The web design world has taken a massive leap forward in the past few years, as companies have started shifting the focus from building static websites where customers have to contact the developer every time they want to update the site, to a new type of site driven by what’s called a “content management system”, or CMS for short. This is an excellent step forward for anyone who needs a website, as it allows a user to instantly update their website with the most relevant information, instead of calling the developer and paying them to put it up when they have the time.

As a result of this shift, almost every website development company has jumped on the bandwagon to make sure they are offering their clients CMS systems with their website development, in order to stay competitive. At Reality Hosting, we decided to develop a proprietary CMS system that was designed from the ground up to be extremely powerful, yet user friendly. This is not the only way to go, but in our opinion it’s the optimal way to provide a client with the best possible solution.

That being said, we’ve noticed an alarming trend among developers in the area and all across the web. For some reason, a very large number of companies are embracing an open-source CMS system called Joomla! for the back end of their websites. While I’ll be the first one to step up and support open-source software, there are appropriate and inappropriate applications of any software package. Joomla! has some serious problems that can cause you much heartache down the road, and for this reason is best avoided.

Why is Joomla! so bad?

1. Usability

The administration section of Joomla! is a usability nightmare. It’s extremely counter-intuitive and difficult to use. So, not only does it take a lot of training and practice to get up to speed with updating and changing the content on your site using Joomla!, but if you have a change in staff (I know, this never happens! heh heh), the new staff member will have to go through that steep learning curve all over again. In the long run, this costs your organization lots of lost time, which results in lost money paid in wages.

A CMS system should be intuitive and very easy to operate without sacrificing powerful functionality. A user should be able to sit down and have a basic understanding of the CMS system in 5 - 10 minutes maximum. This is a completely realistic goal with some careful forethought and planning.

2. Search Engine Friendly URLs

As the Internet becomes more prevalent in our society, consumers will increasingly turn to search engines to find companies. More and more users are looking for businesses in their local area ( i.e. “Flower Shop in Brantford Ontario”) on search engines, and making sure your business shows up on page one of those results is very important.

By default, Joomla! has ugly URLs that aren’t very search engine friendly - if you look at the address bar in your browser when on a Joomla! site, you’ll see something like this “index.php?option=com_content&task=section&id=1&Itemid=2″ , when ideally you want a much cleaner URL structure, something that looks like “Home/53/0″. If you can control the keywords that show up in the URL, all the better, as this will help to better optimize your site for top search engine rankings.

3. Extending Joomla! is a nightmare

If you need to add functionality to your website that isn’t included in Joomla! by default, prepare yourself to break every major software engineering rule. This can result in lengthy debug sessions to track down issues with the code that are difficult to find. What does this mean to you as an end user? All the extra hours your developer spends wrestling with Joomla! will end up on the bill you pay at the end of the day, inflating the price you pay.

When using a proprietary system, the company developing your site has built the CMS system from scratch themselves, and therefore they know the software inside and out and can easily extend the functionality to meet your needs.

4. You can’t own Joomla!

The Joomla! CMS system is basically open-source software that’s freely distributed by the GNU GPL - basically, that’s a fancy acronym that means the system is freely distributed and will always be free no matter how much you customize or change it. This is bad for developers, as any work they put into the Joomla! system to develop a site for a client becomes completely open-source and can be distributed or sold by anyone who has purchased a copy of the software.

As a site owner, this can be bad for you as well. If a developer ads some functionality to Joomla! that you have envisioned, they can turn around and release it as a free add-on to Joomla! to allow anyone to download and incorporate that functionality into their website. You can do nothing legally to stop this, due to the nature of the license that Joomla! is released under. Edit Note: This is inaccurate, please see Elin’s comments below for a full explanation.

5. Poorly Coded

Any competent web developer who is familiar with the language Joomla! is written in will tell you that the source code (or the instructions that make up the program) is what’s called “Spaghetti Code“. On a large scale, poorly written code like that which is found in Joomla! can cause a lot of issues… It can slow the operation of your site down, as it won’t run as efficiently as it should, and if you have problems with your current developer and move to a new one who isn’t extremely familiar with the Joomla! system, it will take them much longer to sort through the code.

