We’ve been getting a lot of questions lately about using Joomla as a CMS (content management system).  Today, let’s take a look at some of the pros and cons of using Joomla as a backend to power your website—and ultimately, let’s find out if Joomla is good or bad for your needs…

First, we’ll start off with a few of the pros that come with the territory:

1. Joomla is widely used, so there should be reliably frequent updates and support for the web back-end software.
2. There are multiple off-the-shelf design templates available for Joomla for those that aren’t really interested in what custom web design offers.
3. Joomla is plug-and-play in many cases; many web hosting companies offer it as an auto-install option.

When it comes to the pros, they’re really summed up in a fairly simple way—Joomla can be an effective CMS for those that are able to take the time to learn it and set it up correctly.

With that out of the way, let’s get on to the fact at hand here:  We’re pretty much anti-Joomla when it comes to our clients’ websites.

There are a variety of reasons we really don’t go for it—most based on real world experiences we’ve had ourselves and with clients.  Here are our cons:

1. It’s a very complex system that is difficult for the average everyday web user to learn and use.  With a big learning curve like this, we’ve found that clients just don’t like to use it for their CMS.
2. Security is very important to us.  With any big publicly available web software like Joomla, hackers have a large user base to go after and the code and hacks are more mainstream because of this.  We don’t like to have our clients’ sites go down due to potential security faults of the software that powers them (nor do clients like to pay the hourly fees to fix security exploits).
3. It’s easier for us to use our own CMS to enable your website’s back-end goals concisely and simply.  Our staff of custom PHP programmers can cut right to the chase and make your website’s back-end do exactly what it needs to do—nothing more and nothing less.  When it comes to user-friendliness, simple is definitely better.
4. Believe it or not, building our custom CMS specifically to suit the needs of your website is much quicker and less expensive than reverse engineering a pre-existing system like Joomla to make it do something it wasn’t necessarily intended to do.
5. Joomla, being a template-oriented system, doesn’t always allow for the appropriate level of customization needed to achieve search friendliness.  Our custom-built sites are always created with organic SEO in mind right from the beginning to give you the full ability to update page titles, Meta descriptions, Meta keywords, and even file names/URL strings.

The bottom line?

Joomla might be right for some websites, but we just don’t care too much for it when it comes to our clients.  It takes us longer to work with it, it costs our clients more in the long run, and the end product isn’t as simple or polished as it should be.  Ultimately, that’s why we don’t use Joomla.

Having a CMS (Content Management System) built into the back end of your website is a huge benefit.  No longer do you need to wait for your webmaster or some other hired third party to make time-sensitive and quite expensive changes and updates to your website—with a good CMS, like the ones we develop here at Sleepless Media, all you have to do is log right in from any web-connected computer and you can have the changes made in just a matter of seconds.

Understanding CMS

A CMS is designed to let you change certain specified elements within a web page—or within the “picture frame,” if you will.  In other words, the design of the site is static and will always remain the same.  It’s just the content portion that you’ll be able to log in and edit.  And in many cases, it’s also a breeze to add a new page as desired.  These are the basics of CMS, and as such, are covered.

Making edits is really as simple as editing a Word file on your computer.  You work with the text first, typing it in and getting it just how you want it.  Then, you do your formatting—adding bold, italics, and the like.  Adding in a photo is just a short click and quick upload away.  It’s simple and straightforward enough.

Simplicity By Design

In fact, the simplicity of a good CMS is intentional by design.  You don’t want too many options or for the system to be too complex or it would just be difficult and unruly to use and depend on.  The point is to be able to make quick, simple additions and changes…to get in and get out successfully without having to call your web developer just to add a new snippet of text to your About page or change a date on your Events page.

A CMS is there to make it easy for you to update your website.  But when it comes down to it, the website and the CMS that controls it are still essentially CSS and HTML code under the hood.  If you go overboard or try and push a CMS beyond its intended limits (of simplicity), bad things can happen.  Formatting gets weird, images are distorted, text runs into the next section of the site, there is too much space between paragraphs, the whole page ends up being in bold…well, you get the point anyway.

