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".

The 3.4 release introduces new features into the CMS such as improved front end module editing, decoupling of weblinks, composer integration, Google new reCaptcha and security improvements by implementing UploadShield code which can detect most malicious uploads by examining their filenames and file contents.

This release was possible thanks to a hard work of over 130 different volunteer contributors.

Over 700 bugs have also been resolved with the 3.4 release of the Joomla! CMS.

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.

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.

If you would like us to build a custom website completely from scratch we will be happy to do that for you. We guarantee that your website will be unique and built from scratch and it will not be based on any pre-made template. Please note that in this case, the website design project will take a longer time to implement and it will also be more expensive.

But if a custom design exceeds your budget, you are not going to lose out with Joomla Bliss! You will still get a great website. In fact, the end result can be much better than many "custom" websites we come across these days. Just check out our portfolio. We use templates provided by the most reputable design houses in the world. There are many commercial Joomla templates. But there is a huge difference in quality between them - which may not be immediately apparent to an outsider. We will only recommend the best templates to you and will  be sure to clarify pluses and minuses of each.

Please take a few minutes to review our web design packages:

01Gold website design package 

02Silver website design package 

03Bronze website design package

04Bronze+ website design package (SME)

05Custom website design 

06Ottawa website design promotion 

When we customize the look and feel of a template, we change the color scheme, navigation structure, fonts, and other visual elements - to simulate or create the desired look and feel. We then install and configure various pre-made modules and components to enable various functionalities our clients require, such as a registration form, newsletter subscription, e-commerce shopping cart, polls, forum, user blog comments, photo galleries, etc.

Our clients watch the site's development through several stages, and at each stage they are invited to provide feedback and make recommendations. Once the website is launched, we provide training to your whole team on how to manage the site, how to add content to it  - at no additional charge. Please download our web design questionnaire to find out what type of information we will need from you to start working on your website.

As a web design firm, we can tell you that nowadays it is very rare to build a website completely from scratch. Most professional website design firms use pre-made website templates and themes, which they sometimes develop in house, sometimes purchase from template design houses, and sometimes a bit of both. Most web design firms re-work and enhance those templates to accommodate their clients' requirements. The end result is presented to clients as custom, from-scratch, design, and in many cases this becomes true, as the original template gets reworked and customized so significantly that it is virtually impossible to tell what the final website was based on it.

Take a look at this example. Can you recognize the original template in the customized version?

Original Template	Customized Version

It is possible to take this approach a step further. Joomla Bliss invites our clients to have a say in the process of selecting the base website template. Using website templates provided by some of the most reputable design houses in the world, we help you select the most appropriate template for your needs; we then modify and customize this template to create the desired look and feel and add required functionalities.

We are proud to help businesses with limited budgets to get a highly professional modern website without sacrificing quality. If you are technically savvy, here is what you can do:

1. Download an open-source free web content management system (CMS) like Joomla
2. Source a quality pre-designed template, provided by reputable design houses, and upload this template into Joomla or other open-source CMS (do not get yourself locked into a proprietary CMS, this will be a very expensive mistake in the long run)
3. Customize this template's visual elements, add your own content, upload images and/or video - and voila!

You have a great website, SEO-friendly, scalable and easy-to-manage, and at ~50-80% the cost of a custom "from scratch" design!

The problem is... few business owners are aware of this route! 

In fact, we were surprised to discover (time and time again!) that not only small businesses, but even technology companies are seldom aware of all the benefits Joomla and other open-source content management systems can deliver. We think the main reason behind this is that Joomla and other open-source projects are run by non-profit organizations; they do not engage in aggressive marketing; their main marketing vehicle is word-of-mouth referrals by users - something Joomla Bliss is striving to achieve as well. As a result, most businesses pay premium for custom "designed-from-scratch" websites (that often end up being of questionable quilty) and in addition get themselves locked into some proprietary CMS where they have to pay annual fees or programming fees for each additional tweak or modification.

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.

Joomla Website + SEO on a Shoestring

A modern website with high SEO visibility affordable? This article presents steps on how to get a great website and position it high on Google and other search engines with minimum costs.

Why Keywords are So Important for Web Design and SEO?

There are hundreds of articles and blog posts written on the topic of keywords for the purposes of website design and SEO. So JoomlaBliss would like to contribute our knowledge to this very important issue as well.