Good design does not necessarily have to be liked!

Tried and tested design. 
A very well known example was a testing by two focus groups for a new design of a beer can.
The first focus group were asked which of twelve can designs they liked best?
The second group, not knowing that it was the same beer in each can design, were asked which beer tasted the best?
The results were startlingly different with the majority favoring a different can in each focus group.
This exercise proved the point that choosing a design should only be considered with what you are trying to achieve in mind. 

The simple fact is if you ask a focus group for their opinion of a web design, most will likely get a different opinion to asking did they get the information they wanted?

Administry takes all this into consideration when using purpose designed templates that allow us to inject colour, pictures and words along with the personal attributes of a business.

Administry will help you establish and set the goals first, which helps us as designers to choose from ours and other experiences which template would be best suited to the task.

Joomla vs. Drupal vs. WordPress

For the technicle who have heard of the big three and want to reassure themselves they are useing the right CMS, then this is a good read.

By Brian Proffitt (COMPUTERWORLD) tests three of the top free site-building applications from the Developers point of view. September 14, 2011

Computerworld - Building a website has never been easier. Gone -- mostly -- are the days of having to hand-code HTML and PHP scripts in order to get a slick, fully functional website, thanks to the capabilities of content management systems that do most or all of the heavy lifting for site creators.

There are boatloads of content management systems (CMSs) for serious site creators, but the most common for websites today are three open-source tools: Joomla, Drupal and WordPress. Actually, to call them "tools" is an understatement -- these are full-fledged platforms, with tens of thousands of add-on tools created by very active developer communities.
These applications have a lot of similarities. For example, all three are written in the PHP programming language, all three are licensed under the free GNU General Public License (GPL), and all three depend on the MySQL database to hold and manage the actual content within a website.

Conclusions of the big three.

Oddly, when searching for help on some Drupal issues, I was often pointed at sites other than the main Drupal site. This is too bad, because there are some good docs in there.

A majority of Drupal modules are categorized as non-commercial, meaning free, something which is different from the Joomla extension family. Free software users will be comfortable with this, but commercial users may need to get used to the lack of commercial support.

Documentation on the Joomla site is wiki-based, updated constantly and well-indexed by search engines. So I ran into it a lot more often when searching for help.

There are far more commercial extensions in Joomla, though not so many you get the idea that "free" Joomla is just a kind of come-on for pay-for-more add-ons. The balance between free and paid extensions is fair, and you get the sense that there's a lot more revenue in the developer ecosystem in Joomla. Take from that what you will.

I found the WordPress community to be heavily centralized on that main site, which made it easy to locate tools and support for my questions. I sort of liked the one-stop shopping aspect of this community, and found no problems in finding the answers I need when questions arose.

This is, for me, a clear draw. If you can't find help on the main sites for WordPress, Drupal and Joomla, then you will almost always find the knowledge you need on a third-party site. These are strong communities that definitely add to the strength column of each CMS.

If I were to make a recommendation, I would tell a beginner to use WordPress, no question. The themes and plug-ins are diverse and numerous, and this is a very good starter CMS that can scale quite well into a more complex site.

I would recommend Joomla for sites that are a bit more complex and are going to be managed by someone with stronger technical skills. For this type of situation, Joomla is perfect: plenty of extensions, easier to learn and enough templates to make site design worries moot.

If I were building a much more complex site, though, I might turn to Drupal first. Though it's harder to learn, it has much more flexibility to scale a site in terms of complexity. It also has the ability to scale up into very complex sites to be used for a variety of business needs.

Each CMS platform has a very strong developer community, however, and if you are planning to pay for help in building a site, there are plenty of experts out there to build as complicated a site as you need with any of these applications.

Another system well worth consideration in your research for a suitable solution is 'LightSpeed'

Designed as RETAIL TOOLS FOR THE iGENERATION

LightSpeed is a fully integrated, inventory-centric retail system that moves seamlessly from the front counter, to online, to wherever customers are. LightSpeed products are multi-user, multi-store and extensible through a developer API so that software never limits retail aspirations.

LightSpeed continues to evolve, providing retailers with a comprehensive suite of retail tools for the iGeneration, whether they’re operating in traditional bricks-and-mortar stores, in pop-up locations, at trade shows, conferences or special events,
or online.

LightSpeed’s tools include extensive quoting, ordering and invoicing capabilities, label and barcode printing, reporting, inventory management, customer profiling and tracking, credit-card processing and gift cards in addition to multi-store functionality. It exports to popular accounting software packages on both Mac and Windows, and integrates seamlessly with QuickBooks for Mac.

The Company’s solutions are used by nearly 10,000 retailers in 30+ countries, ranging from boutiques in NYC's trendy SoHo district such as Nordstrom-owned Treasure & Bond to large global brands like Adidas and Vespa, to improve the customer’s shopping experience, store sales performance and back-office efficiency

Why would anyone want to hack my site?  

You may not think your site has anything worth being hacked for, but websites are compromised all the time. The majority of security breaches are not to steal your data or deface your website, but instead attempts to use your server as an email relay for spam, or to setup a temporary web server, normally to serve files of an illegal nature. Hacking is regularly performed by automated scripts written to scour the Internet in an attempt to exploit known security issues in software, sometimes planted many months before use, making backup restores ineffective.

The results have been from not noticing until administration editing is not taking effect, to complete destruction of files and no site visible. In each case it may not be possible to back up your site at that time.

It may seem obvious, but ensuring you keep all software up to date is vital in keeping your site secure. When security holes are found in software, hackers are quick to attempt to abuse them.

With a managed hosting solution you don't need to worry so much about applying security updates for the hosting operating system as the hosting company will take care of this.

However using third-party software on your website such as a CMS or forum in Joomla, Wordpress, Magento or Drupal you should ensure you are quick to apply any security patches. Most vendors have a mailing list or RSS feed detailing any security issues and notify you of available system updates when you log in to your site.

As the hosting company backs up sites regularly they are only used in mechanical failures as sites may be already infected. It is the owners responsibility to maintain their own sites if you do not have a maintenance plan.

Joomla 1.5 is no longer supported with security patches If you are Joomla 1.5.x we strongly urge you to upgrade to 2.5.x also probably a security audit of the site to install a clean site so we can place in some security measures, as well as tighten up passwords.

WHY SHOULD I UPGRADE...please read this link if you would like more info...
http://www.joomlavision.com/migrate-joomla-1-5-site-newer-version/

If hosted by Administry, In conjunction with our hosting service Voice2net we are able to perform this upgrade and security check for you.
*Subject to your site individual custom modules.

Please contact me should you wish to proceed or ask any questions.