There are a lot of tools and services out there to help people who have no coding experience create a feature-rich and functional website. Choosing the right platform before investing time and resources in a website is critically important. However, sorting through all this information can be very tiring and intimidating for an absolute beginner. In this post, I will help you choose between two popular open-source CMS projects, Joomla and WordPress. We will take a variety of factors such as ease of use, extensibility, maintenance and cost into consideration before making a final verdict. Joomla and WordPressLet’s begin with a brief introduction of both Joomla and WordPress to lay a foundation for further comparison. You are probably already somewhat familiar with WordPress because it is the most popular CMS for creating a variety of websites. However, there are two variants of WordPress that you can use to create websites. The first one is a hosted version that you can find on WordPress.com and the second one is the open-source version that you can find on WordPress.org. In this post, our comparison of Joomla will be limited to the open-source version of WordPress. WordPress was first released for public use in 2003 and it has continuously received updates with new features and bug-fixes in that period. It needs to be installed on a web server to be fully-functional and usable by the public. However, you can also install a version locally in order to test, develop, and build websites. Joomla has also been around since 2005 and received its first major update in 2008. It has also continued to receive regular updates since then. The project came into existence to help people with basic knowledge of website creation process build a website themselves. Some of the similarities and differences between these two platforms arise form the fact that both of them are open-source and WordPress is much more popular. Installation and Ease of UseBoth Joomla and WordPress have been written in PHP and come with MySQL support for any database management related needs. However, Joomla also allows you to use other database management systems like PostgreSQL. You can use both Joomla and WordPress on Apache and Nginx web servers. All this basically means that the installation process is very similar and doesn’t require much effort from your end. A lot of webhosts will usually provide one click installation for both of them. When installing Joomla, you are asked to first select a language and a website name and then set up your login credentials on the next page. You are prompted to set up your database connection after that. You can read the Joomla installation guide on the official website. When installing WordPress, you are asked to choose a language and then set up your database connection details by entering the database name, username, password etc. You can find all the steps of WordPress installation on the official website. Once the installation is complete, you will be able to create posts in both WordPress and Joomla. I felt like both of them offered a similar experience when it came to publishing content. However, Joomla was a little bit harder to navigate. Tie: I rate both Joomla and WordPress equally for their installation and ease-of-use. Available Design ChoicesEveryone wants their websites to stand out from the crowd. A lot of things are important to make a lasting impression on visitors such as the content, the functionality and the design. The terminology is a different for website design choices in WordPress and Joomla. What WordPress calls themes are referred to as templates in Joomla. At the beginning of 2011, the share of WordPress in CMS market was around 55% and market share of Joomla was around 10%. In 2022, the market share of WordPress has reached around 64% and the market share of Joomla is around 3%. As you can see, WordPress has been popular for over a decade now. This higher popularity means that more developers spend time in developing themes for WordPress instead of Joomla in order to improve their monetization opportunities. Availability of more themes in turn means that people will likely pick WordPress over Joomla. So, one factor basically reinforces the other and we end up with the current situation. WordPress offers a lot of free and paid themes that you can install easily and have a website ready to go. The WordPress theme repository on the official website has over 10,000 free themes for you to use. There are also multiple marketplaces like Themeforest where you can purchase premium WordPress themes with better features and support. Unlike WordPress, there is no central repository for themes, or templates as Joomla calls them on its official website. However, there are third party repositories that host thousands of free Joomla themes. You can also find Joomla templates on marketplaces such as Themeforest among others. Winner: WordPress is a clear winner when it comes to available design choices for your website. Website ExtensibilityIt is highly likely that you will want your website to be more than just barebones webpages. You might want to integrate a forum, a commenting system, an eCommerce store or other features and functionality in your website. Most of this extended functionality isn’t implemented in the core of either WordPress or Joomla. This will make the codebase bloated for anyone who doesn’t want this functionality. A good way of injecting additional functionality into a website is through use of extensions or plugins. Extensions in Joomla are similar to Plugins in WordPress. Both WordPress and Joomla have a central repository of plugins. However, WordPress has a much larger pool of plugins for you to use. This is basically due to its popularity as I mentioned in the previous section. Don’t get me wrong. You will almost certainly find all