Joomla which is an open source content management system (CMS) for creating and managing websites through a simple web interface. It has attracted many users due to its ease of use. Joomla also includes more advanced features such as page caching to improve performance on busy sites, advanced templating techniques, and a fairly robust API. Joomla can provide RSS feeds, printable versions of pages, news flashes, blogs, forums, polls, calendars, website searching, language internationalization, and other possibilities.

Description:

Everything that is produced for the WWW must take various Web browsers into consideration, and marketing is no exception. Different browsers can have radically different capabilities and limitations.

Some sites try to support almost all existing browsers, while others try to support only the newest and most popular browsers. A middle-ground approach is to have some enhanced features for newer browsers, yet provide graceful degradation for older browsers.

Let’s look at the top 4 browser:

Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer (IE) by Microsoft is the most common Internet browser today. IE was introduced in 1995 and passed Netscape in popularity in 1998.

Firefox
Firefox is a new browser from Mozilla. It was released in 2004 and has grown to be the second most popular browser on the Internet.

Opera
Opera is another Internet browser. It is known to be fast and small, standards-compliant, and available for many operating systems. Opera is the preferred browser for a number of small devices like mobile phones and hand-held computers.

Safari
Safari is a web browser developed by Apple Inc. and included in Mac OS X. It was first released as a public beta on January 7, 2003, and is the default browser in Mac OS X v10.3 and later. It is also the native browser on the Apple iPhone and iPod touch. Safari for Windows was released on June 11, 2007. Windows XP and Windows Vista are supported.

The content managed includes computer files, image media, audio files, electronic documents and web content. The idea behind a CMS is to make these files available inter-office, as well as over the web. A Content Management System would most often be used as an archive as well. Many companies use a CMS to store files in a non-proprietary form.

Companies use a CMS to share files with ease, as most systems use server-based software, even further broadening file availability. As shown below, many Content Management Systems include a feature for Web Content, and some have a feature for a “workflow process”.

“Work flow” is the idea of moving an electronic document along for either approval, or for adding content. Some Content Management Systems will easily facilitate this process with email notification, and automated routing. This is ideally a collaborative creation of documents. A CMS facilitates the organization, control, and publication of a large body of documents and other content, such as images and multimedia resources.

A web content management system is a content management system with additional features to ease the tasks required to publish web content to web sites.

Get ideas from other sites

By looking at other sites in your industry, you get a sense of what your customers expect. And by looking at sites with a similar personality, you can get specific ideas to work from.

Get ideas from other sources

Paintings, magazines, products-even nature-can provide inspiration for your choices. Find an artist, magazine, or brand you like, and borrow from them.

Get ideas from a color book

Idea books like Color Harmony for the Web (see subsequent listing) are great when you need inspiration, lack confidence, or both. The specific color combinations all work. You can just choose one that resonates with you.

Limit your choices

More isn’t always better. Many people-including professional designers-feel overwhelmed by the choice of colors on the web. To limit your options, stick to the 216 colors in the web-safe palette.

Start with a single color

Once you’ve chosen a single shade that works, you can match others with it. The best way to find appropriate matches is by choosing colors with the same “value” (or darkness).

Learn a little theory

By reading just a little bit about colors and color combinations, you can build your confidence and improve your chances of making a good choice.

People use different media differently:

• People read magazines.
  

• People watch television.
  

• But people navigate the web as if it were a physical space.

Although the computer screen is physically flat-more one-dimensional than a book, even-people move through the web as if it were a physical space. They scan each page for navigational cues, then move forward mentally, closing in on their destination. “Where should I go?” they think, instead of “What should I read?”

This is no small difference. The transition from reading a magazine, for example, to using the web requires a cognitive shift: When a person stares into a monitor, the cursor on the screen (controlled by the mouse in her hand) becomes an extension of her physical body. So the task of navigating the web feels very much the same, mentally, as navigating a physical space.

This is exactly what Marshall McLuhan might have predicted. In the early years of television, McLuhan published influential theories on how people interact with-and are shaped by-media. “All media are extensions of some human faculty-psychic or physical,” he wrote in The Medium is the Message. “The wheel is an extension of the foot. The book is an extension of the eye…clothing an extension of the skin…electric circuitry, an extension of the central nervous system.”

If users do project themselves into the screen (the cursor becoming an abstract representation of the body), this goes a long way toward explaining not only how people feel online, but also how they act. Most people navigate web sites as if they were running through an airport, looking for their gate: Quickly, purposefully, and sometimes desperately.

Designing for users on the run

Theory aside, the spatial nature of the web is what makes navigation so important. In many ways, designing a web site is more like designing a public space than a printed page.

Users arrive at your site with a purpose in mind, and your goal in designing the site is to get them to their destination as quickly as possible, providing the most direct pathways marked by the most universally recognized symbols.

Most people
navigate
web sites
as if they
were running
through an airport,
looking for their gate.Most people navigate web sites as if they were running through an airport, looking for their gate.

