Joomla is an exciting platform for growing your business online

One of the most exciting reasons for recommending Joomla as a platform to our clients is the vibrant global development community that continues to innovate and grow the platform’s capabilities. Others include; an open source architecture that allows us to provide economical solutions for our clients and ease of use for collaboration across a team of users with varied technical skills. This allows for a broader base of collaboration and empowerment across a team of stakeholders.

The current collection of extensions and add-ons for Joomla CMS is now over 4691 and new stuff is coming out daily. This provides tremendous flexibility and scalability over time. Our company specializes in Joomla development, we enhance and build new components or extend existing Components and Modules to add features or configure them in the most effective ways. If done right there are really limitless possibilities for achieving cost effective results and achieving targeted business goals.

Here case study for a recent solution we provided: Rokstories layout like Yahoo

RokStories is a module built by the folks at Rocket Themes. Rocket Themes is a Joomla template design company that has evolved their template architectures with innovative features. They have built integrated modules, plug-in’s and other superb functionality around stable and graphically pleasing Joomla 1.5 native and Joomla 1.0 compatible templates. Their team has one of the best template clubs available in the marketplace and we offer free use of http://www.rockettheme.com Joomla templates to our customers as part of our service engagements.

One of our clients wanted us to modify their RokStories module with a layout to look like the yahoo module content slide show as seen here: http://www.yahoo.com/. This is what our enhancement to the RokStories module looked like when we were finished: http://www.canonprofits.org. Some of the features are turned off in this installation but as you will see the same look and feel was achieved at a fraction of the cost compared to building such a module from scratch. This is a good example of what open source is all about, working with existing code to help a client achieve goals in the most efficient way possible. Building functionality like this from scratch would have taken a considerable effort, cost more and had a much longer development cycle. With a few hours of additional programming we were able to provide what the client wanted at a fraction of the cost.

Top 5 reasons to go with Joomla

1. Using any open source platform will give you scalability but Joomla stands out since it is the most popular and best supported open source CMS platforms in the world.
2. You can build out features freely and never be “held over a barrel” by a development company.
3. You can always update over time and respond to your future needs.
4. Joomla offers limitless flexibility for just about any business model with thousands of extensions and an easy to use administrative interface.
5. Working with a talented group of Joomla! developers and consultants that understand Joomla both from a programmatic capability and from a business process and configuration capability will serve you well and allow you to get the most technology for your investment.

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One of the most powerful and popular capabilities of a Joomla website is the ability to deliver robust ecommerce solutions. While there are a growing number of options for ecommerce in Joomla, the pioneer and still the most popular shopping cart option is the Virtuemart shopping cart extension. It has been exciting to watch how a great basket of ideas has grown to become one of the most popular engines for ecommerce on the web.

Small businesses like it because it is FREE to download, it is easy to implement and maintain and it is scalable to meet the needs of their business as it grows. Shoppers like it because it looks great, is intuitive to use and is secure for handling their transactions. Developers like it because there are many extensions, accounting systems integrations and it is open source code so they can deliver real world business results and be the hero. Yippie everybody wins!

Let’s start with a quick overview of the core features and then I will get to some real exciting stuff that I like about this solution.

Virtuemart release 1.1.4

General Features

• capable of using Secure Sockets Layer (https) Encryption (128-bit)
• flexible Tax Models
  • Model 1: ShipTo Address-based Tax Calculation
  • Model 2: Store Address-based Tax Calculation
  • Model 3: EU Mode (Store Owner based Tax Calculation when Customer comes from an EU Country)
• Shoppers can manage their User Accounts (registration required)
• Shipping Address Management (Customers can enter their own Shipping Addresses)
• Order History: Shopper can view all their previous Orders (and Order Details)
• Order Confirmation Mail (customizable!) is sent to Shopper and Store Owner
• Multiple Currencies (you can allow Customers to change the Currency and buy using an alternative Currency)
• Multiple Languages (using the Joomla! Component Joom!Fish or Nooku).

