Joomla World Conference opens a World of Opportunity
I am just flying back from the 2016 Joomla World Conference (flying from Vancouver to LA and then onto Melbourne Australia) so I figured with 16 hours of flying ahead this would be the perfect time to recap the conference I just attended and share with our clients and friends. It was the best conference I have attended to date with the leadership of Joomla being so much more focused on the end user experience than I have ever seen before. This is very good for our clients (and their web visitors) as the bottom line to any websites success is a great user experience.
Joomla is a content management system (CMS) and clearly one of the best in the world. Bear Web Design has been using this CMS for around 10 years now and we have attended 3 world conferences so far. And we do work with WordPress as well so we know there are other great CMS’s out there but there is no doubt that Joomla is evolving to become more than just a CMS that produces websites with plans such as connecting to apps in the future that will allow portions of your websites content to be shared with your your users thru these apps. It is truly a worldwide driven product (driven by the world community of Joomla). And I am proud to say that the CMS that was the precursor to Joomla was called Mambo (and yes it was built in Melbourne Australia) so I thought it appropriate to give it a mention since I am flying there tonight!
People from Europe and North America are driving the product in my opinion but there are contributors from all over the world. It makes sense that great products on the worldwide web are a collaboration of people from all over the world. Even when so much of the actual desired outcome of your websites demographic is usually local.
When I sit in front of a prospect and talk to them about how Bear Web Design can help them build a new website or redesign their current one I have such a level of confidence in the products we produce that I basically feel powerful. (not something you would think of with me if you know me). But the Joomla product is so solid and has such a proven track record that I am simply so confident in our ability to produce a great website at a fair market price that will greatly serve the client. Combined that with great team that we have at Bear Web Design (that has custom designed more than 350 websites in the last 10 years) it is a pretty hard combination to beat.
At today’s keynote event the topic was the future of Joomla. That to me translates to the future of Bear Web Design and most importantly the future of our customers. Do they have a product that will serve them now and for years to come? Will it get better and will it continue to meet a very fast changing device market place? Well in today’s session I got a big YES! Most clients would know that we had a big security update around 4 or 5 weeks ago that was required to be updated to each client’s website asap to prevent a security flaw. We tell our clients when we update their website (geeky as it is it keeps them aware and knowing that we are watching out for them). But the bottom line is we (and Joomla) are on the ball when new updates coming out all the time! The version we upgraded to was Joomla 3.6.2. I know I know – doesn’t mean a whole lot to you but in the today’s keynote we got the future path of Joomla 3X to Joomla 4X (due for release in 2017) and then ultimately a Joomla X version is at the end of the tunnel possibly around 2018. So why does this matter? The answer is clear!
Your website will need to be state of the art this year, next year and the year after to compete in your market place. And it is a competition (and the judge is Google and then the next judge is a visitor.) The reality with websites today is they are not built and then put in a hosting location and then 3 years later the process is repeated. (That era of web development is basically over). It is much more about a continuously updating the product and the website’s content while striving to offer more and more features to the user. Just like in the sales cycle I don’t spend that much time telling a prospect about Joomla and how well it serves us but the reality I know is that if our clients are happy with their website then are happy with Bear Web Design and ultimately they must be happy with Joomla! And you can rest assured that although so much of our business is focused locally the products that are driving those opportunities are from some of the best developers in the world collaborating all around the world to make sure that your website communicates effectively with your users.
It is that simple and in many ways, it is the human experience when it comes down to it and the neat thing is the user experience is Stockholm Sweden seems to have the same need as the user experience in Vancouver Canada and Melbourne Australia and you guessed it in Nashville, TN. It is indeed a very cool time to be working with websites and I am eternally grateful to be able to serve my clients in such a dynamic and exciting industry. I look forward to continuing to help our clients improve their websites and users experience and ultimately improve their own success.!