Exceeding CMS Limitations

This is the downfall of a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor that all CMS back ends rely upon.  It’s supposed to be simple editing, just like the Word document editing that we talked about a minute ago.  But when you try to do too much with a CMS, things can get crazy.  And when things get crazy, it’s easy to get frustrated.

No worries though.  Things really won’t break on your site, even if they appear to be broken.  Just remember, a CMS is designed to help you make the simple edits…simply.  If you have more than basic edits that you’d like to make, it might be wise to give us a ring first—we’ll be happy to help.  And if things do get a little bit funky due to pushing the limits of your CMS beyond its boundaries, we can easily help you get the page back on track too.

Your CMS will help you update your website quickly and efficiently when it comes to the basics, but it won’t teach you HTML and the code that all goes into making it work.  Stick to the basic updates and try to stay true to your site’s conventional formatting and you won’t have any trouble at all.  Happy CMS’ing!

1. You can get those updates done today.

Not next week, not tomorrow, not “as soon as we can get to it.” With a custom CMS for your website, you can log right in and make updates, changes, or additions to your site whenever you want to—not at the convenience of third-party web designer or webmaster.

2. A custom CMS means you are safe and secure.

Some big name content management systems tend to also be big name targets for hackers. When you think about it, this only makes sense—the more people using a particular CMS software solution, the bigger the pond is for the hackers who specialize in that area. On the other hand, with custom CMS, you can rest assured that you’re just a little fish in a big pond—not enough to attract the attention of mainstream hackers.

3. Your website will be much more flexible.

With CMS, you can add a new page or section your website, no problem at all. Compare this to the old-fashioned way of hand-coding the new pages for the section and then having to modify the entire navigation structure of the whole website to fit the new section in and you can see why the automation offered by quality CMS is an attractive benefit.

4. Make easy updates with no need for specialized (expensive) software.

With CMS, it’s just a matter of firing up your web browser, typing in your password, typing the changes to your content (just as if you were editing a word processing document on your computer), and finally, clicking the “Publish” button. That’s it…your updates or edits are now live on the web in 30 seconds.

5. The price is right.

No more $150/hour web designer fees just to change a few words on your site here and there. Enough said.

6. Content management is enabling.

When you’re in control and you can add new content to your website on a regular, ongoing basis, you’ll find that your web strategy will start to change in a very positive way. Being in control is enabling and encouraging—having meaningful impact on the quality and performance of your site.

7. A custom CMS is designed for your needs.

With a custom content management system, instead of a one-size-fits-all web software CMS solution, your web developer will take your exact needs into consideration and develop a strategic solution to make the entire process as simple, effective, and easy as possible for your exact needs. Any CMS is a good start—but a CMS custom built to your specs is ideal.

8. You can use a CMS to update multimedia.

Photos and videos need to be uploaded to your site? With CMS, that’s no problem. In fact, it’s just as easy as adding or editing written content. Point, click, publish, done.

9. You’re in control!

It’s kind of funny when design and ad agencies tell you they don’t do content management systems. What’s their motivation behind this—are they truly concerned that your message and branding will be messed up if you’re in control, or is it really more about the control (and billing potential) that they lose?

Know what the most popular evolution in web design & development has been in the last year or two?  If you guessed CMS—short for Content Management System—you have guessed correctly.

Website owners have been absolutely crazy about the possibilities that having a CMS built into their sites provides.  And all for good reason.  For example:

A CMS enables you to log in from practically any web-connected device and make updates, changes, or other adjustments to your website’s content…at any time! With CMS, there’s no need to pay a pricey web designer just to make small content updates here and there.

A CMS enables you to make the changes to your site’s content when you want, at your demand. No more putting in a work order with a designer to find out that they’re away on vacation for another week and then will still take another week on top of that before they can get around to making the update.  You can just log right in and make the change to your site, presto.

A CMS makes updates easy. If you’re not too sure about how this all works—just think about creating and formatting a document using your word processing software of choice.  Most content management systems work exactly the same…just type or paste in your content and format it using the simple options provided.

Good stuff, don’t you think?

Thing is though, sometimes it’s easy to try and get carried away.  If a CMS with the essential formatting options is good, then why wouldn’t a CMS with every bell and whistle that would allow you to manipulate every little detail of your website be better?

