Joomla Bliss appreciates that a website design project involves multiple stakeholders; it requires clear and consistent communications and disciplined project management practices. We understand that some rework is unavoidable and will work until we are ensure that the client is fully satisfied with the results. Based on our experience and client feedback we developed what we believe is a “ZERO-RISK” strategy for our clients:

Designed-in quality:

• Use cases are mapped out in granular detail and discussed with the client
• Live prototype of a website and navigation/usability flow is created early in the project (design-from-the-end strategy)
• Coding and QA are conducted by a professional software developer

Prompt communications protocol:

• All emails are acknowledged
• Replies are provided promptly
• Meetings are scheduled upon client request at no additional charge

Granular project management:

Fixed-cost all-inclusive contract:

Client involvement in the design process:

Joomla, a popular open source content management system, was recently upgraded to a 3.0 release (as of September 27, 2012) with enhanced database integration, administrative tools and optimization for mobile devices. A 3.01 security fix went out Tuesday, October 9, 2012.

"The Joomla CMS can now display content on mobile devices as clearly and distinctly as it does on a personal computer or Mac," according to a statement issued by the project after this version's completion late last month."This innovation makes Joomla the first major CMS that includes the Twitter Bootstrap framework that enables it to be 100 percent mobile-friendly by default."

How to Translate Your Website Contents into Various Languages Using Joomla 1.7

Joomla 1.7 does not require JoomFish or other components to enable multilingual support. This support is built in Joomla 1.7 natively, although we don't find it particularly intuitive. There is a couple of steps that one needs to know to get it all going smoothly.

Below is a simple step-by-step summary of how to enable multilingual feature in Joomla 1.7:

Graphic Makeover for Your Website: Building a website is not unlike building a house. Supporting and growing your website is also very similar to decorating your house.

Website Graphics on a Shoestring : First of all, get used to the idea that there is no end to it.

You can always do more for your website! You can always find yet better images, better icons, better image rotators, newer plugins and modules to highlight various content elements on your site, and so on. You need to know where to stop. Remember, your revenue won't come from graphics. So long as your website looks nice, pleasant and professional - you are fine!

How to Create Product Catalogues Using Standard Joomla Blog View?

There are many product galleries extensions created for Joomla but it is always nice to see just how flexible Joomla! is if you know how to use it. Take a look at this product gallery, it was created using Joomla's standard blog view (Joomla 1.5)

How to Select Joomla Website Templates

One of the most common remarks we hear people make after looking at various Joomla website templates is "Joomla looks so cluttered". First all of all, do not confuse Joomla! with the templates you can upload onto it. Joomla is a very powerful web content management platform. It is like Windows or Linux. So you can upload different kinds of website templates into it. Simple, clean, cluttered - whatever your heart desires. You can even upload an empty page with just your name on it. In other words, the look and feel of the website template you use has nothing to do with Joomla's functionality as a CMS.

Then, when you analyze website templates designed by Joomlart or Rockettheme or Yootheme or other website template providers, you would notice that all these template power houses offer a large number of module positions on their templates: 17 module positions, 27 module positions, 40 module positions on a home page! When they showcase their templates, they fill all those module slots with some demo content, and as a result, the templates look very busy. But that does not mean you would need to use all those slots. Those module slots are there by design, but you don't have to use them, especially not all at once! All you have to do is "uncheck" the unnecessary modules inside your Joomla management panel, and the template layout will adjust automagically. You can decide to have only your main menu and one body column and nothing else, if you wish.

However, if in the future you would want to showcase different things on your home page and add something, you can use one of the available module slots by "checking" them back. No additional design work will be required. So, the more modular the template, the more efficient it is. You will never need a re-design. So, when you look at a website template, the busier it looks, the better it is. It is very easy to disable module positions, adding them is not as easy, it would require some additional redesign work.

Also pay attention to the type of modules available by default with a given template. Sure, it is not difficult to add and install various modules and components, but if you are building a new website by yourself, it is best to find a website template that would have 70% of your desired features by default (such as search, login, newsletter sign up, etc etc). Every new module and new component requires some degree of tweaking and testing. For a web designer, adding new modules and components is not difficult; for a person new to Joomla, it can cause some learning pains and unnecessary frustration.

To summarize, the more module slots you see on the template's home page, the better it is. And if those module slots display the type of features you need - fantastic!

Things NOT to pay attention to when selecting a website template

What you don't need to worry about are various visual elements of the website template:

• fonts type, size and colors
• color scheme of the menu
• shading, gradient effects, reflections
• background image
• ornaments or other stylistic details around boxes
• images, borders
• image galleries and their appearance
• graphical elements on individual modules

All these elements are very easy to change and customize. Joomla uses CSS files to control the look and feel of its website templates. There are dozens of image gallery components, so if you don't like the one you see in your base template, you can get another one installed instead of, but you would install it into the same module slot. Check out various Joomla extensions, there are thousands of free and commercial extensions from which you can select what you need. Free and commercials, there is an extension for every function you can possibly think of. But you do need to have a pre-designed slot in your template's layout where you'd display these extensions - and that's why the more modular the template is by default, the easier it will be for you to decide where and how to present various features on your site.

