Success!

A key to success (c) Heather Murray Photography

Every year at about this time, I take a step back from my work and focus my thoughts on my own business, and plan on where I want my next year to take me. I know – business planning should be something all of us business owners should be doing all year round. But – as I’m sure a lot of you can relate to – I’m busy working for my clients! Anyway, so I’ve been tweaking my website and looking at my blog …

ugh

my blog

I always encourage my clients to have a blog … and write consistently in their own blogs. Yet, here I sit … with my blog. I think I wrote 2 or 3 entries in it in all of 2011. Oh wait – it’s still 2011 and this is another blog entry! Yeah! Make that about 3 or 4 entries! Yeah, I know – pathetic!

In all fairness however, Joomla – the content management system that I use on all of my websites, including my own, doesn’t have any great blog extensions. Now to be clear, it’s not the fault of Joomla itself, but the extension creators/master minds. For some reason, there just doesn’t seem to be a great blog extension available especially for Joomla 1.6/1.7, the newest versions of the free, open source software.

So, while I have been sitting here and thinking about my website, thinking about the components that are currently installed on it, and while upgrading it from Joomla 1.5 to 1.7 (thereby losing the one blog extension I really liked but not available for Joomla 1.7), it suddenly occurred to me that WordPress is undoubtedly the BEST in blog software.

Ok, maybe, just maybe, there is an extension that will pull my WordPress blog (which I’d then create) feed into my Joomla site! There are such extensions out there that I’m sure would do a fine job at this, I thought, why not just have a link in my menu to my WordPress blog. Ok, that would work. Off I go to create my WordPress blog.

But wait … in order for me to use my exact same template in WordPress that I use in Joomla, I’d have to pay something like $99 USD per year. Hmmmm. Didn’t really want to lay out that kind of cash.

New idea! Can I install (or have installed) both Joomla AND WordPress on my host? By doing that, I can not only use the same website template between the 2 of them, but I’d save some money while doing it.

And viola! Here I am.

While I troubleshoot many problems on any given day and for any given project, I am continually reminded that there is always (usually) more than one solution to any problem. You just have to be patient and let the solution present itself.

Post By Heather Murray (9 Posts)

Heather Murray is a Professional Web Designer for small and home-based businesses, working primarily in content management systems Joomla and WordPress. In this blog, I provide helpful tips about web design, optimizing for search engines, linking to social media accounts (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, StumbleUpon, etc.) and how to best use images. She can be reached at heather@clusterwebdesign.com.

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