Joomla is a great web developer package, it is online software aimed to help users update the content on their website. It’s open source so all the website development is essentially done. It’s easily skinnable, that is we can apply a custom website design to the software and clients can run with it. Contributors around the world have all chipped in to make the software and modules so we can add shopping carts, blogs, forums, polls and many more!

So why don’t I like Joomla?

First and foremost, the source code is available to anyone. This means that although security problems are found quickly, they’re not always found by the right people! When they are found, another update needs to be performed to keep client’s websites completely bulletproof. These updates take time and cost money which you never expect to spend. We have and will continue to implement Joomla sites when it is the best solution but we give clients the chance to decide for themselves whether to keep updated for an ongoing fee or let their website slip and risk being attacked.

Finally Joomla’s power is another weak point. For large complex sites, Joomla does a great job at making things updatable and flexible, but unfortunately this makes it too complicated for simpler websites and/or less technically minded users. It also becomes difficult to keep updated if we change things to make it easier and better for a particular website.

These are really the only two down points to using Joomla over a custom solution, but I feel they’re quite big ones. If you don’t know how to use it and it’s insecure, it makes a really terrible website… The latter is rare, but it does happen.

An Alternative?

There are plenty of alternatives, but few really do the job, so we designed our own CMS around simplicity and security. Zako CMS is much easier to use, and aimed at your average informative website, it is focussed it at doing one thing so we feel it does it much better than any other (that we’ve seen and tested). Besides fading images and image upload, we also have a simple shopping cart module for 1-10 products (beyond this and a full ecommerce package is recommended) payments can be taken through Paypal, news can be updated, text can be changed in three steps (click text, edit, save) and audio/video can be embedded without ever having to look at code or use third party sites like youtube. 90% of our clients use this software and to date, noone has had any complaints (apart from one who had a tiny screen due to all sorts of browser add-ons so we had to adapt her version to fit in a letterbox of a browser) This, we could never have done with out-of-the-box Joomla!

Like Joomla, our software is open-source but not available to anyone. This means if you decide to leave Zako Media for any reason you can take your website, design and software to another web design company. It’s all written in PHP so any good web developer will be able to amend and make changes to the code. I want happy clients so we don’t lock anyone in just because they’re using our software, that would be like removing the engine of your car for choosing another service garage!

Conclusion

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to web design software which is why we have a variety of solutions mainly built in-house but with some tried and tested open source or commercial products. This gives us the flexibility to find the best solution and not try to hack our way through one to perform a task it was never designed to do. People approach us from all over Europe with one thing in common; they want to make more money. It’s my job to work out how best to achieve this goal online. To do this job properly, I need a variety of tools and not limit myself to just one or two and shrug when things go wrong.

This article will hopefully clear up some misconceptions about copywriting. Basically it is sales writing – that’s it in a nut shell. It is primarily about selling, the actual writing is almost secondary. Below are some key ideas that you should always keep in mind when writing.

It’s not about you 

Sorry, but as a writer you come at the back of the queue. You must focus on the reader; it is them that will be doing the buying. What are they like? Are they male or female? What is their age group? What are their likes and dislikes? These are the questions you need to think about. Take an interest in them, find out what makes them tick.

All good things come in small packages 

That’s what my mum always told me and she wasn’t wrong. Many people seem to be under the misconception that sales writing, in any form, has to be impressively high-brow, be full of ridiculously long and complicated words and sentences. Well it doesn’t and in fact, shouldn’t.  Keep it simple. It doesn’t matter who you are writing for or how educated they may be; your audience will be turned off if they are faced with unfathomable words and rambling sentences. The best writing is clear, simple and concise - and don’t use jargon!

B2B or B2C? 

Whether your audience is Joe Public or another company your style should be the same. Many people think that selling to another business requires a different approach. But at the end of the day it is still a person who will be reading your sales letter or brochure.

Forget the F-word

No I haven’t gone barking mad. By the F-word I am referring to features. Your audience aren’t going to be impressed if you write about a list of features. By doing that the only reaction you will get is ‘so what?’ You must show your audience why the product is for them.

You have to sell them the benefits. If a guy wants to be a better football player, and you sell him your latest top of the range football boots on the basis that they’ll make that happen, he’ll buy them. OK, daft example, but you get the idea. It is all about tapping into the buyer’s emotional need.

Whatever you write you must grab the readers attention (a killer headline), get their interest in what you are selling (that’s where the benefits come in), create a desire (if they want something they’ll convince themselves they need it) and finally get them to act (buy, sign up etc).

Sally Ormond

Freelance Copywriter 

Let me take your business to new heights by making every word count.

Another fantastic website related blog from one of our favourite Copywriting sites; Copyblogger.com. This one talks about the psychology of passive selling, a sales method which all business websites work with no matter how well the website design is done where visitors are anonymous and make the most of that fact. Copyblogger I found fairly recently but after reading from article to article I found much of the content was well worth noting. They state facts and give advice to website owners and marketing alike and make the most of those facts… Anyway waffle over as per article, the blog starts here:

Have you ever stood in a store with something in your hand and then looked up to see if there was a clerk nearby you could ask for help?

Sure you have. We all have. Good help is hard to find.

Companies have been cutting costs by moving towards self-serve more than ever. Depending on where you live, you may have to bag your own groceries, pump your own gas, or bottle your own water.

