Use my website design skills to create an offline advert thereby promoting my business locally.
The constraints:
Seeing as though my budget was small I could only afford the 1/8 Page (64mm x 90mm) advert.
The small ad meant I'd have to design my ad to be noticed amongst possibly 7 other ads on the page. I came up with the not so original idea of using the famous Kitchener "Your country needs you" first world war poster. I also added a bit of humour and alluded to the fact that I'm an Englishman in Australia.
One of my favourite Joomla companies has come up with a great idea: ask everyone what thier essential extensions are for Joomla. My number one extension is the JCE wysiwyg editor, I use it as standard on all my clients sites. I'm not sure what I'd do without it. In fact I'm using it right now to write this post.
Compass Designs wrote the tutorials I used to learn how to build templates for Joomla, I feel indebted to them for that and so here is an announcement direct from them:
You might have heard of UserVoice. Its a great web 2.0 application where people can vote on things. Everyone gets a set number of votes, in this case 10. You guessed it, we are going to ask you to vote on what you think are your "bread and butter" extensions. You can give one extension all your votes, or spread them around.
The only guideline is vote for extensions you "couldn't do without". Also, make sure you search for an extension before you vote, we don't want to dilate votes, and feel free to make enthusiastic comments! If you suggest an extension, try to enter the title as the name of the extension that appears on the extension directory.
Well I flew away from my wife, toddler and baby to seek new clients at CeBIT. Unfortunately I didn't meet a single potential client. Although the exhibition was great. I saw some awesome things including a data center in a cargo container, usb microscopes, eye tracking, GPS laptop tracking, military grade Tablet PC's. There where delegations and representatives from Korea, UK, South Africa, China, Germany and more.
I'm sure the the talks would have been great to go to as they looked interesting but they where priced exclusively for big business.
Yesterday I attended Joomla Day Brisbane. It was a day long conference all about my favourite open source content management system, the one I use on pretty much all my clients websites.
The conference was held at the South Bank Institute of Technology in Brisbane. Two of the Joomla core members were there and gave presentations including Andrew Eddie who kindly tought us a few new tips and tricks. He also gave us a look at Joomla 1.6 which looks to be pretty amazing indeed.
Even the Queensland Government was represented at the conference and wants to be an active part of the Joomla project. We learnt that a lot of businesses in Australia still have static websites instead of ones that can be easily updated, this includes even large Government websites in Australia!
I've been asked by Packt Publishing to review a new book just published about building an eCommerce site in Joomla using VirtueMart. I've done a few of these now so this book will be an interesting read for me. To my knowledge it is the first book about Virtuemart published in English.
I'll publish a review as soon as I have time. In the meantime here is an excerpt from the book....