It’s a good question, but the best CMS is the one that allows you to manage exactly the parts of the site that you need to—but not anything more.  And this isn’t just the control freak coming out in your web design professional; there are actually good reasons to limit your CMS to just the essentials:

1. There’s no way to create a CMS that will do everything. Think of your website like a picture in a frame.  You drew the picture and can swap it out at any time.  But the frame itself is the web designer’s territory—it consists of the site’s look & feel, code framework, and other important aspects that make a website tick.  For good reason, it’s best that access to the hard-coded frame is off limits when it comes to a CMS.

2. Having every aspect controlled by CMS would open your site to vulnerabilities. A good content management system is inherently safe—but like anything, the more the website is opened up for editing, the bigger the window for potential exploits becomes.  To error on the safe side, it’s best to keep it to the essentials.

3. “Too much CMS” will probably lead to formatting issues. It’s best to limit the content management enabled portions of the site to clearly defined areas—blank slates for the end user to control & edit to their heart’s desire.  Creating a CMS that allows editing of the whole site will almost certainly bump other important site components out of place if things get carried away.

So as you’ll see, even the best CMS in the world won’t do everything. In fact, the best systems should aim to do as little as possible!  The key is to work closely with your web design professionals to work out exactly what content you’ll want to manage yourself.

Whether you do it all yourself or rely on expert professional help to create your website, one thing is true either way—a lot of hard work and effort is poured into the best sites.  And with all of that work, it’s also very important that your website ends up being much more than a work of art.  It needs to actually work perfectly and work for you at the same time.

There’s definitely a lot of different components that go into creating a website that works.  On their own, each of these components might seem simple enough.  Part of the real challenge (and where the helpful expert knowledge begins to pay dividends) is putting the elements together—connecting the dots—to create a highly functional masterpiece.

Working Websites Require A Content Management System (CMS). Again, with all of the hard work that goes into building a cutting-edge website, the last thing you want to have to do is to do so much of the work all over again each time you want to update or change some of the website’s content.  With a CMS, it’s a breeze—just log in, point and click, and make content edits on the fly.  No need to sweat the details…they’re already done from the first time.

A Hard Working Website Needs To Load Fast. Fast loading sites are certainly favored by visitors over sites that t-a-k-e–f-o-r-e-v-e-r to load or respond.  Quick and speedy is the name of the game, especially when you have worked so hard to create the site’s overall interactivity.

High Performance Websites Are Compatible. Working to establish a great website is all for naught if you’re missing 25% of your audience who can’t access the site on their particular device or system.  With hordes of different mobile devices and web browsers in use, putting in the effort at the beginning to assure cross-compatibility and standards compliance is absolutely well worth it.

A Working Website Works Well In The Search Engines Too. One of the most important (and profitable) streams of visitor traffic is yours free for the taking from the search engines.  You’ve just got to set up your site and follow a few basic SEO principles along the way—and you can rank well and benefit.  You guessed it—it is more work to do this—but once it’s done, your site works for you and not the other way around.

Flexibility Works Wonders. Don’t simply settle for an ultra-proprietary system that won’t let you do what you want with your website.  Websites that work well must be flexible enough to adapt to ongoing and changing web marketing demands.  Built in obsolescence just doesn’t work at all.

Work is the overriding theme of the day here.  Do you want to have to put countless extra hours of time, effort, and energy into your website just to have to do it all over again in the very near future?  A good website is much more than a work of art—it keeps on working for you well after the initial design.

The bottom line:  Work smarter for your website, not harder on it.

1.    Use titles that capture reader (and searcher) attention.

Your headline is the single most important part of your entire blog post.  It’s what the searchers usually see in the SERPs (search engine results pages) and it’s what piques the interest of a potential reader to pursue the article further.

2.    Write your blog posts in a friendly, conversational tone.

Unless you’re in a very technical, professional, or academic field, it’s always good to keep your web writing as conversational as your topic and audience will allow.  Just talk naturally through your keyboard and let the words flow.  Be sure to grammar check once you’re all done by reading the post out loud—writing for your blog just got a whole lot easier!

3.    Use plenty of whitespace while writing your blog articles.

Whitespace means keeping your paragraphs brief (usually no more than 4 sentences), using sub headlines throughout your blog post, and otherwise ensuring that your copy doesn’t “appear” overwhelming to the eye.  If it just visually looks overwhelming, very few will actually go on the read the copy.

