and Magento.

We love them almost as much as we love Joomlart. Their website templates come loaded useful extensions and neat modules. And their templates are very well suited for any type of business in any country. 

They stay in synch with times and add new templates often. Rocketheme has a vast network of partners who offer signigicant discounts on their products via Rocketthem

The prices are very reasonable in the web design industry. We love how clean their code it, how scalable it is and how rich with extensions their website templates are. 

If you are interested in finding out more, contact Joomla Bliss via this site or give us a call at 613.231.6308.

Greetings from Joomla Bliss, a web design agency in Ottawa

This post is a review of our favourite website template provider Joomlart. The company is 11 years old, which is very old for web businesses; it is based in Vietnam and run by a team of young web designers and developers. They build their templates using powerful T3 framework.

We like their style. Their website templates come loaded useful extensions and neat modules. We find that Joomlart's templates are very well suited for North American businesses of any size as well as for individual owners and consultants. 

They stay in synch with times and add new templates often. The demo site is very easy to use, each site comes in several color schemes. They also develop templates for Magento as well, which is a very good engine for ecommerce sites. The extension suite that they offer for sale is of exceptionally high quality. It is a one-stop place for any online business. We can assemble some of the most complicated business models for under $1000 using Joomlart's tempates and extensions.

Recently Joomlart began to offer templates for Wordpress as well.

The prices are very reasonable and probably the best in the web design industry. We love how clean their code it, how scalable it is and how rich with extensions their website templates are. 

If you are interested in finding out more, contact Joomla Bliss via this site or give us a call at 613.231.6308.

Season's Greetings from Joomla Bliss in Ottawa!

The Joomla Development Team has just released Joomla version 3.4.8! Unlike the last few patches which are more urgent, this is mainly a bug-fix patch, so the team agreed that this can wait until after the holidays :) We do recommmended every one to update to 3.4.8 as soon as they can though, just to stay up-to-date.

You can update your site in your Joomla! admin panel or download the packages on the Joomla! site.

If you need any assistances with Joomla design upgrades or need to restore a hacked Joomla website, we at Joomla Bliss are happy to help. Just give us a call!

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".

Halloween Special Edition

Google and other search engines include Twitter profiles and messages in their search results. Search engines use "signals", such as the number of social media shares of a link, to determine how that link ranks for a given keyword. This is now called a "social search". 

It is official. Social media matters now more than ever. it matters for SEO and it matters for Marketing in general. You've got to get on top it.

This post concisely describes how to use Twitter for website marketing and SEO.  We explain how to use your Twitter smartly to get higher ranking for your website on Google and other search engines. 

If we could tell you one thing and one thing only about how to use Twitter and social media in general to get higher ranking of your corporate website on Google and other search engines, this will be the following: "Create and tweet/retweet only highly useful and valuable content". If you don't have time to learn or do anything else, applying this rule alone will eventually generate a social following for you and will establish you as a thought leader in your field.  If you'd like to do more, here are 13 quick and easy tips you can employ:

Every web marketer uses their own tools, but there is a list of tools that all marketers use or at least are familiar with. Moz published the results of their 2012 survey on the status of SEO and web marketing industry. These results are very useful, especially if you are just starting with SEO and website marketing and looking for some benchmarks.

Below is the Moz list of the most important website marketing tools by category and by percentage of respondents (out of 1600 respondents in total, if we are not mistaken). Joomla Bliss in Ottawa adds one category to this list at the very end.

Every two years, one of the leading web marketing firms and tool developer Moz produces results of their survey on search ranking factors. Below are their findings. Note that it is not clear how exactly they estimate the values and the total points, but in general, their guidelines are valuable.