If a car dealer tried to sell you a car containing a poorly built engine with lousy efficiency by saying “Eh, it runs…doesn’t it?”, you probably wouldn’t be convinced. Joomla!’s “guts” are the equivalent of that poorly built engine.

After developing an idea, a website, and your business plan, figuring out how to actually collect money from your customers may seem easy… but that couldn’t be farther from the truth. There are many options available to today’s online merchant, and there isn’t “one right choice”. Depending on your needs as a merchant, the right solution for you will vary greatly, so let’s take a look at the options available to you.

Full Merchant Accounts

From a professional standpoint, a merchant account is the best method to collect money online. Your company name appears on the credit card statement of your clients, and the transaction fees are the lowest you’re going to get. However, merchant accounts tend to charge a monthly fee that usually falls somewhere between thirty to fifty dollars per month, and the setup can be costly (usually several hundred dollars). This isn’t a problem if you’re moving large volumes, but it can really eat into your margins if you process smaller amounts on a monthly basis.

Depending on your provider, you may be required to get an SSL certificate to secure your website. They start at around forty dollars for budget certificates and go all the way up to several hundred dollars for the top of the line, but most providers have a virtual terminal on their site that you can integrate into your webpage to eliminate the need for an SSL certificate.

One of the biggest benefits with a full fledged merchant account is the support you’ll receive. They’ll usually have a toll-free number you can call to get any problems solved right away. Finally, you should keep in mind that most companies will perform a credit check on you, and may decline your application if you have a poor credit history.

Third Party Merchant Accounts

Third party merchant accounts have the benefit of a cheap start-up cost (about fifty dollars) and no monthly fees. However the transaction fees are a bit higher than a full fledged merchant account, and they display their company name on your client’s credit card statement instead of yours. This can lead to an increase in charge-backs (when a credit card owner initiated a reversal of the charge from their end) because sometimes your clients don’t recognize the charge on their card statement.

A third party merchant account will not let you integrate the payment page into your website’s specific look and feel. You must forward your customers to the stock page of the company, and this can be a huge barrier to sale. Identity theft and crime is a real problem today, so online shoppers can scare easily. Forwarding them from your site to another to make payment may cause them to abandon the order process.

PayPal

What started as a fad payment method in the nineties has grown into a large, internationally accepted method of payment. While PayPal is largely used to pay for online auctions, there are many online stores that use it for collecting money. PayPal has a lot going for it: the sign-up is free, and the transaction rates are reasonable. In addition, you can transfer money from your PayPal account into your bank account at any time, something that isn’t possible with the methods previously discussed.

PayPal isn’t perfect, though. For someone to pay you with PayPal, they must have an account as well - which means you may lose potential customers if they don’t have a PayPal account already and don’t want to sign up for one. Using PayPal as the sole payment method on your site may also give some of your visitors the impression that your site isn’t very professional.

What’s right for me?

Now that we’ve discussed the various options available to the online merchant, it’s relatively easy to decide what solution is right for you. For the serious, high volume merchant who relies on their website as the lifeline of their business, a full merchant account is really the only choice. The stability, customer support and low transaction fees are vital for them to be able to run a successful online business.

An established bricks-and-mortar business that wants to test the online waters, or someone starting a small online business on the side, should start with a 3rd Party merchant account. Not only is the initial investment small, but in the future if the business turns out to be successful, a move up to full merchant account is possible.

PayPal is best suited as an alternate source of payment in conjunction with an existing merchant account, or as a method of payment on a hobby website, since requiring sign up with PayPal can be a large barrier to sale. Unless you are sure the demographic you are targeting is very computer savvy, then PayPal can cost you sales!

So, your web hosting account has a fancy website statistics tracking program. It tracks detailed statistics about visitors and their behavior while visiting your site, to help you manage the effectiveness of your webpage. It sounds great, but you can’t make heads or tails of the wealth of information available to you. All that information may seem overwhelming to you now, but by the end of this article you should have a grasp of what all that information means - and you’ll be able to use it to increase your site’s effectiveness.