kind of extensions for Joomla that integrate eCommerce functionality, SEO, media capabilities like slideshows etc. in your website. The advantage that WordPress offers here is that it gives you many more options of plugins so if some plugin is no longer being maintained actively, you can easily switch to another one. Joomla offers around 6,000 extensions while WordPress offers a whopping 60,000. There are ten times more plugin choices available on WordPress. Just like themes and templates, there are third party marketplaces that offer you feature-rich premium Joomla extensions and WordPress plugins to install on your website. Winner: WordPress is the winner here due to so many available options. Maintenance and SupportOne of the primary features of an open-source project is that it allows you to tweak the source code in order to adapt its functionality to suit your needs. However, this can also be a disadvantage at times because you will have to spend a lot more time on things such as website maintenance. Both Joomla and WordPress are open-source so you will have to take care of website maintenance yourself. Any plugins and extensions that you install need to be updated on a regular basis along with the website themes and templates. You will also have to keep the compatibility of different extensions and plugins in mind before using them. Basically, website maintenance is a much more active process with both Joomla and WordPress in comparison to services such as Wix and Squarespace etc. No matter how experienced you are at creating websites, you will likely run into some issues every now and then. When you get stuck, you won’t get premium support with WordPress and Joomla like you do with other commercial services. However, both these platforms have their own active and thriving communities where you can ask questions and there is a high likelihood for someone coming to your help. Tie: WordPress and Joomla more or less equal when it comes to maintenance and support. CostThe cost of building a website with either WordPress or Joomla can vary greatly depending on your exact requirements. Keeping aside the cost of domain registration and hosting service, you don’t have to spend money on anything else with these two platforms. The bill goes up only when you decide to use any premium themes or plugins. You will also need to hire developers in order to implement custom functionality if you don’t have much coding experience yourself. It would be easier to find developers that specialize in WordPress instead of Joomla because of a larger ecosystem. However, the development cost should be pretty much same in either case for basic needs. Tie: WordPress and Joomla are about the same in terms of development and hosting costs. Final ThoughtsLet’s see a final comparison of WordPress and Joomla to see how they fare in different aspects.
Both WordPress and Joomla are more than capable of creating various kinds of websites. You can’t go wrong by using either one of them for creating some blogs or portfolio websites. However, I would recommend that you use WordPress for complicated websites just because it has a larger community of users and developers around it. via Pixel Lyft https://ift.tt/zfoU0x6
0 Comments
Flexibility will be the new normal (at some companies)With team members working across time zones and even continents, the old container of 40 firmly set hours, keyed to a specific time zone, with inflexible expectations about availability is just out of touch with the times. Many workers value—and actively seek—flexibility over rigidity in their employers. Even as some companies demand a return to the office, many others will embrace asynchronous work and find new ways for employees to work on different days and in different ways to achieve great things together. This is harder to systematize, of course. But that’s where adaptive, human-centric leadership comes in, and in 2023, we’ll see more of it. Expect to set expectationsThe key to avoiding disappointments is aligning on expectations, clearing the way for everything from work/life balance to success measures and timing for that next promotion. Beleaguered managers, and their teams, will all be better served by updated job descriptions, SMART goals, and regular check-ins. Look for an increase in trainings, tools and requests from HR and your new hires to commit to job clarity, performance metrics, and defined career maps. To the extent it’s all served up by one of the emerging online performance management tools, all the better for transparency and accountability. The events of the past three years have torn asunder the workaday world that gave form and structure to our lives. Today, we’re in a rebuilding phase, one where workers demand better from their employers. Companies will do well to listen. At the end of the day, employee engagement is about meeting employees where they are. Companies that show they care about workers will have the edge. Luckily, many companies are doing just that, finding new ways to value employee well-being. They’re demonstrating that trying new ways of working, even when imperfect, can yield success. For workers, that’s good news. For the year ahead, I hope for the best. via Digital Marketing Education https://ift.tt/OIfsTXy Lawyers for the consumers had steadily gained leverage to pry into the company’s internal records to back up their claims that Facebook failed to safeguard their personal data. Facebook’s parent company could have been on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars more had it gone to trial and lost the case. “We pursued a settlement as it’s in the best interest of our community and shareholders,” Meta said in an emailed statement. “Over the last three years we revamped our approach to privacy and implemented a comprehensive privacy program. We look forward to continuing