Mobile applications are growing in popularity and it is becoming increasingly important now that you tailor your web portal to be supported in mobile environments. Fortunately Joomla! CMS has several extensions and template configurations that will offer this capability.

Start with a smart template:

Using a third party template vender for your design foundation can save you a ton of time and money when implementing a mobile strategy for your site.  Rocket Theme or YooTheme templates for are a good example of template venders that have built in features for presenting your portal on mobile devices. You are allowed in these templates to configure primary menus for a mobile user which allows you to segment content just for your mobile user. This is often a good idea if you have a portal that leverages a lot of 3^rd party components since not all components will display as well as others in a mobile browser. There is also a great component/template extension called “MobileJoomla” which is simple to install and works pretty much right out of the box. It is very important to test and view your portal on the targeted mobile devices so you can see what your users are seeing and adjust where required to create an optimized mobile user experience.

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Joomla! SEF Kickstart for implementing search engine friendly URL’s on your Joomla site.

Start by researching the features of the available Joomla CMS extensions and map their features with the particular needs of your site.

Here are several components you should consider:

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Joomla! CMS project Mistake Number Three: Having bigger ideas than your budget, resources and time will allow or than what is actually needed to provide the intended solution.

Often times we get a client with a relatively small budget and limited web experience that wants us to do all of the work and expects a fully functional Amazon type of ecommerce web portal system. Needless to say this is rather unrealistic. Robust features and capabilities are abundant with few limitations when building a portal system using Joomla! CMS. This platform is built on open source code and you can leverage over 7500+ 3^rd party extensions. However, where you do have limitations is in the skill level and resources available from the principle instigator as it relates to the scope or vision they want to implement.

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Mistake Number Two: Not staying focused on what is important

When a project begins someone usually writes a big laundry list of all the features they want. Most often this has not yet been reviewed in depth by a developer whom can provide detailed specifications for the project tasking. At http://www.cnpintegrations.com/ and most consulting firms like ours, we call this the discovery phase of the project where we go through this list and map it to either business processes or available extensions for the Joomla! CMS.

In this discovery phase we try to bridge the gaps between what is already available or requires custom coding, how the client could alter their business processes to be more effective or reduce costs and to assess the training required for the client’s users and stakeholders to be effective.

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Mistake Number One: The Client Thinking that they do not need to be involved in the process

Joomla! CMS for simple sites with prepared contend and well defined design specs on a site that does not change could be handed off to a team to “just build this” but sites with any type of dynamic and changing content requires a very hands on approach from the client to be effective.

Since the shift from  static web sites through the introduction of the dynamic website revolution there is been a battle between where and when a client should be actively involved in the process of developing their site and where they can or should hand off aspects of the development. This is highly contrasted by the size of the budget and diversity of the stakeholders. The client almost always has superior subject matter expertise on their content while the Joomla! CMS support team has theirs in the framework, project execution and technology. We have found that every project is unique in these areas and there is not a one size fits all that works for any project.

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