joomla | category

Help With Your Existing Joomla Site

Friday, November 13th, 2009 by Arcas Computing

We were recently approached by the owner of the just-launched website Yooni Circle, a website dedicated to student life, who had had their site built by another developer using Joomla 1.5 but who had several issues that their current developer wasn’t able to address. They therefore wanted us to help them change the configuration and implementation of their site to ensure that it worked in the way they wanted it to and within two days we had their site ready to go with all issues addressed. We also provided some basic training on the usage of the system.

We are only too happy to assist customers who have existing Joomla sites (1.0 or 1.5) that have been designed and built by other developers, whether that be installing new extensions, configuring existing extensions, recommending extensions to use, adjusting the way the site works (ie for security) and also providing training on how to use the various, often very powerful, features of Joomla 1.5. We can also patch your site to the latest security release which is an important part of the maintenance of any Joomla site and is highly recommended in order to keep your site secure and stable.

Do you have an existing Joomla website that you would like to change or develop? If you have then why not get in touch with us to see if we can help? In order to get the most from any website it should be constantly changed, adjusted and grown and this is easier than ever with Joomla so why not take advantage of it?

We helped Yooni Circle … maybe we can help you too!

Tags: Joomla

Posted in Joomla | Comments Off

NEW PROJECT: Bonk & Co

Monday, November 9th, 2009 by Arcas Computing

We have started work on a brand-new site for the stoves provider Bonk & Co .

The site will be a fairly extensive pamphlet-style website which will feature a much more modern, CSS-based design and will list all the products and services that they provide. The site will be based upon Joomla 1.5 to allow the client to quickly and easily update the content and add new pages as and when they please.

We are currently in the middle of the initial design process and will soon be starting work on the page build.

Posted in Joomla, New Projects | Comments Off

NEW PROJECT: Heller’s Kitchen

Thursday, October 15th, 2009 by Arcas Computing

We were recently approached by the owners of the wonderfully-named Heller’s Kitchen, a restaurant and eatery located in the south side of Edinburgh, just along the road from us.

They wanted a website for their business which would give information on them, their menus and their services and they chose Arcas to deliver this for them. We created a temporary holding page for them and are now in the process of coming up with a design for them from which we will build an updateable, Joomla 1.5-based website with lots of goodness on it!

Stay posted for more information on the development of the website and for launch details once it is live.

Posted in Joomla, New Projects | Comments Off

SITE LAUNCH: Magnetic North/Open Source

Tuesday, September 29th, 2009 by Arcas Computing

We have now launched one of our most ambitious projects to date for the theatre group Magnetic North.

They approached us with an exciting project to refurbish their existing site but also to create a new site for a project they would be running called Open Source. The idea of Open Source would be to allow anybody interested in theatre to become more intricatly involved in the creation of a production and see how the project evolves from start to finish. In order to do this the client wanted to create a social networking site along the lines of a simplified Facebook which would allow people to join the project, create a profile for themselves, and participate in group discussions.

In order to fulfill this brief we were originally going to use Ning to create the site, however we decided that this would be too limiting in terms of expanding the site and having more explicit control over the functionality of the site as well as being rather expensive. We therefore decided instead to use Joomla 1.5 with the JomSocial community component.

By building the site with Joomla 1.5 it also enabled us to create two unique templates for the site, one for Magnetic North itself and one for the Open Source project but still allowing for all content to be edited from a single administration panel. As well as the core social networking system we also added in the Eventlist events component (to allow them to easily add upcoming tour dates and other events), Kunena Forum (to allow users to freely discuss whatever issues they wanted in a more open environment) and MyBlog, one of the more popular native Joomla blogging components.

We ensured, both through design and configuration, that all of the site’s features were tightly integrated with one another so that the site’s main activity feed would reflect new blog posts, group activities, image uploads, event registrations and more.

Are you interested in getting your very own private social networking site set up? Or do you think that your existing site could benefit from having such a system? More and more web users are taking part in social networking now and it is becoming a vital way for getting people involved in your website - contact us for more information on how something like this might be of benefit to you.

Posted in Joomla, Magnetic North, Site Launch, Social Networking | Comments Off

A Social Networking Site In Three Weeks?

Saturday, September 5th, 2009 by Arcas Computing

We are currently hard at work on a brand new website for the Edinburgh-based theatre company Magnetic North (http://www.magneticnorth.org.uk) which involves not only rebuilding their current website but also adding on a completely new section to it called Open Source.

