Second site launched today! This one is for Australian Information Management leaders Data Agility. The guys at Data Agility have been working on a lot of the content themselves and good on them for providing an information rich site. The site is built on the open source CMS Joomla!. Visit the Information Management leaders and let us know what you think.

We’ve just finished a new site www.ineedamassage.com.au which is a directory site for Massage Therapists in Australia. Not only does it provide Therapists with the ability to add a listing to the Massage Therapists Directory, it also provides a discussion forum to chat with other therapists. Have a look and let us know what you think.

Who has time to read pages and pages of reviews on different open source content management Systems? We thought it would be useful to give a 5 word review on some of the main ones based on our experience – here it is.

Drupal – Popular, Powerful, excessively complicated, scalable.

Joomla! – Extensible, somewhat complex, Powerful, Tall-Poppy.

Mambo – Umm, its it like dead?

Wordpress – Simple, lightweight, cool kid, limited.

Silverstripe – Sexy, simple, user-friendly, young.

There are plenty of other Open Source CMSs available of course – we generally use Wordpress for clients who want simple sites who aren’t planning on growing their site too much and Joomla for everyone else.

Welcome to the new Web Circle blog – A Website Designer. Well its the old Blog but its in a new location at awebsitedesigner.com.au. If you have come to look at our Website Design services please check out our main page at www.webcircle.com.au. Otherwise if you are here to learn about Website Design, Website Development, SEO and more then read on and please feel free to comment (unless you are a robot because we don’t like robots…. except for those servant ones).

With the launch of our redesign for The Suncorp Employee Council which includes non-standard web fonts I thought it would be a good idea to post about how you can achieve the same effect on your website. I posted before about the use of Google’s free system to include non-standard fonts on the web, but for The EC redesign we chose to use a paid service called Typekit.

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I recently was asked by a client for some advice on choosing a business name. I thought since I put a bit of time into the response I should post it somewhere and since it was only somewhat related to web design I posted it on Flying Solo where it might be more relevant. Check out the post here.

Just launched a new site for a client – SmokeControl.com.au. The client sells Fire Windows and Fire Shutters to name a few things. The site features a homepage projects fader (which will kick in as they add new projects), integration with our Marketing Emails system, video integration with You Tube, Search Engine Optimisation and a few other goodies. We’ve also installed Google Analytics and set them up with access to our monthly reporting system which automatically sends out a website performance report each month (more info on this coming shortly).

Web Circle Client www.babystitch.com.au was recently mentioned on Joomlahosting.com in their post “10 Brilliant websites using Joomla and Virtuemart“). The post praises the website design and the use of the cart and larger product icons.

I was recently asked by a client to give her some advice on expanding overseas and how to approach the setup of the website. People tend to respond better to sites based locally (i.e. Aussies are more likely to click on a .com.au site than a .com site in Google) so how can you have local sites when expanding overseas without dramatically increasing your maintenance costs and what is the best domain structure?

Here are some considerations (by no means an exhaustive list).

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Another site launched for Gold Coast based Ultra Tek. The site is built on our CMS Premium platform and features some homepage JacaScript faders, a nice clean website design, dynamic news, user login, product listings including some with Flash video.

Have a look and let us know what you think.