Top 20 Must-have Website Design Factors

1. Ideally, your site's URL should contain your most important keyword.
2. Your website should run on a content management system. Free open-source content management systems like Joomla would do a fantastic job supporting 90% of all websites, including some very complex ones.
3. The style of your website should reflect the type of business you are in (check the leading companies/organizations in your field and model your site after them)
4. Your site should be compatible with all major browsers two generations back
5. Your site needs to be highly responsive, i.e. resize and rescale itself on all major mobile phones and tablet devices
6. Page load time should be under 2-4 seconds
7. All external links should open a 'New Window'; all internal links should be set for the 'This/Same Frame'
8. All hyperlinks should have 'Titles' defined.
9. All images should have 'alt' tags describing their content.
10. Your website needs to have pleasant images and an easy-to-read typography (font) style as well as spacious and not cluttered formatting. 
11. Your contact information needs to contain your full physical address, phone number and email, and it should be easily accessible
12. Your website's navigation should be hierarchical (a tree-like structure)
13. Your website's navigation should be arranged logically, starting with the broadest category and progressing down to more specific sub-categories.
14. Your website must have a Breadcrumb element and a Site Map element
15. Your website must contain a site-wide Search element (Google search is the best option)
16. Your website needs to have a Registration form or other means of gathering users' contacts.
17. Your website needs to incorporate Social Media buttons (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn)
18. Your website needs to have a Blog with user comments
19. Your website needs to have a custom 404 error page and 301 redirect setup
20. Above all, your website should offer free and useful information for your visitors, presented in an easy-to-read format (text arranged in short paragraphs, using headers, sub-headers, bulleted lists and other web page formatting principles).

There are standard web design practices that are the norm in modern web design. However, in real life organizations often rely on opinions of individual team members who often have limited experience and lack formal training. If you'd like to discuss your website design or redesign project, call Joomla Bliss at 613.231.6308

Selecting a Content Management System (CMS)

When selecting a Content Management System (CMS) for your website, consider the following:

1. Will your website have a significant affect on your business? For example, a restaurant business is not going to be severely affected by a poorly designed website. 
2. Do you have a very specific, highly custom and very large-scale plan for your website? For example, are you thinking of setting up a social networking community website similar to Facebook? Are you developing an Online auction?
3. Will you offer a significant amount of content? Will your website have more than 50 pages?
4. Will your website have a blog where people can post comments?
5. Will your website offer a newsletter subscription?
6. Will you be selling anything via your website? One item or multiple items? Locally or Internationally
7. Will you offer free downloads of PDF, Word, Excel files?
8. Will you have a lot of visual elements, such as product image galleries, photos, videos, etc?
9. Will there be restricted areas on your website that would require users to login?
10. Will you have a lot of social interaction on your site (posting comments, uploading photos, exchanging messages, etc.)?
11. Do you have plans to grow and enhance your website gradually, i.e. adding polls, surveys, quizzes, adding e-commerce, etc.?
12. Will you be changing the look and feel of your site frequently, i.e. once every 2 years? 

If you answer 'Yes' to 5 of any of these questions, your choice of a CMS should be Joomla. If your website is largely driven by a blog or simple text - it is safe to select WordPress. If you answer 'Yes' with an strong emphasis to question #2 - select Drupal or Magento.

One of the benefits of selecting Joomla for your website back-end administration is ability to chose from over 8000 third party Joomla off-the-shelf components and plugins. A Using quality extensions a Joomla developer can "assemble" a highly complex and sophisticated site in a matter of days. Customizing the flow and adding granularity to the features can be later enhanced and completed in phases, adjusting the requirements to real user behqaviour.

Whatever you do, make sure to test drive your CMS. Do not solely rely on sales presentations or word of advice. Consider the following CMS comparison article. And if you are still uncertain and would like to talk to us about a website CMS, call Joomla Bliss at 613.231.6308. 