4.    Remember that bullet points and numbered lists make excellent blog copy.

This compliments the above rule about whitespace very nicely—but also stands on its own as a web writing principle.  It’s been proven that blog readers are attracted to quick and easy informative posts about the topics they’re interested in.  Lists and bullet points remain one of the top methods of delivering factual information in a quick and concise reader-friendly format.

5.    Cover a topic of interest with your blog posts.

This means planning and not just rambling about corporate policy or something else that’s really mundane to readers.  If you’re out of ideas, think about frequent questions that your customers ask (and answer them in conversational way through the blog).  That one always works in a bind—sometimes it helps to keep a swipe file list of potential blog post ideas handy so you can add ideas at any time they come to you in the normal course of your daily life.

6.    Consider including a relevant attention-grabbing image at the top of the post.

A picture has always been worth a thousand words…and nothing changes here when it comes to blogging.  Using an attention grabbing image can really make the difference if you’re having trouble drawing readers further into your blog copy.  Be creative and try and come up with stock photos that are colorful and somehow tell a story of their own.

7.    Show right away that you have extensive knowledge of the topic.

One way to do this is to share a few bullet point facts or statistics within the first couple of paragraphs of your post.  Sometimes this alone can make enough of an impact to catch a reader’s attention and keep their interest as they continue to read on.

8.    Know that while longer doesn’t necessarily make a blog post better, it does have more potential than a one paragraph blurb style blog post in the eye of the beholder.

Sometimes shorter is actually better too—but too many really short posts can send a message to the visitor that there might not be anything of value to read on the blog.  Getting this just right can be a challenging balancing act sometimes, but getting it right is worth the challenge.

9.    Integrate the basic principles of SEO in each and every blog post you write.

Think about important keywords that pertain to the topic you’re getting ready to tackle.  Make a list of those keyword phrases and at least try to include them where they fit naturally.  Also, include the single most important keyword phrase in the blog’s title.

10.    Don’t be afraid to use other popular blogs for inspiration.

This doesn’t mean copying them (in fact, by all means, you should definitely never copy them).  Instead, just look at their format and the kind of attention-grabbing headlines they use that make an impression on you.  They don’t even have to be topically related to your blog—the ideas and inspiration are universal.

Blogging is still alive and well.  Yep—it’s true.  Even with mass proliferation of the social media we’ve come to rely on today, and with the fact that in some ways blogs kind of pre-date social networking, they work really well as a cornerstone component of websites for a few practical reasons:

• Search engines love frequently updated blogs—which means your blog will help you bring in traffic to your site.

• Blogs are an ideal way to share the odds and ends—or news updates—that you might not ordinarily have a place for on your website.

• Visitors just like the conversational nature of blogs.  They can be catchy to read and foster some really respectable back and forth.

And the best part is that blogging is quite simple if you just commit to keeping up with it.  Here are 5 ways to get excellent results from your blog:

1. Stick to a schedule.

You don’t have to blog at the exact same hour each day or anything overly strict like that, but it is a good idea to keep a basic schedule and plan regular blog postings accordingly.  This way, visitors kind of get a feel for when you’ll be updating the blog with something new—whether it’s once a day or once a month.  Search engines like it too.  And if you want to fill in between the regular schedule with an occasional post, that’s icing on the cake…the more the merrier!

2. Use your blog as your social media hub.

Probably one of the most effective uses for your website’s blog is to use it as a central hub that all of your different social media broadcasts and campaigns kind of aim back towards.  It’s like the central foundation that all of your social outreach ties back into.  This way, your social media efforts still stand on their own, but they also lead visitors back to your site—such as through your blog—for the rest of the story.

3. Ensure your blog is SEO friendly.

When your blog is tuned and tweaked to be a SEO machine, it’s basically using its very organic nature to reach out to the search engines and say “Hey, this site has lots of helpful content that’s updated regularly…click here!”  Search engines love it when they can add super new content to their results pages—and the organized structure of a well-optimized blog really helps them do this very efficiently.

