Starting A Website Development Business With Joomla

A couple years ago, when I was working for a web hosting company, it was may first time to get to know about Joomla and what content management system (CMS) is. I was amazed by how easily it is to setup a CMS website with just a few clicks. The installation process was so similar to installing a program on Windows.

Meeting Business Requirements

Since then, I have been playing around with Joomla and I have even used it to setup a few websites for some business clients, making some money out of the small projects. There are a lot of plug-ins for Joomla that can meet specific business requirements. For example, a wedding centre has asked me to setup a website for them with the following requests:

1. able to sell wedding gowns, tuxedo, invitation cards, decorations, and other related products
2. able to post customer's wedding photo in categories
3. suitable for marketing to different ethnic groups
4. easy communication with customers
5. able to play music album online

With Joomla, it is capable to meet all of the business requirements above with its built-in functions as well as 3rd-party plug-ins.

1. Using Virtuemart for Joomla, I could setup an online shopping cart that has full range of features including shipping and payment modules.
2. Using Easy Gallery, I could setup a photo gallery capable of dividing the photos into a category tree.
3. Using Joom!Fish, I could setup a language selection function that will translate the website into different languages to target different language-speakers.
4. Joomla already has a built-in form for users to submit questions directly on the website.
5. I could integrate Youtube videos on the website.

As you can see, it is easy for anyone to start a website development business using Joomla even if you don't know any programming. Although you will probably not be making a thousand dollar website (if you are, then you can contract someone to help you out),a few hundred dollars per project should not be a problem.

In the next few weeks, I will show you how I would start a website project after getting a job order and walk you through the way to meet the typical business requirements of a website.