Planning on creating a site for your business? Considering the up-front cost of hiring developers to make a site for you, content management system (CMS) platforms have risen to the rescue to fill the gap. Two of the most well-known free CMS products available are WordPress and Joomla.
Both of them provide very powerful features that small businesses can use, but only one of them is appropriate for you. Today, let’s put these two content management systems head-to-head and determine which one remains the victor for your particular situation! It’s WordPress vs. Joomla!
WordPress
We’ll first have a look at WordPress and see what it has in store for small businesses:
Pros:
- It’s very robust and secure. WordPress is highly competitive and has risen above all other blogging platforms.
- While it’s primarily for blogging, it can prove a valuable platform for professionals and entrepreneurs who want to showcase the services they provide. Retrofitting WordPress is almost as easy as installing a theme. There are plenty of small business themes available. For professionals, I recommend using the Shell Lite theme, which I use for my own services.
- As hinted from my previous statement, it’s a blogging software right out of the box, meaning that you can add content from the get-go without having to worry very much about tweaking the software. If you’re hoping to make sales out of content, use this as your blogging platform. It can be very Google-friendly as long as you don’t choose very bulky themes.
- WordPress has a strong e-commerce platform through a plugin. Making a site that sells stuff is very simple and doesn’t require a lot of elbow grease.
Cons:
- Sites made through WordPress are straightforward and simple. This can also be a downside. Making a complex site with lots of features that give your small business a competitive edge is very difficult through WordPress and sometimes could prove impossible. The one-click installation feature is convenient, but lots of the plugins have to rely on a very strict application programming interface (API) that doesn’t necessarily give them ample elbow room.
Joomla
You’ve had a look at what WordPress is all about. Now, let’s put Joomla to a fair test against this contender:
Pros:
- Extensions vary from very simple features to game-changing functionality. There are so many extensions for e-commerce sites that it may be difficult to know where to begin!
- Out of the box, Joomla provides an extensive array of features and the perfect layout for a business looking to sell things online. To have a look at how rich some sites using Joomla can be, have a look at the GSAS at Harvard or ITWire. But that’s probably not enough for you. You want to see a real e-commerce site in action. There’s Pierro-Astro and TrolleyStore. Both demonstrate how powerful Joomla can be for a small business. They are using the VirtueMart extension, in case you were wondering.
Cons:
- This is not the ideal product for a blog. It’s rather difficult to set up a blog and maintain it. The indexing system is not as ideal as WordPress, and there are many other caveats to using this for a blog in general.
- Some security issues in the past have given Joomla a poor reputation, but it’s managed to mitigate most of these issues and even provide a guide for a properly secure setup.
- In general, Joomla is not for the faint of heart. The learning curve is long, it’s hard to set up, and the whole process can be a bit painstaking even for an individual with previous experience setting up WordPress.
- If you’re stuck somewhere, don’t expect a lot of support. The community is a bit slow to respond and the same can be said for the developers at Joomla.
The Prognosis
If you’re looking for a solid piece of software, you can choose either one. However, only one of them is going to be suitable for your business. In a nutshell, use WordPress if you need something simple, fast, and content-smart. On the other hand, if you want to focus strictly on e-commerce, Joomla can really spruce up the look of your business!
The post WordPress vs. Joomla: Which Is The Best System For Your Business appeared first on Small Business Technology.
Emotions play tricks on our memories, making our recollections of events much happier or heart-wrenching than they actually were. Smartphone app Expereal seeks to cut through those cognitive traps by allowing you to rate your day on a 10-point scale and organizing that data into easy-to-read charts.
The iOS app (Android and Web-based versions are planned) is the brainchild of Brooklyn-based digital strategist Jonathan Cohen, who was inspired by psychologist Daniel Kahneham’s 2010 TED talk “The riddle of experience vs. memory.” Kahneham argues that our memories are often distorted by cognitive biases. For example, one bad day can completely spoil someone’s memory of an otherwise pleasurable two-week vacation.
When designing Expereal, Cohen decided to stick to a 10-point scale to help users keep their ratings objective.
“I could have potentially asked people to pick a word to describe their mood, but what I like about numbers is that in order to get the full breadth and benefit you also have to enter tags and give meaning to it,” says Cohen.
Expereal’s first screen allows you to rate your day (or part of the day, depending on how often you use the app). Then you can note your location and the people you are with, add tags and snap a photo. A drop-down menu takes you to a set of charts that visualize your ratings by day, week or month, and compares your numbers to all of Expereal’s users or your Facebook friends who also use the app (data is aggregated anonymously). The “Expereotype” option is an album of your in-app photos with embedded ratings, tags and locations.
