Resuming the Blog

We have been on a "short break" (Ok - a nearly 2 YEAR break) and decided it is absolutely necessary to resume the blog.

We're changing the focus of our business a bit, after getting some feedback from our clients. It seems that the original intent of the Joomla! Framework (and Mambo before it) was to make a simple Content Management System which would permit nearly anyone to have a pretty cool website. Along the road to "pretty cool", we have added lots of extensions, and much hacking of code, to make websites which are anything but simple.

I have seen this happen a lot in the sites I have developed for clients. When we bring them a site that meets scope, and uses simple extensions, there are always questions.

Questions like: Could we have that article appear in more than one category? Can we move that module inside the article instead of where it is now? Could we use a different color scheme for this one page? I want to start using Videos in a lot of my pages, can you make it simple for me?

The answers to those questions (and a thousand more) is now, and has always been: "Yes, but..."

Every little feature one adds to a Joomla site makes it just a tiny bit harder for a "non-geek" to actually work with the site once it has launched. Things which seem straightforward to me, are not easy to grok for someone who makes his living by being good at something else.

The consequenses of this are that the sites that are produced are more complex and harder to update and maintain than the founding fathers of Joomla had hoped.

We have always offered support and training, but in the end, many of our clients find it easier to engage us to make changes to their sites.

At the same time, it is a miracle that a lot of these sites have not been hacked, because the sites have not had the software upgrades necessary to maintain good security either.

We are therefore going to shift our business model slightly! We are going to address a site's long term utility and viability. We think that clients should carefully consider the future when making their strategies for the web, and we want to be a part of the site from "cradle to grave".