to build services people love and trust with privacy at the forefront.” Since the case was filed, Facebook has stopped allowing third parties to access data about users through their friends, plaintiffs said in a court filing detailing the settlement. The company has also strengthened its ability to restrict and monitor how third parties acquire and use Facebook users’ information, and improved its methods for telling users what information Facebook collects and shares about them, according to the filing. Last month, Google agreed to pay a total of $391.5 million to 40 U.S. states to resolve a probe into controversial location-tracking practices in what state officials called the largest such privacy settlement in US history. Separately, a judge last month approved a $90 million Meta deal to settle a suit over the use of browser cookies and Facebook’s “Like” button to track user activity. Meta said in an August court filing that it had agreed to settle the Cambridge Analytica suit, but no terms were revealed at the time. A filing a month earlier showed Meta Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg would have to sit for as long as six hours of questioning by plaintiffs’ lawyers. The same filing indicated former Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg would have to testify as well. Facebook had argued it disclosed its practices in user agreements. It had also said that anyone sharing their information on a social network shouldn’t count on holding onto their privacy. The case is In Re Facebook Consumer Privacy User Profile Litigation, 18-MD-02843, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California (San Francisco). —Bloomberg News via Digital Marketing Education https://ift.tt/zYUmhvp To create the piece of work, the agency prompted a platform called OpenAI’s GPT-3 into thinking it was a creative director that specializes in Christmas ads and got it to generate various scripts. One of the final scripts was fed into text-to-image generators such as Midjourney and DALL-E 2 to create storyboards. Midjourney produced results with the best visuals and DALL-E 2 was used to edit and refine images, according to Rehab. Then the agency used AI voice narration tool Replica Studios to create a more “human” tone for the ad’s narration. A platform called Soundraw created the music. Kerry Wilson, managing director at Rehab, says there isn’t a single “AI silver bullet” for making ads currently, but the tools did accelerate the typical process of making an ad. “In making the ad there was still a fair amount of human input required, mainly in refining the visuals which were generated from the script. But this process was still much quicker than if a human illustrator was briefed to bring the storyline to life by hand,” Wilson said in a statement. “With Google and Meta both reportedly working on text-to-video AI software, it’s possible that there could be even fewer rungs to the process in the future.” WPP invests in Atlanta campusWPP is bringing its Atlanta-based agencies together on one large campus in the historic Old Fourth Ward neighborhood. The mixed-use development will house 10 agencies including AKQA, BCW, EssenceMediacom, GCI Health, GroupM, GTB, Mindshare, Verticurl, VMLY&R and Wunderman Thompson. The office, leased from real estate development firm New City, puts WPP agencies next to many of its clients—particularly Coca-Cola—and Atlanta’s growing technology scene. The campus features a 39,000-square-foot conference center, dozens of shops and restaurants and access to the BeltLine. It “fosters the type of creative environment that will inspire our people, clients and partners alike,” Michael Houston, president of WPP in the U.S., said in a statement. Santa’s ‘Knotty list’Women-owned agency Fancy has created a sassy holiday campaign that encourages people to get on Santa’s “knotty” list. Made for client Lion’s Den, an online adult retailer with a mission to offer sex-positive experiences, the “Gettin Knotty” spot asks the viewer “This holiday, why be nice, when you can be knotty?” and features a man and woman blindfolded or tied up using the Japanese art of rope bondage called Shibari. via Digital Marketing Education https://ift.tt/sUVCAd6 This week’s marketing winners, losers and newsmakers. WinnersAdidas: The biggest World Cup winner after Argentina might just be Adidas. The brand sponsors the country’s team, while rival Nike backs runner-up France. Adidas’ Lionel Messi jerseys sold out in the wake of Sunday’s final. Adidas also drew nearly 50,000 positive social media mentions during the final, way more than other brands that ran marketing around the Cup such as Coca-Cola, Visa and Hyundai, which all got less than 5,000 mentions, according to social media listening service Talkwalker. Messi also set the record for the most-liked Instagram post. The post, which shows him hoisting the World Cup trophy, has drawn more than 70 million likes, surpassing the 2019 “world record egg” post. The Messi shot was taken by Getty photographer Shaun Botterill, who told CNN that she was caught in a rush of photographers trying to capture Messi at that moment. “I almost got trapped, but just got trapped in the right place,” she said “I think if most of us [photographers] are honest, you always need a bit of luck and I had a bit on Sunday night.” via Digital Marketing Education https://ift.tt/jgRJtQN Every year is different and, after Covid, nothing should surprise us. But 2022 certainly did and, mostly, not in a good way. But there were bright spots for many of us and MAA, embarking on its second decade, had a good year in terms of readers and overall performance. I’d like to thank all our readers, especially our Partner Content supporters, and the wonderful team here including co-editor Emma Hall and design and tech wizard Eddie Kremanis of Kree Media.
