Sandbox

http://www.jasgp.org

We're a non-profit organization serving the Philadelphia area by promoting Japanese culture and providing links between America and Japan.

The Joomla version of our website is pretty new, and it will be growing more over the coming summer months.

osarusan,

Great work on your site!  Keep up the good work, and remember to frequent the forum if you have any questions.

Best,
Ryan

Thanks. :-)

I'm really impressed with the ease of converting over to Joomla. Amost every feature of our old site was able to be imported in one way or another, so converting was much quicker than I had initially worried it might be.

The next task is finding out just how far I can go with this site now that it's on Joomla. So I'm scouring the forums and extensions directory for useful components and modules. I'd be really glad to hear any suggestions if you see something on my site that could be done better with Joomla.

osarusan,

My recommendation to everyone is not to look around for new add-ons to your site.  I know that's counter-intuitive, but I've seen plenty of Joomla sites that just are packed with features and extensions that end-users just won't use, and confuses them.

The best way to approach this is from a design and usability perspective:

- what is the problem I'm facing?
- what is the right solution to this problem that brings a net benefit to the average visitor

Only run to the extensions community when you've got a problem to solve.  This will keep your site from overwhelming the visitors!

Keep up the good work!

Best,
Ryan

Right, that's very good advice! 

Actually, I was thinking more along the lines of efficiency and optimization. I'm happy with the front end of the site, but I would love to find more tools for the back end to make working on the site easier. I'm wondering what components might be the most efficient for my site. You can see that I am using AlphaContent for the resource guide, but everything else is just Core Joomla; it's all Section and Category content, and sometimes it can be very tricky to get a page to display the way I want it to.

That's more of what I'm looking for. But thanks for the suggestion! That's a very important thing to keep in mind with web design.