A Compelling Reason to Upgrade: Joomla 3.0 Offers Responsive and Mobile-Ready Formats

BootstrapLargeIf you’ve been waiting for a good reason to update your old Joomla website, or add a content management system on to an old HTML website, the new Joomla 3.0 may have the bells and whistles you’ve been waiting for.

Responsive Design

While Joomla 3.0 has many new features and improvements over version 2.5, the most exciting change is the integration of the Bootstrap framework. Bootstrap is a CSS-based, 12-column, responsive grid framework that enables websites to look and behave great in desktop browsers, as well as tablets and smartphones, via responsive CSS.

With Joomla 3.0, the CMS has completely overhauled both the front-end design and administrator user interface, and has become the first major CMS to become mobile ready in both the front-end and admin areas.

Why is ‘Responsive’ Important?

Each day, traffic from mobile devices grows exponentially as does the number of devices, operating systems and browsers used. Factors such as screen size, pixel resolution, Flash support or lack of, click versus touch, etc. have become crucial considerations when developing websites.

Responsive web design is a development approach of laying out and coding a website so that it provides an optimal viewing experience no matter what type of device is used to visit the website.

Since it is the user experience that enables your site’s visitors to learn about you and your products, make purchases and interact with you, a responsive design ensures that the users get the best experience no matter what device is used.

To learn more about mobile and responsive design, read our blog post Are You Ready for Mobile.

Increased Ease of Use

In addition to making the front-end and admin user areas responsive, Joomla 3.0 has also updated the look and feel of the admin user area, and has overhauled the article manager by adding a better organized filtering system and drag-and-drop feature for sorting articles.

The article edit screen has been redesigned to roll up the publishing options, article options and metadata into a new article details section. The text editor is now front and center, making the article edit page cleaner and easier to work with.

Developer-Friendly

Additional updates are aimed at making the developer’s job easier. jQuery and LESS CSS integration mean spending less time coding, and the integration of the IcoMoon icon library gives the developer some nice options for ‘retina’ optimized icons.

Additional Updates Include:

  • A new fully responsive admin UI
  • A new fully responsive front-end template
  • New user-friendly admin interface
  • PostgreSQL Driver for using the PostgreSQL database
  • jQuery integration
  • jFeed replaces SimplePie for feed management
  • Easier installation of language packages for multilingual sites
  • Guest user group present by default
  • Saving blank articles is now allowed
  • New administrator statistics module
  • Improvements to Smart Search

Free to Everyone

Joomla is an award-winning, open source content management solution that is freely available to everyone. Its ease of use and extensibility have made Joomla one of the  most popular content management solutions available.

To learn more about Joomla visit their website, or contact us for a demo of Joomla 3.0.

Does Your Website Need an Overhaul?

Time and time again, many businesses ask me this question. For many of you, your Website probably started out as an online billboard or brochure. That time has changed. Websites are now your No. 1 business calling card and 24/7 salesperson. Audiences now expect to quickly get detailed information, real services and take actions important to them online.

The key is to keep sight of your company’s goals and audience’s needs. It can start with comments like, “Our Website looks dated.” Or, “The amount of clutter has built up and key information is hard to find on our site.” And, “Are we doing everything we can online to have an impact?”

A few years ago, a thoroughly modern Website could ignore social media, RSS, accessibility and search engine optimization; it could do without Flash-based animation, rich media or have no blog. You only added content weekly or much less. When changes were needed, IT was called in to work with HTML code.

Things have changed, and keep changing. Now there are content management systems that you can update easily and as frequently as you’d like and much more. It’s important to have relevant content for your customers and prospects, and to keep your information up to date.

But how do you know? If you are unsure if you need a redesign, you can always ask for a Website review. It’ll tell you what you might benefit from when having your Website updated or redesigned.