My passion is web development, but I also enjoy artwork from time to time, although I often ‘refer to a friend’ when I just can’t get colours or effects right on the screen.
I would like to discuss website development using Open Source applications. In particular Joomla.
A lot of people out there still think about their website and count the amount of pages they should have on their website.
Very important to realize is that you do not want a website that will only act like a brochure, with beautiful pictures and a page displaying your contact information. Instead, your website should be interactive and work towards a goal. What you want that goal to be might be one or more of many things. This must form the foundation of your plan for your website and you should structure everything else around that.
If you are in the Real Estate business, for example, you might like a website that will allow you to upload new property information and pictures on your website, and also allow other agents to use your website to advertise their property. You would also need the website to be able to mail newsletters and notifications to your users.
Automate
You should think towards how your website could automate some of your current business activities. Look at the cost of sending all your clients a monthly newsletter in the mail. Stamps, envelopes and time printing, folding etc. It WILL save your business money to consider a HTML newsletter. There is absolutely no cost associated with sending a newsletter to your clients monthly, you just pay your hosting fees.
Once you know what your website’s functionality is going to be, you can start fitting your current business’ services or product information around that. In most cases people can immediately come up with about four pages of information, the Home Page, About Us, Contact Us and a Products or Service Description page.
Information for these pages will be obtained from current brochure and company profiles, and then simply edited for online use.
At the same time while working with already printed marketing material, consideration should be given to your corporate identity, and ‘Electronic Stationary’ requirements such as e-mail letterheads, disclaimers, e-mail signature etc. These should be included in your discussions and plans.
Putting the pieces together
Once you have this, you would have the technical requirements of your website (features and functionality), as well as the meat and trimmings that will go around it (static content). From here you will have to start putting the pieces of your website plan together, and also formalize it by committing to timelines and deliverables for individual tasks in the project.
Now, because you need your website to perform certain automated tasks, you will have to work with a database and be able to understand PHP coding. Very few people know and understand this language, and development costs at 80% of the web development companies in South Africa could turn into thousand of rands. If, however, you choose to use Open Source code on your website, it saves you those thousands, as well as cuts down on your development timeline, as you will be able to use already packaged code on your website to perform the tasks and features you need from your website. If you ask Google to define Open Source, it tells us this:
What is Open Source?
Open source software is similar in idea to "free software" but slightly less rigid than the free software movement. Users of open source software are (generally) able to view the source code, alter and re-distribute open source software. There is however less of an emphasis in the open source movement on the right of information and source code to be free and in some cases companies are able to develop proprietary products based on open source ones.
Choose a developer, somebody that knows his way around PHP and a MySQL database, and discuss your website’s requirements with this person. Personally I would always recommend starting your website’s database with a comprehensive Content Management Solution (CMS) that will take care of a long list of basic features such as user registration, page navigation, website layout and much more.
The bells and whistles
Additional requirements - be it mailing list manager, invoicing & billing, online calendar, online shop or any other requirements - can then be built onto the CMS system. There is a long list of CMS systems which are all Open Source applications that you could use on your website. As a guideline, should you choose us to develop your website, a standard CMS will cost around R1500 for the installation and editing to include your logo and colours. This cost would vary from developer to developer.
The time it will take to get a CMS working properly on your website might be 2 or 3 days depending on the amount of information, as compared to starting to write code from scratch.
If you compare a Dynamic website with a statically designed HTML or Flash website, the list of advantages are endless. Some of the better South African websites are already using Open Source applications on their websites, and it simply makes having a proper website more affordable.
