Joomla Bliss’ project management methodology is built around quality and long-term relationships. We do not have unsatisfied clients – a very rare occurrence in the web design space. Joomla Bliss strives to build quality into our products right from the start, going by the principle that prevention is easier and less expensive than correction. 

As part of our process, we complete a Discovery stage in collaboration with the client. We interview the client and clarify as many details of the project as possible. Once all business, technical and visual requirements are clarified to us, we create a prototype of the website and its usability flow. The prototype is presented to the client in the form of a live website hosted on one of Joomla Bliss’ sub-domains. We schedule a telephone or in person meeting with the client and explain all elements one by one.

Hosting a live prototype ensures that the client has a chance to evaluate the interface details and use the site’s main features well before the final release of the website. Joomla Bliss takes care to incorporate clients’ feedback point by point using a tiered approach (i.e. three subsequent rounds of reviews). This tiered methodology ensures that the client knows what to expect and will not have unpleasant surprises.

Before the final release we conduct internal Quality Assurance and also invite the client team to provide their own final remarks. This is in additon to the previous website reviews. And post launch, we offer two weeks of free technical support to ensure that any potential bugs or defects get corrected immediately and that the client is comfortable with their new Joomla-powered website.

Every website case is different. Every business is different. As a rule of thumb, the amount of SEO required and the level of difficulty (i.e. costs) depend on your competition. The higher the competition, the more expensive the SEO. Please review our SEO in a nutshell page for a consize overview of what is inovled in optimizing a website for search engines (i.e. conducting SEO).

Absolutely! The best way to implement Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is at the start of a website design project. This way, a proper SEO infrastructure can be put in place which can later be expanded and built upon. Joomla Bliss has an extensive expertise with SEO and all our websites come with a solid basic SEO in place. If you require SEO specifically for a particular keyword phrase, this is usually an additional service.

Nowadays all hosting companies use modern equipment and servers. And yet 95% of ssues we've experienced fall under hosting, i.e. server types, server confirgulations and database setup. It is important to select a hosting company that supports Joomla natively. While all hosting companies claim to do that, in reality, many do not have proper server configurations set up in place and their support folks are not always knowledgeable, so it often takes a lot of going back and forth to get this done. In 99% of cases, server types and permissions are the culprit. 

Please note that Joomla was designed having a Unix apache server in mind. It it best to select a hosting company that runs on a *nix apache server (the most common and most reliable type of servers). Note that Windows also have an apache server, so please be careful and double check that your hosting servers are a *nix type apache servers.

For a detailed overview on what to consider when selecting a hosting company, please read our Joomla Hosting Requirements page.

Joomla Bliss does not sell hosting packages. We are not a reseller of any kind. For US-based hosting, we refer our clients to Hostgator.com and GoDaddy.com. These companies are highly reputable and provide proper support for Joomla.

Please note that Joomla was designed having a Unix apache server in mind. It it best to select a hosting company that runs on a *nix apache server (the most common and most reliable type of servers). Note that Windows also have an apache server, so please be careful and double check that your hosting servers are a *nix type apache servers. Linux apache or Unix apache. Linux is more popular.

For a detailed overview on what to consider when selecting a hosting company, please read our Joomla Hosting Requirements page.

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".

You and your management need to like your website. Your customers need to like it too. A design inappropriate for your area of specialization could drive visitors away and indirectly undermine your organization’s reputation. Joomla Bliss would be happy to share our best practices with you for selecting a base template. One strategy we recommend is to model your look and feel after the leading companies in your industry or after your largest customers. There is no need to replicate them exactly, but it is good to exhibit your alliance by having your website of a similar style.

Joomla Bliss provides what we call a “zero-risk” strategy for our clients. There are several elements to it, the main one being a live prototype of the future website that we provide very early in the process. We progress from the prototype to the final release by diligently incorporating our clients’ feedback. We will not release a website until you are satisfied.

Most clients find that fixed-cost contracts are a much safer choice for them versus contracts based on a per-hour billing. With hourly billing, your initially low quote can increase to 50% and more for “extras” and "not included" items by the end of the project.

Joomla Bliss offers our clients a fixed-cost all-inclusive contract where we commit to a mutually agreed budget for the entire duration of the web design project until its full completion. This includes basic SEO, training and post-launch support. During training you will learn how to use your Joomla website and how to conduct basic SEO on your website to maximize its ranking on Google.