So web design is an architectural problem, as much as a visual one. And as architectural problems go, it’s a challenging one, because people can’t rely on any of the visual clues-or other senses-they use to navigate real-world spaces.

In the real world, people can size things up more easily: They can see how big a building is, and they can see who else is there. They can tell how noisy it is, and what it smells like. They can see where the doors are. And if they get lost, they can always retrace their steps or ask someone for help.

But the web is abstract, and it offers no such clues. Your senses are limited to what you can see in the browser. And there’s no one around to help you if you get lost. So it falls to the site’s design-and particularly the navigation-to fill all these roles. It must communicate what kind of site it is, tell users what’s there, orient them to where they are, point them to where they’re going, and show them how to get back.

No one said it was going to be easy.

Collecting money online:

• Credit card. The most basic payment method requires a merchant account and a secure server to process the transaction.
  

• Online cash. Online cash services, such as PayPal and Yahoo! PayDirect, let you exchange money between two online accounts set up for this purpose.
  

• Micropayments. Micropayment services will someday allow you to pay for services in tiny increments-a few pennies or less.
  

• Cash, check, bank transfer or money order. These are sent by mail or Internet Banking.

Credit Card

Credit cards may be the most familiar method of collecting online, but they aren’t the cheapest or the easiest. If you have an existing business, you already know about merchant accounts. If you don’t, you’re about to learn. In order to receive credit-card payments online, you have to first establish a merchant account with an FDIC-insured merchant bank.

Be warned: This is a bureaucratic process, and a costly one. Between account set-up fees, processing fees, and transaction fees, you’ll pay quite a bit for the privilege of accepting credit cards. So smaller merchants sometimes use cash-payment services like PayPal.

Online Cash

Online cash isn’t exactly cash. These services-like PayPal and Yahoo! PayDirect-play the middleman, letting you transfer money directly from one person to another, while ensuring that it actually gets where it’s going (and taking a cut for themselves, of course).

PayPal is the best known e-cash service, commonly used on auction sites like eBay, where individuals are selling to each other. It’s a simple system. Users set up a PayPal account by transferring money from a bank account, charging it to their credit card, or sending a personal check. They can then buy online using this account. When someone buys from you, the amount is transferred from their account to yours (with roughly a 3% commission).

Micropayments

Micropayments allow users to pay tiny amounts of money-a few pennies, say, or less-for a service they use online. This approach would be perfect for content sites of all sizes: The tiny payments would mean little to any individual consumer-Why not pay a penny for an article, so long as it’s easy to do so?-but it could add up to significant revenues for the site.

The trick, then, is making it easy. And that’s the missing piece in this puzzle. Although several early players attempted to put such a system in place, none gained critical mass and they all died trying. File this idea-lovely as it is-under “someday.”

But people are always willing to pay for things they need or want. And many online players-from newspapers to software to games-are now making a living through user fees and subscriptions.

3 ways to collect user fees:

1. Subscription-only services
   

2. Tiered services with free and premium offerings
   

3. Pay-as-you-go services

Subscription-Only Services

Subscription services charge users an up-front fee for unlimited access to content or services over a set period of time; nothing is given away for free. Great work if you can get it!

But not many businesses can get away with a subscription-only model, because web users rarely invest money up front in an unknown quantity. Only deeply compelling services or established brands can pull it off. A success story: Both Consumer Reports and The Wall Street Journal bucked the industry trend in 1996 by establishing subscription-only content sites that continue to this day.

Tiered Services

Tiered services put the psychology of salesmanship to work on the web. They offer users free access to a site-or, rather, part of a site-and then sell them premium services or content. This approach has worked for a wide range of businesses, including magazines, research services, software, and games.

What Subscribers Want

• Value. They’ll pay for a service they need that they can’t get elsewhere.
  

• A free sample. They want to try the product before committing to a subscription.

For instance, the financial information service Hoover’s Online offers free access to its basic descriptions of companies and industries. But its premium services-in-depth reports, competitive profiles, targeted searching-require an annual subscription.

The tiered approach has also worked well for ESPN. Its sports news is available free, but users a-plenty pay to join fantasy sport leagues (baseball, basketball, and football) timed with each major league season. Sports fans pay around $30 per season to assemble and coach a team (based on pro athletes) and get a shot at the (fantasy) championship.

This model works for software, as well. Atomz provides a free, basic version of its site search engine, which brings search capabilities to sites with under 500 pages. Although customers can use this free service indefinitely, Atomz uses it as a lure for their full-featured services, for which customers pay a monthly fee.

Pay-As-You-Go Services

Pay-as-you go services allow consumers to sample a site little by little, paying only for the content or services they use. The fee may be applied based on the service rendered or time elapsed. Content sites, for example, may charge by the article, whereas game sites may charge by the hour.

The problem with this model is that the payment system really isn’t there yet. Once consumers can make true micropayments-a few pennies per article, for instance-this model will become far more viable.