Tim Inglis' Tech Blog

The work that I have been doing throughout the year has been gaining the attention of some people in the local web design and development industry. This has culminated in my being offered the position of Joomla! specialist by Keep it Simple IT, a Frankston based marketing and web design company. The position itself is really quite exciting. I am starting out building Joomla! based websites for our clientele with a view to creating templates myself over the next 12 months. Those templates will then be used for clients as they sign on, giving us even greater flexibility in our designs as our portfolio grows.

The learning curve will be fairly steep as my work with php to this time has been in a less intensive environment than that of Joomla!. This is a challenge that I look forward to taking on however as it allows me to branch out into more of a programming oriented career path whilst staying with what I am passionate about, which is web development. IT is a fast moving field and Internet technologies are possibly even more so, which means that the job will constantly be presenting new, different & exciting challenges.

My aim with Keep it Simple IT is to become the resident Joomla! expert and a leading authority on everything Joomla! and this blog will become a vehicle for achieving that goal. It will be used for posting information, tutorials and articles on Joomla! designs and development. I will post on making W3C standards compliant websites through the efficient use of the Joomla! CMS as well as presenting a portfolio of my work -past and present- that will be able to be accessed here.

I have dived headlong into the challenges presented to me through Keep it Simple IT and I am absolutely loving the work that I am doing. I am currently building a website for a physiotherapist in Adelaide which will go live within the week & I will post a link back here once that has happened. There are a number of other sites that I have been sharing the workload on and I am also doing a pro bono website for a church on the Mornington Peninsula, which I am expecting to go live around the middle of July.

I think the most exciting part of this though is that I have always wanted to continue working in the design and development fields without having to push into growing the business through lead generation and sales, and this is exactly what Keep it Simple IT has allowed me to do. I can now focus solely on building websites and enhancing my repertoire of skills while Glenn -the founder of Keep it Simple IT- focuses on his strength, which is generating more business and creating an influx of happy clients.

In the coming weeks, I would like to do a series of tutorials on setting up a Joomla! website, starting with the basics and moving on to getting a site that is fully functional. In these tutorials, I will cover installation, finding a template, downloading & preparing that template, uploading the template to your server, dealing with menus and articles, & tweaking the template to get your final look. At this stage, I am aiming to make these a series of video tutorials.

The site will also consist of sections covering html/xhtml, css, php & jQuery, both as standalone subjects & as they pertain to usage in the Joomla! CMS -with the latter obviously being the main focus. Again, the aim will be to produce primarily video tutorials, but also a range of text based tutorials and articles on each of these subjects. What's more, I will have links to articles and tutorials by other industry experts.

Lastly, the website will be used to give away some goodies & free stuff. These could range from programs/software to t-shirts and to -dare I say it- the occasional piece of hardware and even services such as logo design or personal 1 on 1 tutorials. Who knows? Just keep watching this space for more details.

Take care, and all the best,