Put yourself in the mind of the consumer. Consider what happens at that very moment you realize you need help. You were focused on buying two seconds ago, but then something happened—something very important.

Your brain skipped a beat.

“Find someone,” it said.

“Don’t buy. You have questions. Get answers.”

Your focus shifts. You aren’t thinking about buying anymore at all. You were almost ready to shell out your money, but now you’re in search mode. Now you’re seeking answers.

“Hello… Can anyone help me? Anyone at all?”

Now, think about your website. There are no clerks. No sales associate lingers nearby. The store aisles are empty and the cashiers are gone. There is no one who can help – not immediately, anyways.

The copy on your website is the single solution. Useful content mixed with meaningful messages is the only salesperson on staff. If your site content isn’t meeting, greeting, and convincing people, then it isn’t doing its job.

You need more than a website… you need a website that sells.

And to help you sell more, here are seven copywriting tips for a website that operates like a well-staffed store:

1. Get a professional salesperson – Overexcited content full of exclamation marks and sunshine-bright enthusiasm very often has the opposite effect of calm, confident copy. It just doesn’t work well. Tone down the cheerleading and collect your wits.
2. Eliminate the dress code – Calm and collected doesn’t mean bland and boring. It’s fine to show some personality, so get naked with your content. In fact, most consumers enjoy a good peep show (minus the pom-poms, that is).
3. Tell staff to talk less– Readers quickly lose interest in long, verbose paragraphs and end up walking away. No one likes the guy who can’t shut up, after all. Trim your content. Use concise sentences that create impact - not unnecessary fluff.
4. Inform consumers better – Tell consumers about your company. They want to know your story – the way they want to hear it. What makes you special? Why should they choose you? What can you offer more than the competition?
5. Bring in the specialist – The quality of your content reflects on your business image. If it isn’t well written, it isn’t going to help you sell. Do-it-yourself copywriting is fine for people with the skills. But if that isn’t you, then hire a writer to help.
6. Hire a clerk – Make sure people can contact you quickly and easily with a visible contact form. Ditch the coded (emails) supposed (to) cut spam, as well. That just forces consumers to take extra steps to contact you – steps they may not be interested in taking. There are other ways of verifying that a user is human without having to type out badly displayed letters!
7. Don’t goof off on the job - There’s a time and place for playing the class clown. Snagging a customer lead isn’t that time. Give straightforward information, offer a clear message and cut the clowning around.

Ending here, I would also like to mention a related article from the same blog entitled: ‘I don’t care about you’ which in principal states that your website viewers want to find out how you can solve their problem and don’t want to sit reading about how wonderful you say you are!

Microsoft have relaunched windowslive as a social networking platform. For some time they seemed to be desperately trying to buy Yahoo!, then [allegedly] tried AOL, they’ve got nowhere with Facebook, Bebo and the likes and seem to have given up hitting an existing, popular market. Even their most popular platform;  Hotmail has been falling behind as other webmail systems moved into the realms of AJAX programming (the ability to load web content without reloading the entire page), their Spam filter also leaves much to be desired, certainly compared to Gmail who’s spam filter is virtually flawless!

Microsoft have tried giving away free templated websites with Office Live (which they are still doing) but the uptake seems slow and promotion scarce (for which I’m certainly thankful for), the software itself is flexible but a little over-complicated. The bonus is that they provide the hosting and domain name for free which you can take with you if and when you upgrade. For small websites with few followers, this is an excellent solution.

So what are Microsoft doing now? They seem to have gone back to their corner muttering insanities under their breaths and started work on their own products again. I fear this is too little too late as they attempt to copy the best bits from other sites rather than being inspired and moving the web forward.

Microsoft should ideally stick to offline software and continue developing it’s own products rather than trying to hit the online market. As their web efforts increase, their software side seems to be diminishing, allowing open source equivilents and indeed Apple to take the limelight. Windows is, and always has been a great product, most complainers are complaining using this platform so they must be doing something right even though it’s not quite perfect for everyone. The online side of Microsoft, that is their email exchange software and various others should be opened up to avoid the need for specific Microsoft exchange servers. This way they can compete with Google documents (which is not 100% Word compatible, and certainly far from perfect) then they will continue to dominate the office and avoid loss of marketshare to these free services. Unfortunately as more and more people are storing documents online and slowly coming to terms with editing them online, Microsoft are losing out to online office solutions.

The moral of this story is really to stick to what you’re good at. In a previous employment, I worked initially on design, development, hosting, web, print, seo, stationary, and promotional products. Between two people it became impossible to do anything with 100% quality. We attempted to project manage printers etc. but this too impacted on what we were best at. Only when we removed these ’sidelines’ were we able to concentrate entirely on web design and development and spend time making things run efficiently with the quality we, and the clients were happy with. External products we could work with but were not seen as supplied by us, so once we sent clients out to a printer, we didn’t have to worry about how things were moving. This is a lesson I’ve brought into Zako Media and until we have the skillset and staff to offer a particular product or service, we won’t offer it. I only want Zako Media to give out work which we and the client are happy with, we will not dilute our efforts, attention, knowledge, time, or profits on external activities just to try and help make a sale.

We’ve just launched a new look for our website, as the site grew, it’s navigation became a little… disjointed… serves us right for not using the newest version of our own editing suite. Now it’s all content managed by our own updated software and all text effects, animations are available to our clients.

Let me know here or by email, what you think. We will soon update the blog to match the new design.

www.zakomedia.com