Joomla! - the quickest, easiest way to build a website
Building Your Website, Hosting, Technical Stuff March 22nd, 2009
If you’ve heard of Open Source software, you’ve heard of Joomla. Well, okay, you may not have heard of Joomla but you have probably heard the concept of Joomla because Joomla is open source. Open source is free and openly available software applications for your personal or commercial use. Yes, you heard it right. Free. Open source consists of software applications that are free and many of them are good. One in particular is Joomla!
Joomla! is a content management system often commonly referred to as CMS. CMS is your best friend when it comes to managing any website with content. Joomla! in particular is easy to install. Customizing how your content will be displayed will likely be the most time consuming thing but it will be the most time consuming thing regardless of the application you use to setup your website.
Joomla! can be installed typically two ways: through your hosting provider or uploading the Joomla! files and running the install on the hosted server. Of course, the latter is easiest because it’s literally point-and-click. My site, WebMom Domains, offers Joomla! and other open source applications with every hosting package. Of course, other hosting providers also offer Joomla! and other open source apps as well. You’ll want to check the hosting provider before purchasing a hosting package to ensure they have these apps if that’s your interest. You should also ensure that your hosting provider has Linux running PHP 4 or 5 (5 is recommended) and Apache 1 or 2 (2 is preferred). You can use Windows hosting but personally I think Linux will give you less headaches. Check out Joomla!’s technical requirements.
Just to give you an example of the simplicity of Joomla!, take a look at www.byebyediapers.com. I created this website in TWO hours. Of course, it’s not stellar nor is it complete but what you see took me less time I would have imagined. I installed it through my WebMom Domains hosting account by clicking the Install button.
Just to give you an example of the point-and-click ease of using my WebMom Domain’s hosting, take a look a these screen shots:
When I logged into my hosting account, I selected “Your Applications”
And then I clicked on Content Management on the left and then Joomla!
And then I clicked the red Install button.
For my website ByeByeDiapers.com, during the installation I chose to install Sample Data (which is essentially the Joomla! Demo Website you see on Joomla!). Ideally, you would not chose install Sample Data but I wanted to see what it looked like out-of-the-box.
I made a few changes such as changing the template under Template Manager and what took me the longest was how to figure out the Category, Article and Section Manager. Because I had installed the sample data, I had to disable or rename most of the information (that’s why I wouldn’t recommend installing Sample Data unless you want to play around with it and learn it).
With Joomla! you can get free Joomla! templates or you can pay to purchase premium templates. Just search “joomla template” on Google or your favorite search engine. Also, you can pay a PHP developer who is familiar with Joomla! to customize your Joomla! website. If you’re familiar with elance.com, you can hire a freelance Joomla! expert for a reasonable price.
Also with Joomla!, you can find an endless amount of extensions which really allow for the greatest customization of your website straight out-of-the-box. For example, you can add a Google AdSense Module or extension to display Google AdSense on your site. Or you can add Photo Galleries, Calculators, Maps, Rating systems…the list goes on and on.
You don’t need to know any programming nor do you need to know any HTML to install Joomla! Of course, the more you know, the faster you can get things done. :)
What kind of hosting is right for me?
Building Your Website, Hosting February 16th, 2009
There are many types of web hosting options that are available. They start from the very basic hosting setup for beginners where you are sharing space on a server with many other customers to a server or set of servers completely dedicated to your business needs.
For example, WebMom Domains has a variety of hosting and server options from the very basic hosting for your personal website to an enterprise solution for a large company.
When you take a look around the internet, you’ll see hosting plans labeled something like beginner, economic or cheap. They usually offer a small amount of disk space, small bandwidth or transfer rate and most include email accounts, MS SQL or MySQL databases as well as software tools that would allow you to do things like create a forum for your visitors.
The larger hosting plans offer essentially the same things as the cheaper plans but the big difference usually is the amount of disk space and transfer rates - they tend to be much greater plus have many additional features.
Well, which one is right for me you ask?
Do you have a strong online presence already? Or do you have a lot of potential traffic coming to your website in the near future? Hopefully, you have done a business plan and have projected business growth for the next 5 years (or at least the next couple of years) which will help you determine how many customers you are likely to have coming to your website.
If you project high growth in the first couple of years of your online business, then you will want to get a premium hosting plan now. However, if you are not sure or you suspect business growth will be slow the first couple of years, then obtaining a simple hosting plan with minimal disk space and bandwidth would be just fine.
If you get a small hosting plan but then find you have a lot of incoming traffic or that your database files have grown to the maximum capacity for your current hosting plan, then you can always upgrade to a premium hosting plan. What that means is that either the hosting provider will give you more space and bandwidth seamlessly or you may need to move your website files to a larger server or a dedicated server with possibly just a tiny bit of downtime.
