WordPress and Joomla

www.champlainwebsites.com | Burlington, VT - WordPress DeveloperWordPress has become the most widely used Content Management Systems (CMSs) in recent years. One of many reasons WordPress rose to the top is because it’s open source. It was first released in 2003 primarily as a blogging platform. When version 3 came along, it enabled WordPress to be used for nearly every type of website including ecommerce. That’s when its popularity really took off, and the number of developers working on themes and plugins for WordPress exploded.

If you see a function you like on a popular website that you would like to incorporate into your WordPress website, there are probably already 2 or 3 plugins designed for that purpose. I have a core set of plugins I use for all basic features of any given website, but there are often needs particular to the project that need a specialized plugin. Testing and customization of plugins are a few of the many ways I can help you with your website.

www.champlainwebsites.com | Burlington, VT - Joomla DeveloperJoomla has been around longer than WordPress and has a loyal core of developers that number in the thousands. It is another open source CMS that, in my opinion, is better suited for large websites because of its intuitive article manager. I only recommend Joomla for large websites with several categories of organization.

Over the years, Joomla developers have created extensions for nearly every conceivable website need. With Joomla’s most recent upgrade (which some feel is a game changer), websites are able to be built natively in HTML5, bringing them closer to being “App Ready”. The biggest downside to Joomla at this point is the small number of responsive templates available, but that problem will decrease over time.

Content Delivery Networks – The Need for Speed

Posted on May 16, 2014 in Featured, News

Content Delivery Networks – The Need for Speed

When comparing Incapsula and Cloudflare, to see which CDN could most improve page speed, WordPress and Joomla websites had modest and decent increases in mobile page speed. Desktop page speed increases were small to non-existent when only using a content delivery network for optimization.

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Content Delivery Network: Testing Cloudflare

Posted on Jan 23, 2014 in Featured, News

Content Delivery Network: Testing Cloudflare

I first heard about Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) when researching page speed a few years ago. I didn’t get very far since it seemed at the time to be a fairly expensive addition to my websites. I decided to revisit the subject now that mobile is poised to overtake desktop use, making page speed more important than ever.

CDNs work by making a cached version of your website and storing it on servers throughout the country or world. This, in theory should cut down on your hosting server load and bandwidth and should also serve the pages faster since the database won’t need to be queried to render a page.

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