4. Write from the horse’s mouth.

The great thing about blogs and why they tend to be so attractive to visitors is that most people write their blog posts with a little bit less of a formal tone than they would write regular site copy (and posts are usually less ambitious than sales copy).  When writing a blog, it can be quite helpful to literally speak out loud and type what you’re speaking—just like having a conversation in person.  Maintain your professional edge of course, but be sure to make your blogs light and easy to ready for best results.  It kills the pressure.

5. Follow your theme.

One way to make your blog ultra effective is to have at least a rough idea of what it will offer to visitors.  Keeping with the informal, conversational nature that we’ve discussed above, it’s also a good idea to have some sort of theme—or at least a really solid idea of who your audience is—when developing and writing your posts.  In other words, if your blog is geared towards your customers, or turning search engine visitors in to leads or customers, then it’s probably not a good idea to use the blog for in-house communications as well.  Once you’ve figured out what the specific purpose of your blog will be, try and keep on point fairly closely.

Sure, there are some additional helpful ways to get the most from your blog—but by using these 5 tips for getting excellent results from your blog, you’ll definitely have all of the bases covered; you’ll be on the right track!

Setting up a CMS (this stands for Content Management System) to enable complete management of your new website’s content, or as an add-on to and existing site, has become one of the single most popular requests for web developers these days.

And if you think about it, it really just makes a lot of sense.  Having the ability to manage your site’s content in-house—without the expense of costly web developer fees every time you want to add or edit a new page or a page’s content—is practical, efficient, and can even be fun for the person managing the content.  It definitely takes a lot of the tedious back and forth out of managing a website.

Even though the idea is to enable managing a website by nearly anyone assigned to the task—without regard to their degree of technical prowess—sometimes setting up the content management system can become a little bit too over-simplified.  Clarity and simplicity is certainly a good thing to look for in a custom-built CMS, but you still need to have a robust feature set that allows your website to hold its own in a very competitive online environment.

So here’s our essential CMS advice in this case…Make sure your CMS gives you the ability to manage your own Meta-data on every single page.

By default, our custom-built Sleepless Media CMS gives you the full ability to manage and edit each of the most important Meta-tags, including:

• Page Title
• Meta Keywords
• Meta Description

The bottom line is that too many content management systems skip over this vital integration.  No matter what you might hear, having full access to customize each one of these SEO-essential Meta-tags, on each and every page of your site, is incredibly important.

It’s a well known fact that a Page Title that contains the page’s targeted keyword phrase toward the beginning of its string of words is probably the single most important on-page SEO factor you can control.  The search engines depend on this Title tag to understand your page and what it is about.

In fact, it’s so important that in most cases, the search engines will actually use the Title tag verbatim as the search listing title (the main link that you click on to visit a searched-for website within the search results when you do a search).  This is simply not a place to have an automatically-generated snippet of content inserted by default—you want to customize each page’s Title tag to contain the primary keyword phrase and encourage the searcher to click on your search listing link.

Additionally, having total control over every page’s Mega keywords and Meta description is also substantially important.  Keywords still play an understated, yet relevant role in how some search engines interpret and rank your website’s pages.  And the Meta description is very frequently used by the search engines as a part of your search listing results.  You definitely want to be able to manipulate and manage these components to help get the click and maximize your SEO efforts.

Without a CMS that enables control over every page’s Meta-tags, this is impossible.  Ensure your CMS system includes complete page-by-page Meta-data management capability.

Have you been keeping up with the latest news regarding Google and the persistent hacking coming from China?  It’s a big deal and certainly at the forefront of web and computer security in the news right now.  In fact, as of today, it looks like the U.S. government might even be providing some help from the NSA.  Google has even considered pulling out of China in a dramatic way.

Here’s the deal—if a company as big and well-protected as Google can be hacked, it really is just a matter of time before your open-source powered website could meet the same fate.

And who knows what the purpose will be.  It’s not likely that your website is going to be harboring any classified government secrets or anything, but that’s not the only thing hackers are after.

Your business might have proprietary information that you need to keep prying eyes away from.  A crazy, but hacking-proficient someone might be out there who wants to turn your website upside down for some reason or another.  Hackers might just want to install spyware on your website to steal private information or perform identity theft of your hard-earned customers.  Who knows.

