Archive for the ‘Web Development’ Category

There is no doubt about it, Joomla is a very complex system to work with if you don’t have the proper training.

Time and time again I am hearing how people are just not happy with their Joomla website and they are not happy with VirtueMart (Joomla’s shopping cart).  Their complaints are the structures are just not user friendly when in reality, with the proper training Joomla and Virtuemart is not any harder to use than WordPress or 1Shopping Cart.

The problem is that Joomla comes with so many functions already enabled. People get lost. Once they understand that they can learn to create an article and manage it, then they can learn to move modules, etc, and that they can learn one thing at a time and not get confused by it all at once, Joomla starts to make sense.

Case Study

I met a fellow virtual assistant who had a Joomla site and she was ready to throw in the towel and move it to a WordPress website.  This is fine but she eventually wanted to give away things, have a newsletter and other things that could be accomplished with WordPress but she would either have to pay for these services or she would be using WordPress for something that it was never intended for which is a complex website and she would’ve eventually ran into problems.

She reached out for help and I answered her and spent two hours working with her (she basically needed a full education on how to use her site because her designer created the site, got paid and walked away, which is unfortunate) and she is now much happier with her website.

Her complaint was also that it was not user friendly but once I helped her understand how to do things to her website, she realized it’s really not that un-user friendly.

When you are not use to web design and shopping carts and how they work, whether you use WordPress, Joomla, 1Shopping Cart or Virtuemart, it can all seem overwhelming. But it doesn’t have to be.  All you have to do is reach out and find the right person who is willing to take the time and teach you.

With the fast-pace of your life, you may not want to learn something new and that’s fine but if you don’t take the time to learn, it can leave you frustrated and cost you a lot of money.  Even if you have somebody update the site for you, you have to pay them every time or if you try to learn things on your own without somebody in the background to help you out it will cost you in lost time and frustration.

So before you give up on something because you feel it is non-user friendly, reach out and find somebody who is willing to take the time to work with you and educate you because you may just find that you were just uneducated on the item.  Being uneducated can be detrimental to your business and cause great confusion.

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Every time my daughter would go into Walmart and we walked by this certain two piece outfit (a shirt and leggings), she said she wanted it.  It is an adorable outfit but I was a little stumped because my daughter is quite the diva and lives to wear dresses and skirts but it wasn’t a one time thing it was very consistent.  So my husband and I decided we would get it for her for Easter and we did.

Easter morning she got it and was so excited except of course it was pink and not the teal color she liked so much (they were sold out). Anyway, the outfit is a long shirt with a pair of leggings and she saw the leggings and said I don’t know why the Easter bunny got me pants because this is a dress so I don’t need them.  Mind you, my daughter is 5 years old. Anyway, I explained to her that it wasn’t a dress just a long shirt and she had to wear pants with it, she argued.  I told her that I would ask my mom and sister in law for their opinion at Easter dinner and of course they agreed with me however, that is not good enough for my daughter.  She is still convinced that it is a dress.

This whole ordeal got me thinking about a couple of recent encounters I have had with clients. The most recent one was a person who was looking for help because their website was displaying incorrectly in IE (unfortunately this happens frequently). It was cutting off the complete lower half of the site.

It was beyond my expertise but I contacted a colleague of me that could help me out and we looked at the code and come to find out the most logical problem with it is that they put a height restriction on the site.  When you put a height restriction on a site, IE goes to that height and then completely cuts off the rest of the site.

I told the client about this who then proceeded to tell his web developer.  This web developer emailed me and told me that the code wasn’t the problem but didn’t even know what the problem was and wouldn’t even test to see (sorry but if the site isn’t displaying correctly the only thing it could be is a coding issue). The web developer proceeded to tell the client he needs to redesign the site.

I felt sorry for the client because chances are he will be charged even more for the additional work when chances are all the developer has to do is remove the height restriction and it will work.  I don’t care how long you have been doing web design, there is always a chance that you added something or left out something that is essential to that site displaying properly. When I checked this morning the site was still not displaying properly and they are paying for advertising and marketing and the majority of people still use IE so that poor client is losing business because of the web developers unwillingness to admit he possibly made a mistake.

Another client that I have been working with is a VA.  She has a client who is getting a website developed using Joomla.  Unfortunately she chose a web designer who charges by the hour and quite honestly knows nothing about Joomla.

I’ve been trying to help her out with this client and one of the problems they were having was adding 1SC and Amember to the site. I explained to the VA that with Joomla she doesn’t need to pay for 1SC and Amember because Joomla has free extensions that will handle the job nicely without an extra fee. Plus, if you get too many different applications running in a website that are not created specifically for that site structure you run into a lot of headaches-headaches that can be avoided.