Product Catalog Features

• Powerful Web-Administration Interface (Javascript-powered)
• Manages an unlimited Number of Products and Categories
• Can be used as a Shop or just as an Online-Catalog (you can even turn off Price Display)
• quick Search for Products, Categories and Manufacturers; filter by features or discounted Products
• Product Ratings & Testimonials (moderated or auto-published)
• feature specific Products by setting them "on special"
• Product Availability: show how fast a Customer can expect delivery
• Handles downloadable Products (virtual Goods)
• "Product is back in Stock"-Notification for subscribed Customers

Administration Features

• multiple Images and Files (like Spec Sheets and Flyers) per Product
• Product Attributes (like Size or Color) can be added to Product
• Product Types for Classification (like "Car", "Motorbike" or "Music Album")
• Shopper Groups for Customers (allows different Price Levels and Payment Options),
• multiple Prices per Product (Quantity-based and/or Shopper Group-based Prices)
• flexible Price Display (number & currency formatting; including or excluding tax)
• On-the-Fly Price Conversion between different Currencies using Live Rates from the ECB or other banks
• Shop Statistics / Control Panel with a Summary of new Customers, new Orders....
• Stock Level Control for Products and Item
• Order Management with Order History, Customer Notification and Order Edit Functionality
• basic Reporting Feature: sold Items, monthly/yearly Revenue
• Order Status Management
• manage different Currencies, Countries & States

Payment Modules

• capable of live Credit Card Processing
• pre-defined Payment Gateways like authorize.net®, PayPal, 2Checkout, eWay, Worldpay, PayMate and NoChex
• extend your Shop with other Payment Modules using the Payment Module API!

Shipping Modules

• flexible Shipping Carriers and Rates Configuration
• Live-Shipping Rates using Shipping Modules (e.g. InterShipper, UPS, USPS, FedEx or Canada Post; Modules can use the Shipping Rate API).
• extend your Shop with other Shipping Modules using the Shipping Module API!

For even more information drop by the projects web site: http://virtuemart.com/ and if you are a developer you may want to track the changes and upgrade evolution found in the change log.

• Change Log: https://dev.virtuemart.net/cb/wiki/4245

Virtuemart Extensions:

In addition to the many core features there are many folks that have taken initiatives to build add-on’s and themes to enhance this Joomla extension with an even more rounded collection of capabilities for both look and feel of the shopping experience and functionality to serve niche markets

Check out the extensions available as well: http://extensions.virtuemart.net/

There are so many but one that caught my eye recently was supporting the idea of On Page Check out: http://www.onepage-checkout.com/features.html.

Templates:

Virtuemart has been around for a while, has a pretty nice user interface and is overall very flexible for delivering a comfortable and astatically pleasing customer experience. However, I happen to like the surge of interest in developing template options for Virtuemart. Here are a couple of my favorite resources

These folks have some very nice designs and I am eager to try them out myself but they are relatively new to the scene so I have not yet had the chance. However, they appear to do very nice work. http://www.vmjunction.com/

This group was one of the first to deliver a 3^rd party option for Virtuemart design goodies. While this was not the most graceful process to implement these into my cart they have done a nice job if you like the style of their designs. http://www.yagendoo.com/ If you are new to Joomla or do not understand css and html well you may find working with this a bit challenging.

One of our favorite template designers released a nice Joomla template called Mynxx that offers a nice theme for the Virtuemart experience. Take a look at their live demo. Go to http://demo.rockettheme.com/ and select the dropdown item Mynxx.

I think one of the reasons many of the template design vendors have not jumped on board with template designs for Virtuemart has been that unless you deliver Virtuemart as part of the installation it can be difficult for the average non-technical user to install. I think this will only get better over time and since it has grown in popularity there is now a stronger business case for vendors to invest in this.

Payment Gateways:

One of the biggies for setting up ecommerce is having a connection between your shopping cart and a payment gateway. Something I especially like is that connecting to PayPal with Virtuemart is a real no brainer. Just enter an email address for your PayPal accounting and you are mostly “DONE”. While Authorize.net is another popular gateway there are several others supported and since the Virtuemart framework is open source, well, you can build your own if needed. We work with the OSDCS.com folks to connect the dots on any gateway issues. They are the simply the best and have many prebuilt gateway extensions at http://www.oscds.com or you can also drop by http://www.cmsextensions.org for more useful components and gateways.