It’s especially satisfying to remain a free website in this age of paywalls and those many individuals and companies that support us with donations are playing a key role in this mission. Times are tight but please donate if you can. Have a wonderful holiday and maybe a better (less interesting as the Chinese might put it) 2023. via Digital Marketing Education https://ift.tt/ITLGOrp CES is having its comeback residency in Las Vegas at a pivotal moment in tech and advertising, as the industry steadies itself for an uncertain economic climate going into 2023. TikTok, Walmart and Netflix—brands that haven’t typically had a presence at the early January electronics showcase—will show up in a big way. Excitement, and the challenges, around Web3 and the metaverse will certainly be major talking points as will heady subjects such as the fall of FTX, the disgraced crypto exchange, which could affect marketers and ad agencies in the new year. And, of course, there will be electronics. CES marks the start of business for the year and attracts ad agencies, brands and tech companies. Brands and advertisers, which use CES as the jumping-off point for getting deals done in the new year, plan to meet with tech platforms such as TikTok, and other giants, including Meta, Google, Amazon, Snap, Pinterest and Reddit during the Jan. 5 to Jan. 8, 2023 event. (Twitter, which continues to work through its internal chaos since Elon Musk took over, does not appear to have an official presence, even as it has been a big player in previous years.) There is some optimism heading into CES, which has faced multiple years of disruption due to the pandemic. “We’ve got a lot of big brands,” said Michael Kassan, founder and CEO of MediaLink, which programs the advertising confab at C Space, “like Unilever, AB InBev, pharma [companies]. A lot of big brands that are all coming in, and I think the turnout is going to be really strong.” TikTok’s going to the chapelTikTok, which has been fending off critics in the U.S., where there have been growing concerns about its close connections to China-based ByteDance, will have a large presence at CES. Most major tech and ad platforms have suites where they demo their services to media buyers at CES. TikTok is taking over the Wedding Chapel at Aria, where it will be meeting with ad partners and brands. For TikTok, the stakes are getting higher—U.S. government officials and regulators have raised alarm bells about TikTok’s Chinese origins. Brands have not been able to ignore that some U.S. states are even banning the app from official government devices during a new wave of fear that the app could leave data vulnerable. “I don’t think TikTok will make it a core theme of CES, but I think they will address it, one on one with clients, who are suspect or anxious about the role of China and Chinese stakeholders in the platform,” said one top media buyer who spoke with Ad Age on the condition of anonymity. TikTok, of course, wants to focus more on its technology and how it fits into CES. The electronics show is known for endless exhibits of the latest technology in TVs and digital screens and TikTok is looking to break into living rooms. In November, Dan Page, TikTok’s head of global distribution and partnerships, joined an official CES podcast to talk about the app’s big-screen strategy. TikTok already has a connected TV app, and it has even bigger plans for TVs and out-of-home displays, Page said. “There are 2 billion additional screens across the world, outside of mobile,” Page said in the podcast, “our aim is to bring that entertainment experience to those screens.” Netflix and dealJeremi Gorman, president of worldwide advertising at Netflix, is speaking at C Space, and it marks the first time that the streaming giant has a real contingent at CES as an ad seller. Netflix has started popping up at major ad industry events, including at Cannes in 2022. Netflix launched its first ad-supported streaming subscription service in the fourth quarter of 2022. “They will be there and have a real presence,” Kassan said. Read more: The year in ad-supported streaming All major ad platforms will be at CES, said George Manas, CEO of Omincom Group’s OMD Worldwide, pointing to Google, Amazon, Snap and Pinterest, among others. Omnicom plans to meet with hundreds of clients from major brands, Manas said. “It looks like we’re now exceeding pre-pandemic levels from clients,” Manas said, adding that the agency will continue to meet with executives and have discussions with its key partners at the trade show. The C Space also will feature discussions from major brands such as Delta. John Deere, Stellantis and BMW will give keynote addresses, alongside traditional electronics giants such as LG. Group Black CEO Travis Montaque and Instacart Chief Marketing Officer Laura Jones are set to speak at C Space, too. via Digital Marketing Education https://ift.tt/pex2KNl Under the pilot program, brands still can’t advertise products that can be ingested or inhaled. The revised policy will allow sellers to market topical products including creams and other beauty products; prescription medications that contain CBD and are FDA-approved; and other products that can’t be ingested, such as candles and bath bombs. CBD advertisers will now be able to advertise using keywords in the regions covered by the pilot. Additionally, topical hemp-derived CBD with a THC content of 0.3% or less and FDA-approved CBD pharmaceuticals will be removed from Google’s list of “unapproved pharmaceuticals and substances,” said the spokesperson. ‘Huge’ change for CBD brands“I’m glad this is happening, I just wish it was more aggressive,” said Dickens, of Google’s policy change. “I’m disappointed to hear it’s only a pilot program,” he said. “My question is, what are they waiting for?” He said that while he plans to take advantage of the policy change, the program will be most helpful in terms of regional advertising