Whatever the case may be though, one thing we can all agree on is that getting hacked is just not a very pleasant situation at all.

But What’s So Bad About Open Source Web Software?

Well, technically there’s really nothing wrong with open source software in general.  Some is coded quite securely for that matter.  But the bottom line is that if hackers can get away with repeatedly attacking Google’s systems for a good part of December, they can certainly get through the open source software you’re running, no matter how well it’s been written and implemented.

That said, there are a few solid reasons why running open source can put you at risk:

First of all, open source is just that…open.

Hackers practically have access to a complete encyclopedia worth of information on how it works and what security flaws have been identified and patched (as well as those that are still ripe and available for exploiting).

Secondly, open source software is a BIG target because it’s so widely used.

Let’s face it, if a hacker has the opportunity to exploit hundreds of thousands of sites with one “hack,” the chances are pretty big that they’re going to seize this opportunity rather than go after a single little website somewhere that’s running its own secure proprietary software.

And then there’s the updating issue.

We know for a fact that hackers go after open-source software so frequency because it’s such a large target market—and one that’s full of readily available information.  There are even communities of hackers that dedicate their efforts exclusively towards just one open source platform or another.  But even the sense of security that updates and patches provide is really just another falsehood—by the time the latest patch comes out (and if it ever actually gets installed…which is another huge issue), the hackers have already long since moved on to the next opportunity.  Retroactive open source software updates are simply too little, too late for eager hackers.

Here at Sleepless Media, we strongly encourage the use of custom-built software to run our clients’ websites and web applications.

Of course we’re proficient at developing incredibly secure software, but beyond this fact alone, it’s been proven time and time again that hackers simply ignore one-off professionally developed sites like this.  They’d rather achieve notoriety within their software-specific communities or go big time by targeting the widely deployed open-source software that so many websites are using these days.  Being a small fish in a really big pond has its benefits!

WordPress seems to have become all the rage over the last year or so.  More and more businesses and organizations are turning to the open source web software platform to power their blogs and websites, and some are even using it as a full-fledged CMS (content management system).  And this is where the problem begins…

Now first things first, let’s make it clear that WordPress is pretty cool blogging software.  In fact, the blog you’re reading right this moment is powered on the back-end by WordPress.  The software was designed for blogs and it’s quite good at powering a blog with all of the right tools and features built right in.

But to use WordPress as a CMS to power an entire website—can this possibly be a good idea?  Unfortunately, the answer is, “No it’s not a very good idea at all!”

WordPress was designed to be blogging software, not CMS software.  Here are three specific examples:

1. WordPress is awfully “heavy.”

In other words, the software is loaded up with a feature set that is great for blogging.  But these features just kind of add extra baggage when it comes to using the system for CMS—they can really make a site sluggish.  Also, because of the extensive blogging feature set, the user interface is full of options and features that will only serve to confuse a CMS user whose primary goal is to add or update website content.  On the other hand, a well-designed CMS system is very clean, simple, and straightforward to use for even the novice user.

2. CMS requires more plug-ins.

To effectively use WordPress as a CMS requires the use of numerous plug-ins.  While using a couple of plug-ins is okay every once in awhile, the fact is that each different plug-in developed by different programmers with different skill sets interfaces in a different way with the blogging software and with other plug-ins that are installed.  The end result can be a compatibility nightmare—especially when a new release or update to WordPress comes out and all of the plug-in developers must scramble to get a new plug-in version together to be compatible.  We won’t even mention the plethora of potential security issues that arise from this scenario.

3. It’s not designed to organize large amounts of information.

Because WordPress was designed primarily to be blog software, it does great with categories and tags—the foundation of blog organization.  The problem with using it as a CMS for a larger website lies in the fact that it depends on the installed theme to establish a proper website navigation structure, and most available CMS themes just don’t handle the task very well at all.  Although it’s the standard for blogs, using time-based content presentation (where newest content forces older content down the list into obscurity) is not a good way to organize most website content.

Sure, go ahead and use WordPress to power your blog (or the blog portion of your website).  This is exactly what it was designed to do, and it works great for this purpose.  But be aware of its pitfalls and limitations before planning to deploy the popular blogging software as a full-fledged CMS.