The new online training is up and this is only the beginning!  So far, you will only find Joomla related videos but we've got a lot more coming!

Some of the new material coming soon includes:

• WordPress Training Videos
• Virtuemart Training Videos
• A whle section of videos about our company and how we work
• Written Documentation

Visit the new training section now!

Whenever we build a website, we like to offer basic training to teach our clients how to manage their new website.  We often do this by either an in-person, or online training session.  Lately however, we've also been creating mini training videos in which you can see our screen as we walk you through how do a basic task such as editing a page or adding a menu item.

Because most of the basic training is the same, we've decided to start building a new section on the website for these training materials!  We will be making short videos as mentioned above, teaching you all the basics of your CMS as well as providing some standard written materials.

While we certainly don't think that it will replace 1 on 1 training, as every website has it's differences and some clients need more training that others, we do think that our clients will appreciate being able to visit the website to get a refresher now and then.

We've already begun working on the videos and we're hoping to have this section up by in the next coupe weeks.

Stay tuned!

Keeping busy! We’ve been keeping extremely busy over here. Between client projects and another little project for this website (more on that at a later date) I haven’t had much time to write here. On some level it’s a good problem to have. It means that Michael and I have been kept at our limit, always having a few clients on the go. It does however mean that there is less for you to read. I’m hoping to change that and I’ve started by setting aside a little bit of time every week for blog writing.

I would like to spend a little time today talking about a few of the projects we’ve launched lately. First, there is www.StolzIllusions.com. This website is actually for my other company which does magic and special effects design for magicians and theatre productions. The website was built on our favourite CMS, Joomla, uses WordPress for the blogging tools.

Another recent launch was www.KatherineKormos.com. This client wanted a simple site in which she could keep her bio, photos and acting resume’s up to date. It also allows her to grow the site over time as she plans to add some additional functionality like videos at a later date.

We’re also working on two more websites that I can’t tell you too much about just yet other than the fact that they look great and we’re hoping to get them launched very soon.

The Summer Sale

Lastly, I wanted to mention the summer sale we’re having. Because we know that businesses will be planning for Christmas 2011 soon, we’ve decided to have a sale. For this, we’ve put together a nice little package of features which we can use to then build you a custom company website. This is still the same great work that we always do and is by no means scaled down. We’ve always had a couple new clients come on board for their company websites and we’re excited to help them roll out the new and improved online home for the Christmas season.

Alrighty, that’s it for today. More news, tips and tricks to come!

It's been less than a year since Joomla 1.6 was released and now that we've built a few websites on the new platform, I thought I would spend time telling you a little more about our favourite content management system.  This blog post is in no way endorsed by Joomla.  It is our CMS of choice because quite simply, it helps businesses grow in ways that the others can't.

What is Joomla?

Some clients are suprised to find out that 2.7% of the internet is powered by Joomla, particularly those who might not have heard of or used the system.  Simply put, Joomla is a powerful web engine which allows you to completely run and maintain your website content as well as harness the power of several back-end tools.

Core Joomla Features

Here are a few notable core features.

Content Management:  Manage all of your content including website content, blogs, banners, polls, contact, search and more.  Everything is run through the back-end Joomla interface and be accessed from any web browser in the world.

User Management:  Manage both your own internal users, controlling who can see and edit what, as well as your public users around the world.  There are nine user groups with various types of permissions on what users are allowed to access, edit, publish and administrate.

Extensions:  There are tens of thousands of components, modules and plugins available for you to extend the capabilities of your website.

Some Favourites

Beyond the basics, there are some key tools that can make the world of difference to a business.  Here are some of our favourites:

ProjectFork:  This is a project management component which allows you to track the progress of all of your projects, upload files and manage milestones and expectations.  The best part is the fact that you can setup users for your clients to login and see the progress, make notes and comments and trade files back and forth with you.

CiviCRM:  This is a CRM system for Joomla which lets you completely manage all of your customer relationships.  This tool also comes with a complete suite of extensions and additional tools.

Chrono Forms:  This complete form builder tool enables you to build powerful forms on your website front-end and, where applicable, process more complex actions based on the results of a form.  For example, we use this tool to run the website quote form on our website.  Build your form, publish it to the website and all of the data is collected and, in our case, emailed to the respective email address (mine).

Final Thoughts

To cap the pen here, I feel that Joomla is the "CMS above the rest" because it offers tools, functionality and power in ways that other CMS systems can't.  It's far more SEO friendly than most and it's as stable as can be.  These days over 75% of our website designs are now built on this platform and we've never looked back.

We are pleased to announce the recent launch of a new client site, www.KatherineKormos.com.

This website features Katherine's acting and technical theatre work by combining the CMS functionality with blogging, photo galleries and a striking new design!