Joomla for your Church

April 14th, 2010 No Comments

Is it time for your church to upgrade their website? If it is, consider the strengths of using the Joomla content management system. There are numerous extensions that will give your website functionality that you have wanted for a long time and do it for a fraction of the cost of a custom system. Here are just s few of my favorites:

PrayerCenter by Mike Leeper

RSMail

JEvents Calendar

Shape 5′s Map it for Google

Search BibleGateway Module

These are just a few. They will enhance your website and for a modest cost or free.

If you need help with your church website, please feel free to contact me.

Dennis Hoyle

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Manage your web content

July 15th, 2009 1 Comment

With the advent of (CRM) Content Management Systems for websites like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and SiteFinity and many more, editing the content of your website has never been easier. If you can use a web browser and a word processor, you can change your website on the fly, adding editing and removing text, photos, video and more. No more coding html or messing with FTP! Some CMS’s are geared toward an individual or small group or business (WordPress), others are focused on community, larger group or business (Joomla, or Drupal). SiteFinity is based on Microsoft .Net and is focused more on business or large group.

When choosing a CRM software for your website, keep in mind how much control do you want over all aspects of your website.

WordPress

WordPress is very easy to use, has excellent support and offers great themes and plug-ins. WordPress will do nicely for individuals, groups, churches, clubs or small business. With hundreds of free themes to choose from and thousands of inexpensive themes, you’re sure to find a look you love. If not I can create a custom theme per your instructions. Plug-ins will make your WordPress website do what you want and much of the time they’re free or donation based. I highly recommend supporting the developers via donation, they are doing the hard work to make our lives easier and deserve our support. WordPress is a free open source software.

Joomla

If you need more control or offer a large amount of content, Joomla would be a great choice. Joomla is Open Source software with a huge following of users and developers. With Joomla you can control almost every aspect of your website such as menus, categories, modules and articles and each of those have numerous formatting options like; position, naming and content detail to give you the look and feel you want.  Control is good, but it can be overwhelming to someone less technical. You may want someone (like me) to help you setup the website and train you how to use it. Extensions are available for almost anything you want to do and are often availble free or at a low cost. I could help you setup your Joomla site and you can take it from there.

Drupal

Drupal offers a lot of built in functionality for e-commerce, photo galleries, group discussions, forums, podcasts, newsletters and more. There are numerous add-on-modules for more functionality. Drupal is also Open Source. Many programmers prefer Drupal over Joomla, but that’s mostly personal preferance. If you plan on doing some custom programming, you might consider Drupal. Also, Drupal has a very small  footprint and in some tests, runs faster. Important if you get a lot of traffic.

SiteFinity

SiteFinityis very good for modification and customization by skilled developers. It’s excellent software and comes with excellent support (because you pay for it). It is more costly because it’s not open source, that can be an advantage (support) and a disadvantage (cost). Also, SiteFinity runs on a .Net (Windows) operating system, hosting may cost a little more. Once your developer creates the website structure you can easily manage the content.

If you need help with your new website, please contact me. I like to show you the options so you can make an informed choice.

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Selling on the Internet is Easy

June 6th, 2009 No Comments

Do you have a product or service that you want to sell on the Internet? It’s a lot easier to do than you think. It can be as easy as setting up a PayPal buy now button on your existing website, to a new website that allows you to enter product and inventory information and process sales automatically.

There are two ways of creating a simple e-commerce website that I recommend:

  1. PDShop by Pagedown software offers an inexpensive inventory control and online sales software that can be added to a .Net website using an SQL database. This means that you can login to a secure website, add, edit and remove products easily. The advantage is a reduce monthly cost and high capacity. Many websites offer online sales, but charge you a large monthly fee and limit the number of products. Some even charge a percentage of each sale costing you even more. By creating a website using PDShop your costs are; site setup and configuration, web hosting (around $20 a month) and fees charged by PayPay or Google Checkout. You will also have the ability to add, edit and remove website content inluding products, pages and any other information you choose.
  2. If your selling needs are less ambitious, creating a simple WordPress website with an e-commerce plugin we really reduce the cost. The plugin WP e-commerce is a fairly simple way to do it. There are others, I can help you find one that meets your exact needs. The reduce initial setup cost and low maintenance costs make this a very effective way to sell products and services on the Internet.

Both of these solutions have the advantages of low cost, quick setup and the ability to make changes as you see fit. These are not the only way to do it, some Joomla plugins are very effective e-commerce tools. Please contact me if you’re planning on selling on the Internet. No cost to talk and I may be able to help you keep more of your hard earned money.

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WordPress for Photographers

May 26th, 2009 No Comments

WordPress is largely known as an excellent blog and CMS (Content Management Software), however, it makes an excellent platform for photographers to display their images and promote their work. Virgil Hubbard needed a new website to display samples of his fine art and portrait images. After trying a few themes, Virgil chose the Black Canvas theme from Studio Press. The theme was designed for photographers and can have a black background or a white background.

Click here to visit StudioPress website!

Out of the box it is a very nice looking theme, however the default thumbnails are 50 x 75 pixels and will distort the image if it’s not a landscape image. With some minor changes the thumbnails are now 50 x 50 pixels and use a cropped image created by the WP media library.

To protect the images I used the wp-CopyProtect plugin by Chetan Gole. This plugin disables the right click “save image” function from a browser.

Other modifications include changing the title ”categories” to “portfolios” and using Contact form 7 for a simple email contact form. To reduce site maintenance I added the plugins for a Google Site-map and the WP database backup.

If you need a new photo website to display your images and promote your services, please contact me and I’ll get you up and running in very short order.

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Using WordPress for Group Discussions

May 14th, 2009 No Comments

Does your company or organization needs a private place for online discussions? Consider using a password protected WordPress blog. It’s very inexpensive to implement and you retain control of who accesses your website. Just enter the users, assign the rights you want them to have, approve them, and then send the user the log-in information. Casual visitors will only see a log-in page.

Advantages:

  • Private discussion
  • Controlled user access
  • Ease of posting and comments
  • Committee dedicated pages

Additions that can prove helpful are:

  • Voting (click the star)
  • File sharing (photos and documents)
  • Event calendar
  • Forms

Give your group a comfortable place to discuss what’s important to you.

Please contact me if you want help creating a WordPress Discission Group:

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