I explained the extensions to the VA who said that her client won’t be interested because her site is already over budget and past due. I told her I would talk to her client for her and explain it to her because it will actually save her a ton of money and headaches in the long run. I then got an email saying they went in a different direction.  A couple of months later, I get an email from this same VA asking for assistance on some other matters and I explained to her that in order to get the results she was looking for, I would have to redo the template not redesign, just redo the template to get the effects she wanted. The VA then proceeded to tell me that she doesn’t need my services at this time.

Obviously this client’s site is still not up and running properly. Had I been able to talk to the client in the beginning I could have gotten all the things that she wanted done completely and her site up and running and making her money a long time ago.  I know that sounds arrogant but the problems that she is having are simple problems, problems that can be taken care of with the correct extensions and a web designer with the know-how.

These clients ASKED for expert help. They got it, and then continued to fumble around messing things up because they wouldn’t listen to the simpler information. They over complicated things and did not take the advice they asked for.

You run into people like that. You tell them it is a shirt, and they insist it is a dress, and end up with their backside exposed.

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Newsletters and shopping carts are two of the most used services for websites today.  It seems like everybody has something they want to sell for their business whether it’s a physical product or a downloadable product so they turn to their websites to increase sales.

As a website owner you also want to keep your clients and customers informed with what’s going on in your business and portray yourself as the expert in your chosen field so you start a newsletter.

The most popular service for both a shopping cart and a newsletter is by far 1SC (1Shopping Cart). After all, spending $99/month to offer a newsletter, physical products and downloadable products seems like a steal considering how much you believe you will earn from your products.

The truth is it takes time to get a website found online and even when it does get found, it doesn’t necessarily mean that your visitors will purchase your products.  You have to have a superior product and portray that throughout your website.  Your newsletter has to have something of interest for it to get subscribers.

Depending on what you charge for your product, it could take you a long time to just break even when paying $99/month. What if there was an alternative to that costly monthly fee?

There is and it’s called Virtuemart and Acajoom. Virtuemart and Acajoom are made specifically for the CMS, Joomla and they are both free.

Virtuemart-

Virtuemart is a fully functional, high powered shopping cart made specifically for Joomla.  Some of the features it includes are:

• Shopper groups-this allows you to be able to offer discounts to customer A but not customer B.  This is a great feature so that you can offer discounts to repeat customers.
• Multiple currency
• Shipping address based tax calculation
• Unlimited number of products
• Online Catalog
• Featured products
• RSS feeds to update subscribers on new products
• Easily add and remove products
• Live credit card processing or pre-defined payment gateways like paypal, authorize.net and more

Acajoom-

• Unlimited subscribers
• Subscription through URL
• Create a default HTML template for each mailing
• Unlimited lists, you can have a list for marketing tips, a list for startup tips, a list for whatever you want and have different subscribers to each.

You may be saying it’s great that all this stuff is free but I already have a website so I don’t want to redo it.  That’s perfectly understandable.

It will cost you approximately $900 or less to get a full-featured shopping cart, newsletter manager, and easy to update website. With 1SC, you are STILL going to either have to put in a LOT of work to set it up, template it, configure it, load the products, etc. In fact, the SAME amount of work that is required for a Joomla site. And you’ll have to either do the work, or pay for it, at about the same rate.

The real comparison is not in setup fees – those are the same. The real comparison is in monthly. A Joomla/VM setup can be maintained for $35 or less per month, and with that, you can often get assistance and advice on how to actually EARN with the site. Compared to 1SC, that’s a significant savings.

Let’s do the math:

Shopping cart and newsletter using 1SC-$99/month
Joomla, Virtuemart and Acajoom-$35/month
1SC for 1 year-$1188
Joomla, Virtuemart, and Acajoom for 1 year-$420
That’s a difference of $768 for 1 year

The proof is in the math.

I understand change is tough. Especially when you have virtual assistants, coaches, marketers etc telling you to stick with 1SC but the truth is, you could really be costing your business a lot of unneeded money waste.

If you don’t mind wasting thousands of dollars to keep in touch with your clients and sell your products online because 1SC is the “norm,” then more power to you. But if you are looking for a cost-effective, long-term solution to your newsletter and shopping cart needs, give us a call and we can help you decide which solution is right for you.

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Recently I had the unfortunate task of telling a business person some really bad news about her site.