The CMS Advantage

There is a long discussion going on about which one of the three leading open-source web content management systems (CMS) is better: Joomla, Drupal or Wordpress. Here is our view on the topic.

Hello from Joomla Bliss, a web design agency in Ottawa

This post is a review of one of our favourite website template providers Rockettheme. The company is based in Denver, Colorado and run by a team of experienced web designers and developers. They build templates for Joomla, Worpress and Magento.

We love them almost as much as we love Joomlart. Their website templates come loaded useful extensions and neat modules. And their templates are very well suited for any type of business in any country. 

They stay in synch with times and add new templates often. Rocketheme has a vast network of partners who offer signigicant discounts on their products via Rocketthem

The prices are very reasonable in the web design industry. We love how clean their code it, how scalable it is and how rich with extensions their website templates are. 

If you are interested in finding out more, contact Joomla Bliss via this site or give us a call at 613.231.6308.

Hi from Joomla Bliss, a web design agency in Ottawa

This post is a review of one of our favourite website template designers Yootheme. The company is based in Hamburg, Germany and run by a team of young designers and developers. They build their templates using Warp framework . 

We like their style. Their website templates come loaded with a suite of neat widgets. We find that for North American business environment their templates are best suited for small businesses and consultants, and not for medium or large corporations.

They stay in synch with times and add new templates often. The demo site is very easy to use, each site comes in several color schemes. Their website templates are designed for Joomla and Wordpress. 

The prices are higher than average and the Euro conversion makes their templates adn subscription almost double of those of Rockettheme or Joomlart.

If you are interested in finding out more, contact Joomla Bliss via this site or give us a call at 613.231.6308.

Greetings from Joomla Bliss, a web design agency in Ottawa

This post is a review of our favourite website template provider Joomlart. The company is 11 years old, which is very old for web businesses; it is based in Vietnam and run by a team of young web designers and developers. They build their templates using powerful T3 framework.

We like their style. Their website templates come loaded useful extensions and neat modules. We find that Joomlart's templates are very well suited for North American businesses of any size as well as for individual owners and consultants. 

They stay in synch with times and add new templates often. The demo site is very easy to use, each site comes in several color schemes. They also develop templates for Magento as well, which is a very good engine for ecommerce sites. The extension suite that they offer for sale is of exceptionally high quality. It is a one-stop place for any online business. We can assemble some of the most complicated business models for under $1000 using Joomlart's tempates and extensions.

Recently Joomlart began to offer templates for Wordpress as well.

The prices are very reasonable and probably the best in the web design industry. We love how clean their code it, how scalable it is and how rich with extensions their website templates are. 

If you are interested in finding out more, contact Joomla Bliss via this site or give us a call at 613.231.6308.

We are proud to help businesses with limited budgets to get a highly professional modern website without sacrificing quality. If you are technically savvy, here is what you can do:

1. Download an open-source free web content management system (CMS) like Joomla
2. Source a quality pre-designed template, provided by reputable design houses, and upload this template into Joomla or other open-source CMS (do not get yourself locked into a proprietary CMS, this will be a very expensive mistake in the long run)
3. Customize this template's visual elements, add your own content, upload images and/or video - and voila!

You have a great website, SEO-friendly, scalable and easy-to-manage, and at ~50-80% the cost of a custom "from scratch" design!

The problem is... few business owners are aware of this route! 

In fact, we were surprised to discover (time and time again!) that not only small businesses, but even technology companies are seldom aware of all the benefits Joomla and other open-source content management systems can deliver. We think the main reason behind this is that Joomla and other open-source projects are run by non-profit organizations; they do not engage in aggressive marketing; their main marketing vehicle is word-of-mouth referrals by users - something Joomla Bliss is striving to achieve as well. As a result, most businesses pay premium for custom "designed-from-scratch" websites (that often end up being of questionable quilty) and in addition get themselves locked into some proprietary CMS where they have to pay annual fees or programming fees for each additional tweak or modification.