Optimising Web Design for SEO

Here is what Google has to say about the file extensions: "At Google, we are able to index most types of pages and files with very few exceptions. File types we are able to index include: pdf, asp, jsp, html, shtml, xml, cfm, doc, xls, ppt, rtf, wks, lwp, wri, swf.“

Details on file types:

• Adobe Portable Document Format (.pdf)
• Adobe PostScript (.ps)
• Atom and RSS feeds (.atom, .rss)
• Autodesk Design Web Format (.dwf)
• Google Earth (.kml, .kmz)
• Lotus 1-2-3 (.wk1, .wk2, .wk3, .wk4, .wk5, .wki, .wks, .wku)
• Lotus WordPro (.lwp)
• MacWrite (.mw)
• Microsoft Excel (.xls)
• Microsoft PowerPoint (.ppt)
• Microsoft Word (.doc)
• Microsoft Works (.wks, .wps, .wdb)
• Microsoft Write (.wri)
• Open Document Format (.odt)
• Rich Text Format (.rtf)
• Shockwave Flash (.swf)
• Text (.ans, .txt)
• Wireless Markup Language (.wml, .wap)

If you are going to have a Joomla website, you will need to install several components to enable functionalities not supported by Joomla natively (not yet). For example, a Site Map is a must for SEO. Newsletter subscription is a must for lead generation. Google Analytics is a must for your understanding of your visitors' behaviour on your website. And there are a few more functionalities that most small business owners would find very useful. So we compiled a list of 10 free must-have Joomla extensions that even a toddler can get installed and enabled independently:

1. Xmap - automatically generates a Site Map element on your website. Every time you add or delete a page, your site map will get updated automatically.
2. AcyMailing - a simple newsletter component with subscriber list management capabilities. The free version has limitations, naturally, but those limitations might not be important to small businesses or individual consultants. To get more features, you can purchase the next levels starting from around $30 in total (without any monthly fees).
3. SimpleCalendar - this one is a darling! If you need to post a calendar of events on your website, for seminars, trade shows or whatever - this component is a sweetie pie. It even allows you to select your own colors. The only two things we found would have liked to change is a link back to the author (a tiny one, not invasive) and a "back" arrow icon displayed next to each listing. Those two are not necessary and should be displayed on demand only.
4. JComments  - this is a very popular component in the Joomla user community. It is used on this site, right here, in the blog section. It works well and looks well, so we highly recommend it to anyone having a blog on their Joomla site.
5. JCE editor - this is a very nice and simple article editor component. There are other - fancier - editors available for Joomla, but we love this one for one convenience it offers: ability to add links to your own articles via a drop-down drilling through your content as well as by copying a URL. The same goes for images too! The extension is very lightweight as well, a factor favoured by many website designers.
6. Gtranslate - this component provides translation of your pages into 50+ languages. It does not translate modules and plugins, but it works well. It might not work much better than Google translate, but it seems to be more customizable.
7. Akeeba Backup - this Joomla component is an absolute must. It allows you to backup your website online. Don't forget to click on the backed-up file and save it to your hard disk. The restoration of the backed-up file is not easy as the actual backup, but it works very well when you learn how to do it. Read the website instructions and use the kickstart file!
8. MassContent - if you need to publish several articles at once or simply have a lot to publish on a daily basis, this Joomla component is a must. You can publish a blog, a news release, a static article - all from one place. Sweet!
9. Google Verify - this Joomla plugin allows you to verify your Joomla website on the Google webmaster central. Google will generate a line of code for you which you will need to paste inside this plugin - and voila, you can get statistics about your website the way Google sees them (your links, your pages, your coding error, things like that).
10. BIGSHOT Google Analytics - this Joomla plugin allows you to enable Google Analytics website statistics tracking on your Joomla site.

Would like to add a free, very easy-to-use and very useful Joomla component to this list? Don't be shy, add your comment below.

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 applications. 

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. 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 for 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 (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 and 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 the core, and hence, when version upgrades are implemented (which needs to happen much more often than with other CMSs), 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 less 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 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.

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 future scalability.

With Joomla, one can type a question in Google and find an answer to it with a screen shot to illustrate 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. So 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 interface 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 12 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.

The learning curve for new users is minimum. Training can be conducted in a swift and efficient way and usually takes 1.5 hr, and maintenance SLA required 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 the 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, and 
• 1 stands for the worst performance or the highest required expenditure in time and/or costs.

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".

As a rule, a new website for a small business takes 2-3 weeks. For a medium business a new website takes about 2-3 months. As a service provider, we are financially motivated to complete the project on time. Most marketing folks find that getting their management to review and approve things ends up being the main challenge.