Small Business Management Solutions – Real world value

The real power and value for your small business with the Joomla CMS and Virtuemart combination is the ability to integrate Joomla and Virtemart with other accounting and Customer Relationship Management systems.

Synchronize with QuickBooks and CRM

The key integration that I am particularly interested in is the Info@hand Customer Relationship Business Management platform, where there is a bridge between the users in a Joomla/Virtuemart experience and the contacts and accounts in info@hand CRM. With this solution you actually manage your products inside of the CRM (info@hand) and then synchronize this with your Virtuemart extension in Joomla. Then to make this even more interesting, when a customer makes a purchase an ecommerce invoice is passed to info@hand and associated with the account so you can then manage all of your accounts from a centralized dashboard in info@hand... And then to make this even more exciting you can synchronize info@hand with QuickBooks Accounting software so that you have a full transaction life cycle management solution. This will allow small businesses to actually have a low cost of ownership solution that could allow you and your niche products to compete effectively in the marketplace.

• Synchronize with QuickBooks
• Info@hand eShop CRM Sync with Joomla and Virtuemart
• Customer Relationship Management
• Marketing Campaign management
• Workflow Automations
• Integration with Auth.net and other payment gateways

Click here for full list of many robust features.

For more information on this solution visit these sites: http://www.learningcrm.com and http://www.crbm.net

Another solution I found interesting was not as full featured as an info@hand CRBM solution but offered the synchronization with Quickbooks was bay a company called Webgility. There solution which I have yet to try, looks like it would do a good job for connecting the dots with QuickBooks but is just limited to this function and it is a desktop application so you lose the portability of the web.

http://www.webgility.com/quickbooks-integration-video-demo.php?utm_source=vm&utm_medium=directory&utm_campaign=virtuemart

Why we feel Joomla and Virtuemart are the best solution for small business ecommerce:

We have implemented sites for customer ranging from selling a single product to working with companies with huge databases of products. In this experience we have found the Joomla and Virtuemart solution to be very easy for our customers to configure and manage. It offers most of the functionality out of the box and if you use PayPal for your payment gateway it is about a easy as eating pumpkin pie to set up. Since this is a popular open source project supported by a global community the support and advise will not limit you to one vendor and you have the freedom to expand the code base to meet your particular business need.

We hope this overview is helpful and if you ever need configuration support custom coding or training on the Joomla or Virtuemart solution we would be happy to talk with you.

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The high level difference between building a traditional static web site design and a Joomla CMS site is not that different since we have to consider all of the same strategic, development and design specifications but the actual development process is very different. Joomla CMS uses a template architecture that allows you to separate the content management and functionality from the design interface. This has many advantages but it requires a different approach to our planning and implementation processes if we are to get the most out of this new Web 2.0 socially aware business model.

Weigh the cost factor of building or buying

Before you go down the path of designing a template you need to make sure you weigh the business impact on the decision to built it or buy it. It is important to realize that a full design process for a Joomla template is much more than just creating some appealing graphical elements in Photoshop. Make sure you review the cost implications and determine where this fits in your priorities.  When companies do a realistic assessment of considering this choice we have found that in most cases it is far more cost effective to brand and alter an existing template vs going through the entire ground up design process.

The advantages for using a template

One of the advantages of pre-built templates is you can look at ideas and weed out subjective roadblocks and hone in on what is going to appeal to your clients and their customers. There are so many wonderful Joomla template design specialists that have built incredible and flexible templates with this need for a unique business identity and cost efficiency in mind. Most of these design teams have several highly skilled full time designers and content developers working on maybe one new design per month. Most small businesses can not afford to hire a team with this diverse skill set to build a one off design for their company and thus, why the template strategy was built into the Joomla framework to allow for this flexibility in the first place. It actually creates a win win for everyone since designers now have a greater market for their creativity and business owners have a more cost effective solution to achieve world class designs that they can re-brand with their own identity. Another great reason why this approach is so popular and advantageous is that, for the most part, swapping a template (if the actual new joomla template is designed correctly) can take very little time to implement. Where, in the past changing a look and feel for a web site was a rather laborious process of altering every page.

