We are pleased to announce the launch of our new Client Support Portal. The support portal allows our clients submit and trace all technical support issues related to their websites. The new support portal offers an ability to quickly view submitted requests, trace their status, add attachments, and comment on follow up actions. The support portal sends automated email notifications and reminders, providing an added convenience of hands-free project management.

The Joomla Bliss Support Portal currently includes the following features:

Software as a Service (SaaS) is the term that has gone mainstream in the last two years. SaaS is a delivery model for software needs. Essentially, it is "renting" or "leasing" parts or all of your IT infrastructure: servers, email, software applications for accounting, document management, etc. etc.

While we don't dispute the fact that in certain situations renting or leasing can be the right decision, it certainly does not fit all businesses all the time. And yet - this is where everyone is going, and going fast.

According to report published by ZDNet magazine, in March last year, Gartner forecast that worldwide SaaS revenue would reach $14.5 billion in 2012 — a 17.9% increase over 2011's $12.5bn. This healthy growth rate is set to continue, according to the research company, which predicts a $22.1bn SaaS market in 2015.

In this post we attempt to swim against the current and argue that SaaS is a poor business model for a large number of businesses. As the first step, let us take a look at the main pros and cons that are typically assigned to SaaS.

Social Media Marketing (SMM) campaigns can have different goals, i.e. increase awareness, drive traffic, drive user registration, prompt sales, etc. But ultimately, all businesses need to generate revenue, and Social Media Marketing is just one form of Marketing, with the same ultimate goal of helping to increase Sales. The first step is to determine what specific goals you need to reach by embarking on a social media campaign.

A website has a little value if your clients or customers can't find it. Before embarking on a website design project, it is good to familiarize yourself with the basic web marketing principles.

Website Marketing in a Nutshell

Overall, website marketing can be summed up as three things:

1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
2. Social Media Marketing (including Affiliate Marketing)
3. Paid advertising on search engines (Google AdWords) and social networking sites (Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Plus, etc)

Whether you are focusing on all of them or only one, the bulk of your activities will be creating content on your website. Quality content is key for any kind of website marketing activity.

Well, Google Plus is not intuitive at all. And the instructions are disconnected. Each step maybe described well, but the whole process - go and figure it out on your own. 

So here is what we did to enable Google "authorship" feature so that our blog posts appear on Google search results like this:

Create a Google+ Profile and Link it with Your Blog

1. First, you need to create your own personal profile with Google Plus. For that, you need to verify your email with Google.
2. Then you need to add a business page with your company profile and link your business page with your own personal profile. Follow Google's instructions on that. They are not very clear, but after a few pokes around, you will get it.
3. Google would want to verify your business and will send you a post card wtih a PIN number that you would need to enter into your business profile. Remember to view the pages as "yourself" or else you won't be able to edit any business info. The post card takes 2 weeks to arrive.
4. Then you need to confirm yourself as an author of your site with Google: https://plus.google.com/authorship
5. And now to get Google to identify a page as written by you, what it needs to see in a page is the following code:

   <a rel="author" href="/<your G+ profile link>">John Smith</a>

   For K2 articles; if you selected the option to 'show Author', it already creates the following:

   <a rel="author" href="/<link to K2 user page>">John Smith</a>

6. To make it show the G+ profile link, go to K2 > Users and add the profile link as the user URL. Then, go into component/com_k2/templates/blog/item.php and component.com_k2/templates/default/item.php

   Find under <!-- Item Author -->  the following code

   echo $this->item->author->link;

   and replace it with (save copies!)

   echo $this->item->author->profile->url;

7. For Joomla article, the following plugin should help:

   http://duben.org/joomla-english/sd-google-authorship-plugin-for-joomla or this: http://www.deconf.com/en/projects/how-to-set-up-google-authorship-markup-with-rel=author-in-joomla/

8. For those who like to use the code, it gets a little tricky to describe, as each template might have created its own version of the article display, and different version of Joomla also might have different display methods. In general, try to find in:

   templates/<your template>/html/com_content/article/default.php (if not found, copy from components/com_content/views/article/tmpl/default.php)

9. Find where it generates the author text (usually with a class called createdby or create_by), and replace it with the following:

   <?php
   //name of K2 user table
   $query = 'SELECT url FROM #__k2_users WHERE userID=' . $this->article->created_by;
   $db =& JFactory::getDBO();
   $db->setQuery($query);
   $authorlink = $db->loadResult();
   ?>

   This gives the variable $authorlink your Google Profile URL that you saved in K2 in the steps above.

