It’s been a busy year and I have not had much success with applying these social networking tools to an actual business need (mainly because of my day job). I started this blog and project as an opportunity to learn more about social networking, the technology and the resources necessary for a one man operation. So here is my New Year’s Resolution:
“Continue to explore and learn about these tools and attend necessary training, seminars and conferences to further develop technical skills necessary to launch my site by March 2009.”
Step 1: Business Plan - Define your goals and objectives.
During my time away from this blog, I refined my business plan and tested my concepts with my core audience. What I found was that I was way to focused on the technology (bells and whistles) and my audience was interested in a simplified version of the site that met their communication needs. I went back to my business plan and redefined my goals and objectives. I also created a few wireframes and conducted a few focus groups and found a way to apply this technology to support my business nees and meet the communication needs of my audience.
Solution – Joomla offers the ability to create communities – social blogging sites (think community organizer), traditional message boards (think twitter level contributions), niche publishing platforms (think specialized magazines), and more.
Step 2: Scale – Use Joomla Templates and Tools Out-o- the-Box.
Last year I got caught up in evaluating just about every plugin, component, template, and extension that Joomla had to offer. The fact is that Joomla 1.5.2 offered by GoDaddy does not support all the legacy tools described in the previous sentance. I tried to make them all work – Community Builder, Fireboard Forum, Private Messaging System, and many others. After working with developers in Vietnam and California – I came pretty close to making them all work as advertised. The fact is I was trying to replicate as much of the user experience as we all get on FaceBook, MySpace, and LinkedIn and found that these Open Source tools are just not up to the task. Unless you have software development skills and a bank roll to support it.
Solution – Scale back and use the tools out-of-the box without all the bells and whistles. Add as you gain experience.
Step 3: Training – Attend a Joomla Training Course
Joomla is a content management platform or a glorified publishing platform. As a content management platform you will have the ability to incorporate articles, video, audio, private messaging and much more into your community. These tools are not terribly complicated – but can be extremely difficult to integrate. You will need to join a few communities and make some minor monetary contributions to get the manuals but interacting with an expert and spending a day getting some hands on training will go a long way to helping you launch these tools out-of-the-box.
* Lets start with training offered by Joomla University. I recently attended Joomla University offered by Compass Designs. It is a flexible full day session where you learn how to build a Joomla website, get traffic for it, and make it convert. You’ll be guided through how best to leverage Joomla for your organization and be shown the tricks and tips that the pros use. At the end of the day, you should have site that’s ready to go live online. You will leave with a book and even a basic Joomla Web site if you want to start out with a basic package that includes hosting, templates and a site ready to go. You might find it difficult to expand on the platform and transfer it over to your own hosting environment down the road. Also, I’ve found these people extremely difficult to contact when you have problems/questions or your ready take advantage of upgrades. The course will cost about $300 and is worth ever penny.
* Don’t forget about documentation. If you are going to use Community Builder you will need to become a member and pay $32. The documentation is necessary if you intend to set-up Community Builder but you will quickly find that you will need Joomla training as well.
* Finally buy the book. If you want to build sophisticated websites that can be easily edited and updated, you need to master Joomla. I found the book to be an easy-to-read, easy-to-use book on Joomla for every site manager, administrator, and developer – Joomla 1.5 – A User’s Guide ($29).
Other resources: Benefit from my experience – Resources worth exploring
- Joomlapolis – The Home of Community Builder – Great site for downloading all the components necessary to launch community builder. Also they offer all the documentation, user forums and support to launch this tool.
- Template Plazza Demo Website – Great site for exploring hundreds of templates based on niche audiences – golf, gaming, news, real estate, classifieds, and many more. If you’ve have a defined business need, this site is a great place to start. They also have reasonably good user forums and support. The cost is $39 to $189 depending on your needs.
- Free Joomla Quickstart Guide – This guide is intended for those who have no clue where to begin but really want to learn how to use Joomla!. Helping you become successful installing, configuring, backing up and restoring, upgrading, and extending Joomla! is exactly the point of this guide.
- Need Help? Need a Programmer? Joomla Developers – If you require professional Joomla website design or development for your business, whether its a long-term job or just a single project, you will find the help you need here at the prices you want to pay . No matter how big or small your budget is, joomla freelancers from around the world will compete for your business at JoomLancers. You can get a lot done for very little – I posted two projects at $250 each that resulted in replicating the Communa2 Template at TemplatePlazza.
One of the first things you will learn about the TemplatePlazza site is that all the “bells and whistles” in their demos are NOT INCLUDED. You will need to download (and pay for) many of the components and plugins necessary to complete the “look and feel” of these sites. I’ve found the Freelancers at this site to be extremely helpful. All you have to do is define your project, post your budget, review the bidders and set a timeline. The site will hold your payment in escrow and you can release it when you are satisfied with the status of the project.
It’s been a long year and I am resolute that I will launch my first social networking site by March 2009.
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