She was asking for some ideas on how to get more visitors to her site as well as making it more visible on Google. I checked out her site which was very nice but I noticed one HUGE problem, it was completely built in flash. Because the site was built in Flash it probably cost her roughly $1000 dollars. The bad news about it being in Flash is that the search engines will only index it as a single page site without any content.

Considering content is one of the most important aspects of SEO if the search engines can’t read it, I don’t care how nice it is, the site will bring minimal traffic, if any.  You can add description tags and title tags that are excellent but because that is not a primary concern with search engines, you will receive minimal benefit from it.

It is true that Google purchased the rights to the technology to interpret Flash. However, they have not implemented it and no other search engine can read it.  When they do implement it, they will only read the text inside the Flash, not pictures of text, since Flash sites are basically moving pictures, Flash sites will still not be as indexable as other sites.

There is NO aesthetic advantage to designing an entire site in Flash. In fact, you can achieve almost the same effects with JavaScript, and CSS, which won’t interfere with search engine indexing.

Flash is great for accents, but not for entire site coding.

I wasn’t really thrilled about telling the person about her site.  Especially since I knew approximately how much she paid for it, but as a web designer I felt I had a moral and ethical duty to tell her.  Was she upset?  Probably, but I haven’t heard a response from her.  My only concern is that she went back and talked to the person who created the site for her, asking them about it.  Not because I am fearful of the backlash but because of the fact that her web designer probably told her I was full of it and that Google and other sites can index her Flash site just as well as any other site.  The reason I am sure that her web designer told her not to worry about it is because they created the site for her to begin with, knowing that her site would have a hard time getting indexed and getting traffic.

Just because a site can have a ton of bells and whistles doesn’t mean it should.  This also goes for advertisements, or anything that does not serve a purpose to your site visitors such as music playing in the background, a video of the site owner/CEO talking about how great their business is or even saying welcome.

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A lot of people believe that when they decide they want a website it can be up and running within a couple of weeks.  Unfortunately, that is not so.  The truth is building a website is a process.

Domain Name And Hosting- Obviously this is first and foremost.  The domain name needs to be purchased quickly so that it is not purchased by another person.  There are several businesses and people who are on the internet and it may be difficult to get exactly the domain name that is wanted.  Hosting needs to be purchased as well because without hosting, there is no website.

Site Design-The site design is one of the most important aspects of the whole website.  You have to get the colors, pictures, navigation and all around organization of it correct.  Then it needs to be sent to the client for approval.  It is commonplace for some additional tweaking and design work to take place before it is out for the world to see.  This could take several days, or even weeks, depending on how quickly approvals are returned, and how intensive the changes need to be.

Site Structure Install-If you are using the CMS Joomla,  this is actually the easiest thing to do as long as the designer has Joomla already configured.  Then it is just as simple as installing it into the hosting account and making sure all the components are there.  This also includes installing the template that was created. This can take between 1 and 4 hours to do, depending on how much is pre-configured.

Content-The content is the hardest part of creating a website.  The content has to be written and it has to be written well.  A client can do this themselves, or hire it.  However, a good web designer will take a look at client provided content and tweak it to better suit the site visitors and for SEO purposes.   This will go on for every page that is on the site.  This can take several days or even weeks, depending on how many pages the site consists of and how much needs to be done to speak to the site visitors.

SEO- When a site is built correctly, the SEO is largely accomplished in the design and content areas. Too often, a site owner hires a designer to do the site, a content writer to create the content, and then hires an SEO expert to optimize it – the problem with this approach is that it results in a lot of unnecessary cleanup, and may produce handicaps in the site that are prohibitively expensive to correct. It is best to include the Optimization in the site build process from the beginning. Because when the site is built correctly to begin with, SEO becomes a simple process of adding the titles, descriptions, alt-tags, and creating a backlink and online Search Marketing plan. Search Engine Optimization helps to attract higher placement in the search engines and results in more traffic to the site.  It begins and ends with good content, and happens best within a smart site design.

Training-Joomla can have a learning curve to it, as does any software that is worth using, that is why designers who create websites in Joomla SHOULD include training.  Training can be from one hour up to several hours.  Depending on how much the site designer and site owner agreed to and how much the site owner needs help with.

The average time between contract signing and site completion, is two months. It can happen faster if the site is fairly simple and the site owner returns required items promptly and gives approvals quickly. Sometimes it can take longer, due to unforeseen complications (technology is that way), or unexpected events in the lives of the site owner or designer. Getting a “Website Tonight” though, is a myth. If you get an instant website, it isn’t going to be a complete website.

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