Three key elements of a template:

There are three high level evaluation considerations for choosing or designing a Joomla template design.

1. Graphics and Branding
2. Content Placement
3. Features and functionality

Graphics Elements:

The graphics elements in a well designed template are among the easiest to change by design. Most come with layered source files that allow you to tweak files and make changes to get the fine tuning of your branding to match in the final rendition of your presentation. Most are designed with style variations out of the box to allow you to quickly get a look and feel that aligns with your brand identity. Many cases you can change the logo to your own, change a few settings in the back end and be done. One of the key underlying features of a Joomla template is that it is built using cascading style sheets (CSS) which means that it gives you the flexibility to tweak other template attributes such as fonts and bullets or other typography attributes. Make sure you consider the quality of the CSS development, availability of source files and use rights as part of your decision for implementing a template.

Content Placement:

Traditional design would typically start with a sketch of ideas about where you want your content to show up. This leads to what is called a wireframes mock up to indicate where content is to be placed and help identify what types of content will go where. In Joomla they call this module positions because Joomla is built to allow you to assign particular content to particular module locations. When you are picking your template make sure you consider where you want to place content and if the module positions in that template will support the specific content you have in mind for now and in the future. Keep in mind that just because there is a module, for example, in the left position that you have to populate content there. Most module positions will adjust dynamically depending on if content is assigned to it or not. Once you see how this works on a few demo sites it may open your mind with new ideas about what you may want to try with your site.

Features and Functionality:

Having a joomla template that supports your desired features and functionality is very important. As you add new components and extensions to your site you need to make sure that the template you chose will support them. With the growing need to adhere to web standards and to meet web accessibility requirements you have to make sure your template framework will support any required features and that it is compatible with standards or targeted browser platforms. There are also many new “eye candy” capabilities with the advancements of AJAX libraries that are becoming the norm. Things like “litebox” which brings an image to the front of focus and grays out the back ground or special menu or tab modules that require some code integrations to make them work effectively (mootools is a good example).

Other considerations:

It is good to review all three of these elements in your preferred template or design mock ups with an experienced Joomla professional prior to choosing your template or engaging in a design project. There are a lot of well planned layouts, graphic designs and feature rich capabilities to choose from but you have to strike the right balance with each element to get the best option for your particular needs. Keep in mind there are new templates being generated all the time and with the themplate framework in Joomla you can easily change templates in the future but you need a good foundation. This is especially true if you are just getting started. Your template is the foundation of what you will build and position your content around in a Joomla CMS web site. Another important consideration is the support available from the particular template development teams and the availability of documentation or tutorials for the template features. Having good documentation can save you and your  team time and money supporting your project in addition it can help you realize possibilities or limitations of your Joomla template  before you impliment it.

Here are some template resources you can review and compare:

Our preferred vendor for client projects is Rocket Theme

CNP’s extensive template catalog

Template clubs:

JoomlaXTC

Yootheme

Bonus Themes

Joomlart

Shape Five

YouJoomla Templates

Pixel Paradise

Themes Club

JoomlaShack

Powerful template development tool if you want to take a stab at building a basic template yourself:

Here is a great tool that is fun to play with for devloping your own Joomla template. This is not the perfect solution and is limited in many ways but it is a great way to get started and for designers it can help you build a quick framework to present to a client.

Artisteer 2 Template Designer:

The cost of the professional templates and club memberships is often well worth the investment but a tool like Artisteer can deliver a basic but limited template to build upon if you want to starte from scratch.

There are so many creative designs to build upon it really does not make business sense for most smaller organizations to even consider going through an elaborate ground up design process. Not that you do not need to ask many of the same questions but in my opinion for most cases, since creative design is so subjective you can get much further on a budget by working with an existing template and tweaking it for your particular needs. I hope you find this useful as you move forward on considering the design approach to building your Joomla project.

For more information about our professional design, development and support services please visit: http://consulting.cnpintegrations.com

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