Open Source is a new project which Magnetic North are starting up which is designed to involve audiences and those interested in theatre more directly and deeply in the process of creating theatre. What they wanted, therefore, was a sub-site that would basically act like a social networking site, allowing people to connect to one another and take part in various discussions. Because of their schedule the company wanted the site to be up and running by the 5th of September which meant that the challenge for us was:

To create a site with full social networking features such as friends, activity streams, galleries, forums, events listings, private messaging and more!
To completely redesign the existing site and come up with a variation on this design for the social networking part of the site
To install and configure a blog for the site
To allow the company’s members to login securely to adminster all parts of both sites from a single location

And this all had to be achieved within 3 weeks! Will we manage it? Check back soon and find out!

Posted in JomSocial, Joomla, Magnetic North, Open Source, Social Networking | Comments Off

SITE LAUNCH: A&A Studios

Tuesday, September 1st, 2009 by Arcas Computing

We are pleased to announce the launch of a brand-new website for Scotland’s leading hair replacement clinic, A&A Studios!

The clinic approached us earlier this year wanting to refresh their website which had been up and running for many years, in part spurred on by the launch of a competitor’s new website. They wanted a more modern look and also wanted to make use of more dynamic display of the information on the site since so much of it would be static text. The site gives information about their various hair replacement services as well as they trichology and beauty parts of their studio.

The site is based upon the Joomla 1.5 content management system and features several plugins/components to extend the functionality of the basic install including:

Search engine friendly URLs
Image slider scripts to slide images across the page
Image slideshows
Google maps plugin

You can view the live site now at http://www.aastudios.co.uk!

Posted in A&A Studios, Joomla, Site Launch | Comments Off

A Quick Joomla Conversion!

Monday, August 3rd, 2009 by Arcas Computing

One of our existing customers who operates the Strang Steel Property Search website which we designed and built using Joomla 1.5 came to us because he had had another site, PB Racing, built by another designer, however he wanted it to be as easy to update and make changes to as his property site so asked us to convert it into a Joomla 1.5 site.

We therefore got a copy of his existing site and stripped out all unneccessary code then rebuilt it as a Joomla-compatible template. We installed and configured Joomla, implemented the template, then added his content back in again including a requested “news ticker” module and all in under 4 hours! The new site was up and running within a couple of days of us being asked to run the conversion for him and now he can quickly and easily update content throughout the site.

To us this demonstrates that Joomla 1.5 is a system which people can quickly and easily come to terms with on the end-user side of things but also it shows how we can, depending upon the complexity of a website, fairly quickly move it across to the Joomla 1.5 CMS.

If you have an existing website and would like to take control of it then why not contact us for more information?

Posted in Convert to Joomla, Joomla, Joomla Site Conversion, PB Racing | No Comments »

SITE LAUNCH: Atlas Lettings Property Rentals

Monday, June 1st, 2009 by Arcas Computing

We are proud to announce the launch of our latest site, http://www.atlaslettingsedinburgh.co.uk!

The site is for a newly-established property management company based in Edinburgh who wanted a powerful and simple-to-update site on a restricted budget. We used Joomla 1.5 alongside the Hot Properties plugin to achieve this and included some customisation of the basic package including:

Custom templates for the property pages
Extension of the built-in fields plus adaptation of the search facility to allow for these fields to be searched on
Addition of feature whereby the admins can choose the rental status of a property and have a “LET” banner overlaid over the images of the property dynamically
Installation of more advanced contact form with spam checking

Feel free to check out the site and let us know what you think!

Posted in Atlas Lettings, Joomla, Site Launch | No Comments »

SITE LAUNCH: Dempsey Sails The World!

Tuesday, May 19th, 2009 by Arcas Computing

We have just launched a new website at http://www.dempseysailstheworld.com which is actually one we did for free. Free?! Yes, for free!

The reason for this is that we were approached by Craig, who is about to embark on a solo circumnavigation of the world and all in the name of charity. He contacted us to see if we would help him in creating a simple website for his project and we did one better than that by providing him with a fully-featured content managed site that allows him to post to a blog we set up on the site for him from whereever he might be in the world (and, considering what he is doing, that could be anywhere!)

The site also allows people to donate to him as well as get in touch with him with messages of support and well-wishes.

You can view the site at http://www.dempseysailstheworld.com - good luck to Craig!

Posted in Charity, Joomla, Site Launch | No Comments »

SITE LAUNCH: Gourmet Kebabs/Abrakebabra

Friday, May 15th, 2009 by Arcas Computing

We were approached by the owner of a new gourmet kebab shop opening in Edinburgh to provide them with an updateable website on a tight budget and very tight timescale and we were only too happy to oblige!

The customer provided us with the site design/layout which allowed us to create the site more quickly and from start to finish the entire project took around 7 working days (including revisions and launch). The site features their menus and details of the restaurant as well as a contact form to allow customers to get in touch.

Check it out here - http://www.gourmetkebabs.com/

Posted in Joomla, Site Launch | No Comments »

Archive for the ‘Joomla’ Category