10. Now change the author link to something along these lines:

    <a rel="author" href="/<?php echo $authorlink; ?>"><span class="createby">
    <?php some code from Joomla that shows the author name ?></a>
    </span></a>

    That should make authorship works on Joomla default articles too.

11. Finally, test on  http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets that you have authorship successfully linked.

Hope this works for you!

It takes a few days for Google to reindex your pages and start showing your "authorship".

Whether you are planning on having your website run on Joomla, Drupal, WordPress or any other content management system, if your website is expected to have some user activity - you need to create a set of main use cases before the design process can commence. 

Not Writing Use Cases Costs You

In practice what often happens is that when marketing managers source a web design agency they usually provide some basic description of what they would like the website to do and expect the design agency to recommend the best "flow". Later, after the flow has been completed by the design agency, clients often request "changes" because the recommended flow does not reflect their vision adequately, and then those changes can sometimes be very significant, which often leads to additional charges. In other words, clients first pay for the recommended flow and then for its adjustment to their vision.

There is a simple way to reduce this two-stage - unpleasant to the client - process to one: develop a set of uses cases before starting the design process. 

What is a Use Case

In web design a use case is a detailed description of how users will perform a particular task on your website. For example, download a whitepaper, post a resume, search for a job, complete a payment, register for an event. etc.

Each use case should begin with defining a goal of a particular task and then establishing a starting point for it. Each use case should end with the "last step" in the process - and not only from the user's perspective but also from the perspective of a website administrator who will be gathering and analyzing the website activity information on a regular basis.

In other words, for each use case you need to determine the following: what you want your users to do on your website and what they might want to do on your website (which is not the same thing!)

• Your goals or what you want users to do (e.g. download white paper and then call you to order your products)
• Specific sequence of steps you expected them to perform
• Users' goals for performing these tasks (e.g. read useful informaiton free of charge and not necessarily order anything)
• Users' expectations of what type of information they should be offered

When you determe both perspectives, you will be able to find "overlaps". And this will help you determine how the website should be structured and how it should respond to a user action.

How to Write a Use Case

The easiest way to write a use case is by writing text - with detailed description of what happens or should happen at what point. Your narrative would be exceptionally useful if you also find an example website that has the exact (or very similar) flow that you would like to have. 

But before you do that, you need to establish the main purpose/goal of your website. Is it to educate? to sell something? to promote something? Write down all your goals specifically and then proceed with defining those use cases that would affect your goals the most.

Here is a short list of how to write an effective use case:

• Identify the type of users you expect to use your website (accounters, students. board members of your company, event participants, etc)
• Create use cases for each type of users. Start with the most important one. TIP: To define the most important users, focus on the $$ or authority. Does a user type affect your revenue? Does it affect your company? Start with those users who affect these two things the most.
• Define what that user is expected to do on the site (download, register, buy, etc). Each one of those expectations will be a separate "goal" and it will have its own use case.
• For each use case, decide on the normal course of actions. For example, a user comes to a website via an email invitation by clicking on a link from that email. The user "lands" on a specific page where you present them with an option to register in order to receive something. The user registers (clicks the call-to-action button). What happens then?
• The user receives a thank-you email? What would that email contain? Will the website send one thank-you email or will it also send a follow-up auto-reminder of some kind?
• It is assumed that all user registration information will stored on your website, otherwise, why would you need a website? What kind of registration quesitons would you need to ask in order to generate more $$. 
• Would you allow sales people to call users who registered on your website to follow up? If yes, then you need to ask for the user's permission during the registration process.
• Can the user do more than one action?
• Can they create an account and view their activity history on your website? 
• Can this user come back and repeat the same action? 

All this information needs to be captured in a use case. That is why it is called "developing a use case", because it takes a few rounds to editting to establish the right amount of information. 

