The holidays are upon us and the economy is shot to hell so desperate times call for desperate measures. The recession hit my web design business hard the past 2 years so I figured a little free advertising can’t hurt. I did a Google search for free classifieds in my area and as you would expect, Craigslist is number one. I figured that I could place an add and If I got one client out of it I would be happy. I created a simple 3 sentence add describing my business and what I had to offer. I felt like a anxious kid on Christmas eve, waiting to see what will come of my little snipplet. I didn’t receive any calls the first day so I decided to check my ad and make sure I had the right phone number on it, I’m known for typo’s. OK, where is it? Nobody told me that when you place an ad on craigslist it immediately disappears off the page because 30 other people have the same idea as you. I just need more posts! My obsessive nature came out and from now one no one will have more post than me! Ads three times a day, every day. This has to work.
About a week later I received a call from someone who saw my ad! Yippie, free business. It only took me 15 minutes 3 times a day for a week to get this guy. He proceeded to tell me what he was looking for and It sounded like every other client I have met. I asked him all the usual questions and then I asked what his budget was. Budget? He replied. Well I have a few puppies I can give you. Dogs? He wants to trade dogs for my labor intensive, mind boggling design work. Don’t get me wrong, I love dogs, but bartering is not what I had in mind.
I guess the moral of the story is, If you want to attract quality customers, do the footwork, pay the money and do it right!
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( 2.9 / 413 )Joomla is an open source content management system (CMS) that allows you to build and launch websites within minutes. Since Joomla is open source, upgrading and adding additional functionality can be done with no or minimal cost.
What is a content management system?
A CMS allows you to make changes to your website easily with just a few clicks modifications are instantly applied to your website front end. The days of updating outdated links or contents on every page of your website are over. Joomla offers a user friendly interface that can be learned within a few hours, even people with little to no knowledge of web design will find its operation smooth and simple.
What types of sites can I build with Joomla?
Joomla is scalable as well as extremely customizable. Whether you are creating an online store or a simple 5 page company overview, Joomla offers the flexibility to change applications on the fly.
Some of the types of websites you can run with Joomla are:
• Portal websites
• Member Based Websites
• Online Stores
• Blogs or News Sites
• Corporate Websites
• Personal websites
As I stated before Joomla is easily expanded depending on your needs. Joomla components are easily installed and allow you to offer your visitors tons of fresh content. Some of the components available are:
• Forums and Message Boards
• Photo Galleries and Portfolios
• Chat and Instant Messaging
• Directories and Classifieds
There are hundreds of free modules and component created by third parties located at the main Joomla website Joomla.org. If you are looking for a website that won’t become outdated within a year, take a look at Joomla.
If you want to have a Joomla Website Built for you, visit CharlottePlus.com a Charlotte web design company.
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( 3 / 391 )So you finally decided to take your retail business to the next level by opening an online store. Well congratulations on a wise choice. Internet sales accounted for almost 417 billion dollars in revenue for the year 2009. So why not grab your piece of the online pie. The first step would be to find a shopping cart that will provide you with everything you need to sell your product.
A shopping cart is an internet based program that allows retailers to categorize and display their items online while providing customers with everything from product details, checkout and payment integration. Over the past ten years I have worked with several shopping carts, some that are a great pleasure to work with and others that I wouldn’t suggest to anyone. Shopping carts can cost anywhere between free and several thousand dollars. I’m going to be discussing one in particular, Virtuemart for Joomla. Why you may ask, well it’s free for one and the Joomla architecture allows for scalability. Joomla what? What is Joomla? A brief explanation is that Joomla is an open source content management system that allows web designers to build different websites around the same software. It’s no nonsense backend allows administrators to manage their website with a click of a button. I will discuss more about Joomla in my next article, for right now; we are talking about shopping carts.
Virtuemart is an open source program as I mentioned above, your cost of operation is really just your webhosting. So for around 10 bucks a month, you’re in business. Other managed services like Yahoo, eBay stores and Volusion can cost three times that or more depending on the package you choose. Virtuemart offers all the bells and whistles you need to get your business online in a jiffy. Once the storefront was installed the only time consuming job is to enter in all of your products and upload photo. The software has several product layouts to choose from, so you can customize easily without any knowledge of programming. Unlike other open source shopping carts such as osCommerce, installing a custom template is as easy as 123.
Virtuemart is integrated with about a dozen payment processors such as PayPal and Authorize.net, shipping features are also limit less, allowing you to set shipping rates for all over the globe if needed.
I recently created a virtual storefront for a client, his budget was restricted and his time was limited, I suggested Virtuemart with Joomla. We had the site up and running within a week and stayed well within his budget.
Anthony Urso is a Charlotte web designer with over 10 years experience building simple to complex internet application for clients globally. For more information you can view his online portfolio at h
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( 3 / 384 )Today I needed to find a simple web blog software that is pretty much upload and go. I really wanted to stay away from Wordpress and such so as usual I go to Google and type in 'php blog'. The first listing that came up was to a site called 'Simple PHP Blog' PHP Blog . Ok, sounds good. I was expecting this cheesely little script (No expectations means no disappointments).
I went to the site and I was pleasantly surprised, the clean no-frills look and feel really caught my attention. I downloaded the script and uploaded. Wow! I was up and running in just a few minutes. No databse connections needed, the script uses flat files. A little old school, but then again I wanted something simple.
Business has been slow lately so I figured increasing my backlinks will help out with some SEO. I'm going to be submitting my RSS feeds to Feedburner and a few others to see what kind of response I get.
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