Joomla! Start to Finish
How to Plan, Execute, and Maintain Your Web Site
I entered the web world in 2000, back when we built web sites in Macromedia Dreamweaver 3, made our navigation buttons as JavaScript-based image rollovers, used tables for layout, and used the font tag and spacer GIF images quite liberally throughout our sites.
In those days, "weekend web masters" would buy a copy of Microsoft FrontPage on a Friday night, spend the weekend learning the software and confi guring their web host, and by Monday morning, they were hanging out their shingle as a web professional.
In 2009, our weekend web masters are now Saturday web masters. Call up a hosting company, get them to buy a domain name for you and set up an open source content management system like Joomla, click a few buttons, and you’ve got a web site up in a day or less. What’s more, you don’t need to know any HTML, CSS, PHP, MySQL, what a web application is, or even what FTP is.
Many of my fellow web designer and web developer friends are shocked by this. What differentiates their years of experience from those who just installed Joomla for the fi rst time yesterday? What justifi es your higher hourly rate?
Actually, those of us who have been in the business for a while know that clicking the buttons is just a part of the process. The more languages you know (HTML, CSS, PHP, etc.), the more customizationsyou can make to the client’s site.
But is that all? We know HTML and CSS and they don’t? We’ve built a dozen Joomla sites before and they are on their fi rst one or two? What about those web firms based overseas who charge rates that are so low that we can’t possibly compete here in the United States? They’ve built hundreds of Joomla sites - doesn’t that negate the arguments just made?
As web developers, we have to get smarter about marketing ourselves and what skillsets we bring to the table to solve our client’s problems. We need to understand what our client does in their organization and how they serve their clients in order to understand what technology can do to solve their problems.
Most technical books cover button-clicking really well. There are dozens of Joomla books that talk about how to create a poll, create a custom template, and install new extensions. But not one of those books talk about why you should create a poll, what a custom template can do for you, or how to evaluate an extension before you install it.
Rather than writing another book on button-clicking in Joomla, I wanted to write a book about planning your Joomla site with maintenance in mind (rather than thinking about maintenance after the site is built), what kinds of problems a blog or a newsfl ash might solve, whether a custom template is right for every site, and how to upgrade your site.
These are the skills that you bring to your client. This is how you’re different from the person who just installed Joomla for the fi rst time yesterday and who has never before built a site. You know more than you think you do! Start marketing these squishy skills you have and take a genuine interest in your client’s needs. Suggest ways that technology could solve some of their problems. Become a partner to your client, a true solutions provider, not just a button-clicker.
I touch on a lot of topics in this book, including user experience, user design, information architecture, business strategy, target audience identifi cation, and much more. I don’t go deep into any of them. If you’re from any of these disciplines, you might even accuse me of barely touching on these topics. Truth is, each of the above topics is a genre of books by itself. I’ve just given you a start on these fields in this book. I encourage you to read up in these areas to expand your skills.