Cohen says Expereal fills the gap left by journaling apps and life-tracking wearable tech products like Jawbone UP and Nike Fuelband.
“None of these services in my mind really address the fundamental question–’how is my life going and how is it trending over time?’ I thought that by having a better understanding of this over time, it would be an interesting way to look back in order to move forward,” says Cohen.
Of course, Expereal is only as useful as the data you enter into it. The app’s notifications can be set to remind you to use it 1-5 times per day. While testing the app out, I found I was more likely to enter a rating if I was having a bad day because adding tags allowed me to vent. If my day was going okay, however, it was tempting to ignore Expereal’s prompt on my iPhone.
“It’s not immediately sticky,” Cohen admits. “But for many of us who are relatively happy in our lives, I think there is value in those moments of self-reflection.” He adds that Expereal is meant to “counterbalance to the immediate promises of contemporary best-selling self-help books and programs.”
I committed to using the app five times a day for two weeks and was surprised by my data charts. A couple days I had written off in my memory as a total waste of time (because of a headache or a task left undone) were actually rated quite high, and I realized I’m much more pessimistic than I thought I was. I already use Timehop as a scrapbook and Step Journal to keep track of my daily activities, but I like Expereal’s focus on mood tracking because it’s already motivated me to stop being so negative.
Cohen tells me he is continually working on the app’s data analysis so that the aggregate numbers aren’t skewed toward any particular part of the day or people who log onto the app more consistently than other users. He declined to give me specific numbers, but says Expereal currently has several thousand users.
Aside from being a handy life-tracking tool, Expereal is also beautiful, with minimalist graphics inspired by mid-century California design, graphic designer Reid Miles and Monocle magazine. The app was bootstrapped by Cohen, who is currently looking for investors and investigating several revenue models. Cohen envisions Expereal as part of a larger ecosystem that will eventually include books, seminars and other tools that tap into people’s desires to improve their lives.
“If you look at the world of self-help, that segment of the marketplace, there are all of these amazing books by behavioral psychologists out there,” says Cohen. “If Expereal can capture a piece of that marketplace, I think the potential is huge.”
Apple had a bit of a head start when it came to mobile software sales, since it launched its App Store earlier than the Android Market — now called Google Play. The gap between the two, which was more pronounced in terms of initial downloads, has begun to close. Today both Play and the App Store announced very similar milestones.
Apple has been counting down to its 50 billionth app download for a while now. In fact, the assets were leaked via the Apple website backend code earlier today, so we all knew it was coming. Coincidence that it would land on a Google keynote day? That’s hard to tell, but Google had its own milestone to announce: 48 billion downloads announced onstage at I/O today.
The announcements give us a unique opportunity to compare download numbers from both stores on as equal footing as possible, and the result is a snapshot of two app stores that are neck and neck — at least in terms of straight downloads.
That doesn’t take into account paid vs. free apps, or how much revenue each makes from ads and other sources. But as you can see from the graph, it marks one area at least where Google used to trail considerably but is now catching up. Also the fact that Google’s Android OS now accounts for a majority percentage of global smartphone sales means it shouldn’t be surprising that there are a lot of people downloading apps.
Ever since Google launched its new Google+ Sign-In for mobile and the web, the company has been saying that one of the most popular features on the platform is the ability for publishers to direct users to install their native Android apps with a single click during the sign-in process. These over-the-air installs, Google today revealed, have indeed turned out to be a nice way for publishers to direct users to their mobile platforms. About 40% of those who see the prompt, the company told me today, accept and install the app.
Here is what Seth Sternberg, Google’s product manager for the Google+ platform (and former Meebo CEO) had to say:
“When we launched Google+ Sign-In, we wanted to bridge the gap between desktop and mobile by allowing web users to instantly download a site’s Android app with just one click using our over-the-air install feature. Since launch, we’re now finding that 40% of people who are offered to install a website’s mobile app, accept. This is a significant benefit for consumers, who can now easily access their favorite sites on the go, and developers, who are experiencing greater mobile usage.”
The Google+ sign-in feature has obviously been a major focus for the Google+ platform team lately and it seems like the service is seeing some good early traction. Just a few days ago, Google announced that it will feature over 50 Google+ partners it I/O later this week. The Guardian, one of earliest partners for the Google+ sign-in system, for example, said that Google+ sign-ins now account for 41% of social sign-ins on the site.