Web Hosting - the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Building Your Website, Hosting February 16th, 2009
I’m going to break down web hosting into my three unique categories: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
The Good (Not free but guaranteed NOT to give you any headaches!)
There are thousands of domain and hosting providers out there. Most of them carry decent hosting plans and most are similar to some extent but they are going to cost you money. Most of the basic plans start around $5 and go on up depending on the hosting provider and services provided.
They are yours to do whatever you wish with them. They are not ad-supported in any way.
Some things to consider…
You’ll want to make sure they guarantee 99% and higher uptime (in simplest terms this mean the amount of time on average that a hosting provider guarantees their servers and/or networks to be up and running). This is important because as an online business, you cannot afford to have lengthy downtime.
For example, what if you spent lots of money on a Google ad campaign for a weekend sale you were running on your online store and just as business started picking up over the weekend, the server your website is hosted on crashes or they take it down for maintenance (technically you should pay attention to any downtime notices given to you by your hosting provider and therefore you wouldn’t plan such an ad campaign during this time…right???) 
So, they take the servers or network down for 4 hours for emergency maintenance and all the people coming to your website during that time will find it unavailable. Not only will you have lost potential business from existing customers, you will have lost money on your ad campaign because you were trying to draw new customers to your website as well and it was not available. Most of those customers, especially the potentially new customers, will likely not return.
But wait, it’s not just this one weekend they have 4 hours of downtime, it’s every weekend or it’s an hour every evening and so on. That’s less than 99% uptime and that will hurt your business. So make sure your hosting provider guarantees 99% or higher uptime. WebMom Domains is one of many places offering 99.9% uptime. You can’t afford anything less.
The Bad (Semi-freebies, aka Free with a purchase)
Okay, this is not entirely bad (but it sounded kind of cool saying Good, Bad and Ugly, didn’t it?) Domain and Hosting providers such as WebMom Domains, Network Solutions, GoDaddy, Dotster, etc. offer free websites and hosting when you purchase a Domain name or other products from them. The only caveat is that while the website setup and hosting is free, it will include some form of their advertising on your website generally termed “ad-supported”. Some Domain providers may have pop-up ads that show up on your free website, some use ad banners at the top of your website while others use a small area of your website such as WebMom Domains.
Again, while it’s nice to have a free website, if you intend on running a business or blog for profit this is probably not the best route to take for the reasons mentioned above. If you want to have a place to put your family pictures to share with friends and family, then this is a great option.
Another good reason not to have a free website is that you are generally given a small amount of bandwidth, disk space, emails, etc. Say for example, you are the person that designed the SnuggieTM and you want to sell it online. After you launched your online store, business was slow but then through some aggressive marketing your business suddenly and exponentially grew. Let’s say the number of people coming to your website grew from 30 hits to 3,000 in just a month! If you have small bandwidth (meaning the amount of traffic going to and coming from your site), your site will slow down because it cannot handle all the traffic. If your site is slow, guess what? People are going to get irritated when they click to purchase that SnuggieTM on your website and it takes one minute for the web page to load! You will lose customers real fast. You need to consider paying for a decent web hosting plan if you are going to take your business seriously and you want to make sure you can upgrade your hosting plan easily should you need greater bandwidth, disk space, etc.
The Ugly (The Freebies)
Completely free websites.
That’s right…for absolutely free, almost no-strings attached websites, you can go to places like Webs.com to get your very own free website.
The catch? Like the free with purchase websites mentioned above, your website will have Webs.com advertising somewhere on your website (they have to make their money somehow since it’s free to you). This means that there’s some advertising competition between you and Webs.com should you try and advertise for yourself on your Webs.com website. I really wouldn’t recommend it for a business especially since you don’t have much control on where the Webs.com advertising will be placed on your website. Again, this would be a great place to put up your family pictures to share with friends and family. They might give you a hard time about the ads on your website but who cares!? It’s free.
Another reason why I wouldn’t recommend free places like Webs.com is your website name or URL is going to be essentially THEIR URL.
For example, your free website on Webs.com will be YourDomainName.WEBS.com (YourDomainName being whatever you name your website)
If you plan on running a business, I guarantee that you people will not take your business seriously if your URL is, for example, ShoeEmporium.Webs.com. (WebMom Geek Alert: in this example ShoeEmporium is what we call a Sub-Domain ) There is a caveat to this however, you can buy a domain name and forward it to YourDomainName.Webs.com. Check out my other post What is Domain Forwarding.
Free services like these are great for personal use such as sharing photos or stories or experimenting with creating your own website. Not a good idea for a business. If you’re going to start an online business invest a few dollars a month into a small web hosting plan.
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