But the worst thing I noticed is that the websites didn't look very slick and they didn't offer online bookings. Some didn't even offer demo request forms. It's my feeling that if the visitor wants to contact you, book you, or see a demo video - then you need to let him act while he is motivated to do so. Just giving him your phone number isn't good enough. It may be late at night and they can't call until morning.

So, after printing out your phone number what will they do? Go to bed? Perhaps not. Perhaps they will continue browsing until they come to a website where they can take action. At my website, they can order a demo, send me an e-message (I don't post my email address because the spam-bots will harvest it), or even pay a deposit and reserve their wedding date. In other words, I let them act while they are motivated to do so. Many times we've been booked at one, two or even later in the morning when there is no way we would have answered the telephone.

OK, so now that I've sold you that you need a slick, functional website, you're response is probably either that you already have one or that you can't afford one. If the former - double check your opinion. If you're "thick skinned", post your link on our forums and ask for critiques. You may be surprised by some of the responses. You'll get much better feedback than friends or relatives could / would give you.

If you think it would cost too much to have a professional create a great website for you - you're right! And as in the videography business, there are plenty of web designers / developers who aren't worth half what they charge.

But there is a solution! It's a relatively new phenonemon called Joomla! (The exclamation mark is actually part of the name.) Joomla is a content management system that rates up there with the multi-thousand-dollar commercial CMS systems, yet it's cost is much lower: $0.00 ! (This exclamation mark is for real!) It requires absolutely no HTML know-how; no programming know-how; nothing! It is made so that the average user can have a better website than many professional web designers / developers could create. As a web developer who goes back to the earliest days of the Web, I can say that they suceeded!

I redid this website in Joomla a few months back and have since converted a dozen or so other sites. There are some potential "gotchas" to look out for. One of them is that you have to pay attention and take a few extra steps to make your Joomla website Search Engine Friendly. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

I've brought up three major website issues:

So I'll close by focusing on just those points..

The look of your website

Joomla website designs are set by a "template". Joomla installs with two default, plain-vanilla templates. This site is an example of one of those default templates. There are literally thousands of free Joomla templates available on the Web. SmBizHosting.com has some good examples of free Joomla templates. You can find thousands more by Googling " Joomla templates".

As you might expect, the commercial templates often offer greater ease-of-use. They sometimes allow quick, easy change of colors and usually give you the PNG or Photoshop version of images, so you can more easily replace them with your own. It once took me half a day to slice up a client's custom image, like pieces of a puzzle, to fit a free template. See sample joomla site with virtual store (beta).

But there's no doubt that nearly all of these, even the free templates, are much more professional-looking designs than I (or most of us) could do. Installing one is as simple as downloading it to your computer, going into the administration page of your Joomla website, and clicking your mouse a couple of times.

Your website's functionality

Sure, you can have custom scripts or even whole applications written to your specs and run them in Joomla, but chances are you won't need to. Why not? Because just about everything you can think of adding to a website has already been done and the extensions are avaiable at Joomla.org and most are free! My wedding videographer websites (currently not Joomla) have a date-checker / reservation form that does not show a calendar and it limits the number of dates that can be checked. This is because you generally don't want to advertise when you have a lot of open dates (like in December), and you don't particularly want your competitors to see how you're doing. I didn't find anything exactly like it on the Joomla.org site, but it wouldn't be too difficult to rewrite this as a Joomla component.

Error-free, standards-compliant website

Joomla is open-source. This means that thousands of programmers have access to the code of not only the Joomla core application, but of the extensions too. Programmers collaborate on forums and any flaws are quickly flushed out. With Joomla, you get thousands of developers looking at the code and recommending improvements, thus ensuring a bug-free, standards-compliant website.

Interested? I recommend the book "Beginning Joomla!" by Dan Rahmel (Apress).

There's just one more "gotcha". Some hosting servers are not very Joomla-friendly. Joomla flat-out won't run on some servers due to the server's configuration, not due to the operating system per se, because Joomla runs on nearly anything - Windows, Unix, Linux. Also, many hosting servers do not allow easy implementation of search engine friendly practices. If you don't know what an .htaccess file is and don't know how to code one, then you may not be able to make a Joomla website that can readily be found in the search engines, UNLESS - unless you host on a sever that is setup for Joomla.

OK, here comes a shameless plug for one my family's companies -

At SmBizHosting.com, there are non-Joomla PHP customers as well as Joomla customers. Although those wanting Joomla can choose an automated install from their control panel, SmBizHosting.com will (at no extra charge) install Joomla with an SEF component for search engine friendliness, and they will configure your .htaccess file for you. The only thing left to do is enter your content and wait for business!

Of course, there are plenty of other hosting companies that are Joomla-friendly too, just remember to check that aspect before signing up.

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Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved.