Feb 4, 2010

Site Update

I have made a lot of progress with the CMS (content management system) for my site. The load time was cut in half by removing the items that were mentioned in an earlier post. It is about 4/5 seconds now and I will continue to reduce this by shaving some HTML code out of the main template page.

A lot of content was added and the banner was fixed. The banner is tricky and I added more height to it so that I can have better pictures in each banner. It is a random selector which is what I would like. I do not want the same banner in the same section time and time again. In fact, in the future, I would love to just upload new banners and have them display randomly making the site more dynamic as a whole.

I have not researched the shopping cart yet. I also took off the “log in” module which I will have to replace. I feel a lot better about Joomla! now that I have some experience with it. I was very, very close to purchasing a template to spice up my site but after reading further at Joomlashack.com I found that purchasing a template doesn’t include the right to use it on your site.

That’s just bad business. I won’t be using these tactics with my photography and I advise anyone that is starting up a web site or editing/redesigning an existing site, be careful with these people who sell their add-ons and extensions. Their site may look wonderful and have a forum and all sorts of bells and whistles, but there is no real way of knowing if it is legitimate.

2 comments:

  1. I was just getting ready to make a purchase on joomlashack when I stumbled across your blog. Can you elaborate?

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  2. Sure thing. If you go to the template selection page and look at all the templates to choose from, select "technical specifications" and there are a few items at the bottom. Scroll down to the bottom of that page and you can find items like: "The branded template has discrete links to us as the template creator.

    The unbranded template has no links and we modify our terms so that you can put your own "Designed by" links/statement on the template.
    "

    There is also:

    "Our commercial templates are copyrighted and licensed on a per domain basis. You will need one license for each website you intend to use the template on. Additional domain licenses are available for $19.95 from our licensing center."

    And there are comments on each of these tech specs that look unanswered. You have to dig to find these and I don't know if you really have to purchase another license or just re-use the files/folders because I decided against this.

    Since the revamp of my site I've decieded to try out Wordpress and I'm amazed at the community support and availability of templates. Try Wordpress out. And, if you have godaddy.com, they do all the database set up work for you. It's amazing.

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