With Joomla emerging as one of the most popular CMS being used today, you can find yourself stuck in dilemma–which extension of Joomla to use for your website. Using Joomla core software programs can have enormous benefits and considerable effort has been put in developing those Joomla components, templates, modules, plugins, extensions etc., which can affect your website positively in multiple ways.There are a number of Joomla extensions available to choose from. However, I’ve tried to compile 5 popular Joomla extensions here.

1) Community Builder

Community Builder is quite a popular tool that enhances Joomla user management system and makes your website social facilitating users to interact on the same. This extension enables you to integrate additional files in profile, user lists, extended registration workflows, uploading of images, establish connection path between users, integration with components such as Forums, Galleries, Newsletters etc. It allows the existing key users to become moderators and exercise powers such as banning/unbanning of profiles, new membership approvals, report handling etc. Community Builder fetches your members some special privileges such as allowing them to create content for your website, blogging, membership groups etc.

2) VirtueMart

VirtueMart is an advanced shopping cart solution, which is extensively used by a number of store owners across the world. This open source Joomla extension can be run equally well in Store as well as Catalog mode and its strong administration tool enables you to handle varied number of categories, discounts, shopper groups, customers etc. This free extension can easily be downloaded and modified without any restrictions. It facilitates shoppers to manage their accounts easily and view all their order details. It also helps them to make payments in multiple currencies.

3) JCE

JCE is an extendable, customizable popular Joomla extension that fetches you a latest editor for editing Joomla based pages of your website. It entails varied features such as file and image handling, strong administration interface for configuring the editor, plugin support etc. This Joomla extension is licensed under GNU and is free to download. This tool helps you to style test with the help of familiar buttons and general commands such as bold, italic, underline etc and also run a spell check on the write-ups. JCE also enables you to copy text from Word to other text documents and insert images using file browser interface.

4) Joom Fish

Joom Fish is an advanced Joomla extension that enables you to maintain your website in different languages (multilingual content management) with the help of a system bot. This extension encompasses a front-end module for selecting the language along with varied plugins and a router. It can be used without patching of important files. This extension is free to download along with some free available add-ons. Its central control panel permits easy access to all important features and the translation overview entails filters, which help in speedy access to entries you’re looking for. It also helps to translate lists all at once thereby enhancing performance improvement.

5) JomSpecial

JomSpecial is a great Joomla extension that enables you to create and develop your own social network. You can complement your social networking website with logos, themes, graphics etc with the help of this Joomla extension and also customize the same through CSS edits. It includes a broad array of features such as private messaging, friend requests, comment on walls, share photos, follow updates and add third party components with its improved API. You can also create unlimited number of groups, invite and add members to the same, hide the group etc. These are some of the most popular Joomla extension available on the Internet today. I hope improvements will keep taking place and more & more useful Joomla extensions will arrive on the World Wide Web to help netizens all across the world.

Many web hosts offer Joomla hosting such as LimeDomains, HostGator, JustHost etc. You can easily host your Joomla website on the server of any such good web host and use these Joomla extensions to maintain your website successfully.

Getting Rid Of The Brochure Mentality: Many business owners and entrepreneurs build a website without understanding the fundamental reasons for doing so. As such, they create what I call a ‘brochure’ website. You may have done this already.Well don’t be upset, it’s a pretty natural thing to do. For some reason we decide to follow the lead of the majority, thinking if everybody is doing it, it must be the right thing to do… WRONG!So, going against all conventional wisdom, why do we put up a website? What is the best way to use it?

The Fundamental Reason for Being

Why do you need or want a website? The answer is LEAD GENERATION. Lead generation will lead to small business sales! How is your web site structure important when it comes to lead generation and marketing for small business?

Landing Pages

Well, in order to generate leads you will need to make offers. Offers need to be tweakable. Therefore, you need to be able to update your content easily and quickly. More importantly though you must have a specific page for your offer. These pages are called ‘Landing Pages’.

Let me explain…

Lets say you have a website where you are selling weight loss products. One of your supply companies is running a marketing campaign and you think you can make more sales while the campaign is running. Would you send your visitor to the home page of your website, hoping that they find the specific information about the sales campaign? That’s not going to going to be a very effective marketing campaign!

Or would you send them directly to the promotion?

You’d send them directly to it and make the offer very clear, being very specific about that offer and nothing else.

No matter what you do online, you must be able to make clear offers to visitors in order to generate leads and sales for your small business. You do that by sending them to specific pages, which we call landing pages.

Hopefully, you will be able to edit these quickly and easily, so you can tweak your offers and get the best response possible.

Search Engines Want Content

They love to suck it up! The more content you have the better! There’s a saying ‘Content is King!’. Its true.

The more pages you have the better. The more often you add and update content the better.

Did you know that the way your pages are linked together is very important? Your internal page linking strategy is as important as your external links strategy. I can hear you thinking ’strategy, shhhhhmategy! this is getting technical, I don’t want to know about this’. That’s fair enough, it is technical. And while you can put a website up and link it together any way you please, if you want a good search engine ranking, it pays to have your site built by a professional who knows about this stuff.

By the way, what you call your pages and the physical directory or folder structure of your website is petty important too! So if you’ve got a site that has pages named page1.html, page5.html etc, you should start thinking about keywords for your page names! That’s an important strategy too.

Your small business marketing strategy must start by getting rid of the brochure mentality. You must start thinking lead generation. Everything starts with lead generation!