The Basics

Hits:

Any time your webpage logs a request for information a hit is recorded. This information can take many forms. For instance, if someone visits your webpage, the request for the html file would be a hit, while each image loaded on that page would also count as a hit. If that user then downloaded an image or a zip file from your site, another hit would be counted. So basically, each piece of information that’s requested from your webpage is counted as a hit. One thing to keep in mind when looking at your website’s hits is that one user can be responsible for many hits.

Pages or Pageviews:

A “Page” is counted any time an HTML page from your webpage is viewed. This can be from a direct request (i.e. www.yourpage.com/content.html ) or an HTML page generated from a script (the resulting page from www.yourpage.com/content.cgi ). This number represents the total number of page views only and does not include other ‘stuff’ like image or audio files loaded with these pages. What is actually constituted as a page varies from server to server. The standard pages are .htm, .html, .cgi, .pl and .php.

Sites or Visits:

This is a count of how many visits your page has received. It’s best to think of this total as “sessions” users spend on your website. A unique visitor accesses your site and a visit is logged. If that visitor requests several more pages, a new visit will not be registered unless a certain period of time has passed where the server has had no communication with that visitor.

Unique Sites or Visits:

In addition to the sites/visits column, there is a list of uniques, which is a list of all the unique visitors that have visited your site (when a visitor who has already visited your site visits it again, only a visit is recorded). However, this is not an accurate count of unique people visiting your site. For instance, any time a dial-up user reconnects to the net, their IP changes. Therefore some of your unique visitors could be the same person.

Bandwidth:

Bandwidth is a measure of how much transfer your site is using. It may be broken down into kilobytes or megabytes. Your hosting account probably comes with so many gigabytes of transfer, so to figure out how close you are to your limit, use these figures:

1024 Kilobytes – 1 Megabyte and 1024 Megabytes = 1 Gigabyte.

Note: Web stat programs don’t usually doesn’t track other things (like POP3 and FTP traffic) that are often included in your bandwidth allowance. It’s best to check your control panel or contact your host for an exact figure.

Advanced Website Statistics

Now that we’ve covered the basics that are common to the most popular website statistic programs, you should be able to learn all sorts of interesting information about the traffic on your site. Most programs will break this information down many different ways, by day and even by hour. The detailed breakdown should allow you to learn a lot of basic information about your site’s visitors. However, that information is not always useful. Now we’ll look at some of the more important statistics that can actually help you determine the effectiveness of your website. Please note: not all web stats programs track all of the features listed below.

Visit Duration:

Some web stats programs will track how long your site’s visitors stay on the page. This can help you determine the effectiveness of your index page. For instance, if the majority of your visitors are staying for less than thirty seconds, then perhaps your index page should be tweaked to convince more of your visitors to stay longer.

Pages Visited:

If your stats program tracks the number of times different pages on your website are visited, you’ll be able to gauge the effectiveness of your website design from a business perspective. If the majority of your traffic is only visiting your index page and then leaving, you may want to redesign it to convince your visitors to explore your site more (if you are buying a lot of “junk traffic”, then there’s probably not much you’ll be able to do to get most of your visitors to spend more time on your site).

Search engine stats and referral pages:

Chances are your program will have a section that tracks where incoming visitors from your website are coming from. If it says something like “direct request” or “direct access”, this means your URL was typed into the address bar of a browser or visited from a bookmark. If an address to another page is listed, that means someone came to your site from a link on that page. You can use this to track the effectiveness of advertising campaigns on other websites. Any search engine links will have the keywords used to find your page listed, and this can help you plan and evaluate your search engine optimization strategy if you have one.

Error Codes

Finally, the error codes section is also quite significant. The most important error code is the 404; you may have some mistakes in your webpage causing people to visit a link to a nonexistent page, and the 404 error codes section will help you identify these problems and correct them.