given its limited scope. “These locations were chosen based on a variety of factors including size, region, and maturity of the market,” said the Google spokesperson over email. Google “will look at feedback before deciding to open our platforms to these products in other locations.” The change “is huge,” said Coral Hines, CEO of Buena Botanicals, a Georgia-based natural CBD lifestyle brand with three employees that was founded in 2019. “Google is the main search engine that people use to see what’s around them.” Hines hopes to see the program expanded not just in scope but in terms of products allowed, as the program is “still very restrictive” in what it allows to be advertised, she said. Restrictions elsewhereGoogle will partner with monitoring and compliance company LegitScript to vet advertisers, which entails looking into whether a company’s products comply with federal THC limits. Advertisers will need to be re-approved annually. The ads will be age-restricted and unavailable to people under 18. New CBD advertisers will need to follow all of Google’s existing ad policies, which include regulations against misleading medical ads and local requirements for pharmacies, which make up a small fraction of CBD advertisers, according to a Google spokesperson. Google competitor Facebook, owned by Meta, still prohibits CBD and cannabis products from being advertised, a representative confirmed. Twitter changed its advertising policy in 2019 to now allow for the marketing of non-ingestible CBD products in the U.S. with the exception of states including Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Virginia. Advertisers need to be approved by Twitter in advance and cannot target people under 21 years old. Twitter representatives couldn’t be reached for comment. TikTok’s North American ad policy doesn’t mention CBD. Representatives couldn’t be reached for comment. via Digital Marketing Education https://ift.tt/KqLIAab The endeavor reunites Dagger VP Group Creative Director Lance Krall with Tara Ochs, who launched Picture It Productions in 2016. During the company’s four-year run, the pair worked with producers such as Jerry Bruckheimer, Laurence Fishburne and Drew Barrymore as well as CBS Studios. Ochs joins as Dagger Originals head of development. Krall, a Hollywood alumnus who wrote for hit TV shows including “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” and “Last Man Standing,” joined Dagger in 2021 and will add the title of head of TV at Dagger Originals. Dagger Originals will focus on developing new programming in the network, cable and streaming spaces and will be separate from the agency’s traditional advertising output. An advertising agency creating original TV content makes sense to Krall, who says that one of the biggest challenges is packaging the idea with the right writer or producer to be attractive to networks and streaming services. “In order to get people interested, you have to sell the idea to them in a way that is easily digestible,” he said. “An advertising agency with the ability to do amazing pitch decks and have strategic insights can help market that idea to attract talent and ultimately sell that idea to the marketplace.” via Digital Marketing Education https://ift.tt/hjVuTH2 As a creative agency, Elephant prides itself on the strength of its work and the people behind it. But like many agencies, Elephant faced a number of major challenges during the pandemic years—both client-facing challenges like large-scale campaigns suddenly having to be put together remotely and internal woes like Zoom fatigue setting in. In April 2022, during a thoughtfully planned out unifying of the company, Cara DiNorcia took the helm at Elephant as its new president. After five years at the agency in various managerial roles, DiNorcia had an enormous new task at hand: To revamp the organization to be fully remote and borderless while optimizing the employee experience and the options available to clients. Her solution? An enterprise internally referred to as “One Elephant.” Ad Age Studio 30 spoke with DiNorcia about how the transition to a One Elephant mindset reframed the company’s narrative, how approaching hiring with a borderless model helped achieve DE&I goals, and why Elephant feels nimbler than ever. Ad Age Studio 30: You have said the idea behind your One Elephant restructuring was to unite the company’s East and West Coast offices so that they could collaborate more as a single entity rather than as separate outposts. What prompted that transition? Cara DiNorcia: One Elephant came out of taking a long, hard look at how our work, both internally and externally, was impacted by the pandemic. While we weren’t gathering in offices, we were still producing some of our strongest work for our clients. There was no longer a need to tie employees to a particular physical location. Combining operations across all our offices to work together as one cohesive company made more and more sense. And becoming completely virtual gave us the ability to hire across the globe and continue to diversify our talent. We now have more flexibility to design the right team for our clients and our work. Was the staff enthused by the prospect? When you drive an organizational change like this, you have to truly believe in it and get your leadership to believe in it as well. I’m so proud of how everyone has been rallying around One Elephant and getting excited about the work and the team we have in place. In some ways, there was almost that feeling of starting a new job, where you’re learning a new team and a new collaboration style. And once we were able to address logistical kinks like time-change differences and transitioning folks onto new clients and teams with people they hadn’t worked with before—it all started to come together. via Digital Marketing Education https://ift.tt/GBTXWNn |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
April 2023
Categories |