Gartner has just released its Q1 figures for mobile handset sales, and the key takeaway is that Android continues to steal the show, led by handset maker Samsung. Google’s mobile platform now accounts for nearly 75% of all handset sales, a jump of almost 20 percentage points on a year ago, and equating to 156 million devices sold in the three-month period. Smartphones sales grew by 63 million units to 210 million for the quarter, making up nearly half of all mobile phone sales overall, at 425 million. With the number of mobile handset sales up by a mere 0.7% on a year ago, it’s clear that higher-end devices are very the much growth engine for the mobile industry at the moment.
Here’s a breakdown of some of the more interesting figures from Gartner.
Although Samsung does not release exact sales figures for its devices, Gartner estimates that the Korean giant is the biggest of them all: it accounted for almost 31% of all smartphones sold in the period, with Apple in number-two with 18%. It’s quite a change from last year, when the two were nearly level, with just 5 percentage points separating them. The widening gap, and Samsung’s growth, will continue into the quarter ahead, it seems, led by the popularity of the company’s newest flagship model.
“We expect the new Galaxy S4 to be very popular despite being more of an evolution than a truly revolutionary device compared to the S3,” writes Anshul Gupta, principal research analyst at Gartner.
On the other hand, the fact remains that at least some appear to still be holding out for the next iPhone rather than going for the iPhone 5; and Apple meanwhile is still holding back from releasing new, low-cost models that might help it along more in emerging markets and compete more comprehensively against the huge range of Android devices out there.
The gap between the two biggest brands and number three continues to be a big one, with Samsung very much taking the lead here. “There are two clear leaders in the OS market and Android’s dominance in the OS market is unshakable,” Anshul writes.
Together, Apple and Samsung accounted for 49 million handset sales. This is down by 1.1 million from a year ago, and as the smartphone market continues to grow, the players who are vying to be the next big challengers continues to churn. LG swapped places with Huawei, and is currently at number-three at 4.8 million units (with a strong showing from some of its newer 4G handsets and its lower-cost smartphone range). Huawei’s 4.4 million, however, shows that it continues to press ahead, as does fellow Chinese handset maker ZTE, which rounds out the top-five:
Samsung, unsurprisingly, is also leading in the overall mobile category, which also counts sales of lower-end feature phones. Its share there is now 23.6%, topping 100 million units.
Just as Samsung is widening the gap against Apple in smartphones, it’s doing the same with Nokia in the overall rankings. The Finnish giant is still number-two but with a 14.8% share, a drop of 5 percentage points on last year.
Looking at mobile platform prominence in smartphones, Android’s current 74.4% market share is nothing short of astounding in terms of its increase, particularly considering that at this point there is no sign of it slowing down.
Gartner’s numbers, it should be noted, are some 10% higher than those from Kantar Worldpanel Comtech that were released at the end of April: a sign of the margin of error between different analysts’ estimates resulting from different counting methods. Here are yet more numbers from IDC, which claims that smartphones outshipped feature phones, and Canalys, which was also more bullish than Gartner on smartphone numbers at a 300 million estimate.
Back to Gartner: the 156 million units sold in the quarter is actually almost double what was sold in the same period a year ago. Android is without a doubt riding the very crest of the smartphone wave: Gartner points out that smartphones accounted for 49.3% of sales of mobile phones worldwide, up from 34.8% in Q1 of 2012, and 44% in the fourth quarter of 2012.
Apple continues to grow but at a slower pace, managing to increase its share by a “mere” 5 million. BlackBerry (still called RIM by Gartner: hello rebranding!) continues to drop, indicating that at least so far, its big BB10 attack has yet to bear significant fruit. Microsoft is showing a respectable doubling of growth to nearly 6 million units, but that is pretty tiny when you look back to Android and its 156 million. It shows that a significant amount of work remains to be done by Microsoft and partners like Nokia if it expects to get anywhere within spitting distance of Android, or even Apple.
Still, the cautionary tale of Symbian remains a sign of how fast a handset maker can fall from grace. It’s now at 0.3 percent of sales now that Nokia has discontinued its production of the once market-leading devices — although its share was falling fast even before that.
Gartner points out that Asia is currently the market driver for mobile phone sales worldwide, accounting for more than half of all sales, with China remaining the biggest single market.
“More than 226 million mobile phones were sold to end users in Asia/Pacific in the first quarter of 2013, which helped the region increase its share of global mobile phones to 53.1 per cent year-on-year,” writes Anshul Gupta, principal research analyst at Gartner. “In addition, China saw its mobile phone sales increase 7.5% in the first quarter of 2013, and its sales represented 25.7 per cent of global mobile phone sales, up nearly 2 percentage points year-on-year.”