After you've developed a written text-based use case for each important (business-affecting) task and user type, it is best to provide an example website that utilizes something very similar to your goals.

After your web designers analyze your use cases, they might still have questions for you! And after they've clarified all the details, the will be able to create a use-case flow diagram.

Use Case Flow Diagram

Creating a flow diagram is a very important step and yet very few design agencies do that. A master diagram showing interconnections between various user types prevents a lot of miscommunications. It also simplifies Quality Assurance and Project Management. 

One of the easiest way to create a use case flow digram is to set it up in a series of PPT slides. Once you "glue" them together, you will be able to see where your "holes" or "missing steps" might be. 

If your site is simple, then a verbal text-base use case description might suffice. But if your site has several inter-connected user activities - a diagram in addition to the textual description is a must.

If your web design agency did not volunteer to create a master use case flow diagram, request that they do. Depending on your contract, there maybe a portion of the budget allocated for the "discovery stage". If it is the case, then the use case flow diagram should be provided to you. If there is no discovery phase covered by the budget, still request it from your designers. And if they refuse (unlikely!), then you need to create such a diagram yourself. 

What happens if you don't? Well, nothing terrible, the skies won't fall down on you. You will end up spending additional time writing emails, clarifying and explaining, calling and asking for revisions - and also paying for all additional changes. That's all.

One of the articles on web design published by Smashing Magazine provides some useful insights on recent changes in the web design field affected by mobile devices.

The article makes many valid points, such as mouse click versus taps, etc. Those details are important to keep in mind when designing a website.The presentation is good and so is the conclusion. But there is one point concerning the main design principle that caught our attention. Here is what the author is saying:

"The way we designed our websites until recently was by putting a header with the logo and navigation at the top, putting the subnavigation on the left, putting some widgets on the right, and putting the footer at the bottom. When all of that was done, we’d cram the content into the little space that was left in the middle. All of the things we created first — the navigation, the widgets, the footer — they all helped the visitor to leave the page. But the visitor probably wanted to be there! That was weird. It was as if we were not so confident in our own content and tried our best to come up with something else that our guests might like.

But rather than pollute the page with all kinds of links to get people out of there, we should really focus on that thing in the middle. Make sure it works. Make sure it looks good. Make sure it’s readable. Make sure people will understand it and find it useful. Perhaps even delight them with it!

Once you’re done with the content, you can start to ask yourself whether this content needs a header. Or a logo. Or subnavigation. Does it need navigation at all? And does it really need all of those widgets? The answer to that last question is “No.” I’ve never understood what those widgets are for. I have never seen a useful widget. I have never seen a widget that’s better than white space."

Well, it's just like saying, why do you need a roof and a wall and an entrance, focus on the living room. That's all that matters, your guests will be there after all.

An interesting moment we found is how everything has to be linked to "confidence" these days.

Companies are trying to display a summary of their website's content on their home page for a reason, to make sure users don't miss something important, not because they have no confidence in what's in the center of the page. Granted, it often creates a cluttered look, hence a granular top navigation can be useful to mitigate this.

But in any case, it is not a power game. Confidence in one's content has nothing to do with sidebar widgets and additional navigation links. Without navigation, your users will be confused.

If you run a focused website, a blog on a particular and rather narrow topic - one living room solution might work.

But if your website has a repository of documents, tools, etc .- your users will be utterly confused. Recently, I was talking to someone who was trying to locate a particular item on the shopify.ca website. This site has the above-mentioned living room design, it does not have a traditional navigation, so clicking back and forth and scrolling down endlessly is the only - annoying! - way.

The use of white space is, indeed, a good thing. No arguments here. But "never seen a widget better than a white space"? Huh? How about calendar of events? Weather storm monitoring? Traffic congestion report?

So please, confident web author of smashing magazine, for those of us who is used to structure and logic, let us keep some navigation, at least one level somewhere! Not all concent can - or should - be reduced to a flat one-level menu.

We noticed that a lot of websites found a way out of this trendy pickle by finding a heavy use of the left-site navigation. Not sure what's the difference. If you are going to use a hierarchical navigation, you might as well provide one common point of reference and use a drop-down top menu like we did before.