How can using Joomla for your professional business website benefit your company?

First let me mention what Joomla can’t do. Joomla will not teach you how to build websites, but it can allow you an amazing amount of control over your site once it is in place, and that can be very powerful. Plus, like WordPress, Joomla can be connected to your social media sites in almost the same way that we described in our previous post.

Now let’s start with Content Management. You are probably familiar with the idea already, but if you are not, it is basically what the name implies, managing the text and images that on your site.

Successful websites, with high traffic, are sites where content is updated on a regular and frequent basis. If you have a standard HTML website, and do not know how to work with HTML, updating on a regular basis can become quite costly.

That might not be an issue if you are a well established business with a team of professionals, but if you are a new business, you might not be able to afford the added expense. Another issue to keep to keep in mind is that updating your website can sometimes take much longer than necessary if your Web Master is too busy working on multiple projects to add your updated content to your website when you need it. That is to be expected if you have a Web Master who knows what he is doing, but it can delay updates.

Thus for issues of Content Management, the solution is a Content Management System, or to those of us who hate typing, CMS’s.

Enter Joomla, a free, open-source content management system (CMS) and application framework that powers 2.7% of the entire web. 2.7% of the web might not sound like much, but when one thinks of the gargantuan magnitude of the web, that is huge.

CMS’s like Joomla allow those who do not know HTML code, to update and control their own websites with relative ease and without the need to know how to code. For someone to add content to their own website, Joomla uses a WYSIWYG style editor which is similar to a text editor and very easy to learn how to use (most people are already familiar with MS Word or an equivalent program). I love it for my clients who want to post their own updates, such as news posts, new pictures, new specials, etc…

Besides allowing non-tech savvy people to update their own websites, Joomla’s framework is an extremely powerful and scalable architecture that can fit all kinds of website needs right out of the box. Its architecture can also be extended through the use of modules, plug-ins, and components to add new functionality. On the Joomla Extensions website, there are currently 7516 extensions listed at the time this was written.

These extensions allow a Joomla website to do almost anything, like add e-commerce functionality, personalized forums, database handlers, events calendars and listings, and so much more. To be honest, I’ve run into very few website situations where Joomla was not able to handle the needs of one of my clients. Joomla is also secure, updated frequently, and free.

The fact that Joomla offers so much in a free piece of software is really quite impressive. There are paid solutions that are similar to Joomla, some better and some not as good, and for my money I almost always go with Joomla.

All you really need to get started is a web server or hosting account that runs PHP and MySQL, (most hosting company’s have this), a customized template for your site (don’t use the same ones that everyone else is using) and someone to install and set up the software (don’t use the pre-installed scripts, as they rarely ever install without some kind of error).

If you are not tech savvy, or you do not know how to code, I would suggest you let someone else do most of the set-up for your site, and also let them show you the ropes of how to use Joomla. It is a large and robust program with many options, and if you are not a Web Master you can break lots of things on you own. Still once the set-up is done and you have been shown what to edit and what not to touch, you will be controlling and updating your site in no time at all.

When set-up properly Joomla is very SEO friendly and allows users to add their own meta-content on each and every one of their posts, menu-links, categories, and sections. You can also customize the titles for your pages, update and edit your global key words and meta description, link titles, links, menus, and so much more.

With the release of Joomla 1.6, there are even more options for Joomla and it’s great architecture. To find out more visit Joomla’s website at www.joomla.org

Chances are that sometime since it’s release in 2003 you have heard of WordPress. If you have not, then let me fill you in just a little. WordPress is a completely open source and free to use blogging platform that was initially released by Matt Mullenweg as a fork of b2/cafelog. It has since become one of the most popular blogging platforms in existence, in fact, WordPress is used by over 13% of the 1,000,000 largest websites.

Though it is already 8 years old, I have to say that I am relatively new to the WordPress scene, as I have been an avid Joomla developer and fan for many years now. I graduated from Mambo to Joomla when it was first introduced and fell in love immediately. Thus I could not understand this love for WordPress that was seemingly everywhere.

My thought process was that Joomla was more than just a blogging platform and could handle an amazing amount of different website applications. Thus allowing it much more flexibility and the ability to do so much more than WordPress. While that is still true, Joomla just cannot do blogging as well as WordPress. That is because WordPress is simply built for blogging and it does it extremely well. It has quite a few built-in features and a plethora of plug-ins to extend it’s basic functionality, not to mention, it is so easy to install.

With all that in mind, my favorite feature thus far is the amazingly simple integration with social networks such as facebook, twitter, and linkedin, through the use of plug-ins.

There are  a multitude of plug-ins for WordPress that allow you to automatically publish your WordPress blog posts directly to your social media accounts. Which can save you an extraordinary amount of time and energy if you are trying to keep all of your accounts up to date with each other, it certainly saves me a lot of time.

One of the best WordPress plug-ins I’ve found to do this is “Network Publisher” (provided by linksalpha.com) which can post automatically to 30+ social media sites, including facebook, twitter, and linkedin. The free package, aptly named “Free“, allows one person to publish to 5 social media sites and 5 websites, with 300 posts per day. The other packages range in price from $2.99 a month to $49.99 a month, and can meet a varying degree of  needs.

“Network Publisher” is very easy to set-up, and once you have done so, it basically runs on auto-pilot, which totally works for me, because I just love “set it, and forget it” style software.

So, I have discovered a few of the reasons why there is so much love for WordPress, and I have whole-heartedly joined the ranks of avid WordPress fans and developers now. I would suggest, that if you want to keep in touch with your clients through social media and a blogging, you should seriously consider WordPress. It’s ease of use, easy installation, amazing amount of built-in features and additional plug-ins, SEO friendliness, and easy social media integration make it a very strong contender for blogging.

I have to say that I love this program, and I believe that once you try it you will to.

This is a great piece of open source software from Kevin Papst and Severin Leonhardt which makes keeping track of your time extremely simple.

Kimai can be rather easily  installed on your own web server, and accessed through any web browser, anywhere in the world. It is essentially an online time-clock that allows you to keep track of your time by customers, projects, and particular tasks in a very easy to use system. In fact, the simplicity of the system is what makes it truly shine.

I love the way I can set up a new client, input the project I am working on for them, and then input the different tasks that I will be working on for that project. Kimai then allows me to keep track of the time I have spent on each task,  for each project, for each client, and it automatically calculates my earnings based on what hourly rate I have specified.

I’ve been using Kimai for about 5 weeks now, and the only drawback I have found is that the invoice system requires a PDO database connection. For me that is not really a big deal as I prefer to use some other systems for my invoicing needs.

If you are interested in Kimai, you can find this software at kimai.org and try it out yourself. I think you will find that it is well worth the 15 minutes it takes to set up, for something that can help you manage your most valuable asset… Time.

Download Kimai Free

We are proud to announce the launch of our Blog “From The Dragon’s Mouth”. We will be posting tutorials, articles about web technologies and design, basic information that everyone who is interested in the web should know, and any information we think might benefit our customers and the community.

We are also proud to announce the launch of the brand new dragontreestudio.com website.

We look forward to getting to know the community and sharing our knowledge and expertise with all you.

“The Dragon Tree Studio Team”