Writing, tutorials and whatever goes with that

Monday, September 1. 2008

Over the last year or so my other half and I have slowly, and a little nervously, been dragged away from doing web design using Serendipity, and over to the dark side of Wordpress design. Unfortunately we had no option since we were being paid by the client and they wanted Wordpress.

Don't get me wrong, Wordpress is a great blog engine however my first love was always Serendipity because it is designed to do the job of blogging very well whereas Wordpress always seemed more like a CMS with blogging as it's main drawcard.

Well now we're being tugged in another direction altogether, yup, another engine which is even more CMS and less blog. Can you guess? It's Joomla, a CMS I haven't had a lot to do with in the past but now have to work with on an almost daily basis.
We've made the decision to stop producing free templates because they take up so much time, and I really don't want to sell premium templates, the amount of support that people need just isn't worth the effort versus the income.

In fact that is a major downside to professional webdesign as well, clients are very rarely willing to pay and often expect loads of free support long after the project is completed.

I prefer concentrating my efforts on writing, I have a number of clients for whom I do copywriting and advertorials but the income isn't fantastic yet. I'd be interested in knowing if any of the readers of my blog write for a living.

So, getting back to Joomla. One of the things I did back in my Serendipity days was write a bunch of tutorials on how to customise themes or do basic things with plugins that a lot of people found useful. Would anyone find Joomla or Wordpress tutorials interesting?
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in Writing Resources   Comments (10)

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  1. YellowLed said,

    Monday, September 1. 2008 at 05:11 (Reply)

    »A Jedi's strength flows from the force. But beware the dark side. Anger, fear, aggression. The dark side of the force are they. Easily they flow, quick to join you in a fight. If once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny.«

    Personally, I don't care for WP or Joomla tutorials at all. In terms of traffic, WP tutorials are probably more promising. But Joomla definitely needs more documentation than WP. Pick your poison ;-)

    There's one phrase in this post ... »free support« what's that again? If someone's not willing to pay for something, he's left to take what's available for free. Period. If a project is completed (and paid for), it's done. If you expect anything further, you'll have to pay for it. Period.

    I know it's kind of hard to differentiate between free support for a community which one has benefitted from himself and paid projects, but you have to do that. Otherwise you'll end up doing a lot of stuff for free and will not be making any money ...

  2. Carl said,

    Monday, September 1. 2008 at 05:23 (Reply)

    Gee, are you still subscribing to my feed? Great to hear from you.

    My days of working with Serendipity are well past, I doubt I'll be back, the project just seems too blog focused and more and more these days I need CMS functions. Tutorials for Joomla are much needed, and as you say the traffic is going to be low, ah decisions, decisions...

  3. YellowLed said,

    Wednesday, September 3. 2008 at 11:34 (Reply)

    Why, yes, I am. And why shouldn't I? Just because you're following the dark path? ;-)

    BTW, Garvin is right: You should definitely check out the new possibilities in s9y/staticpages before you completely forget about us. Then again, if you really want to make money with stuff like this, you're going to have to use the Blogengine/CMS customers want, which is not necessarily the best one on the market ...

  4. Carl said,

    Wednesday, September 3. 2008 at 11:43 (Reply)

    OK, I guess it's awesome to still have you following my meaningless drivel, I try to add a nugget of value to the world but the dark side is a strong motivator, it gives me money and I don't have to have a 'real job' so as long as you can ignore the obvious dark side posts...

    I will be taking a look at the new static pages plugin, and maybe, just a little bit maybe, I might resurrect the s9y users site, except if I spend any amount of time on it I'll have to invoke the dark force to pay for my time, but hopefully this won't take away the value that others might get from the tutorials I write.

  5. YellowLed said,

    Wednesday, September 3. 2008 at 13:16 (Reply)

    Carl, I meant by no means to insult you or your choices. I also didn't take any of the »dark side« stuff seriously, and I think I indicated that pretty well. Sorry if you took it more serious then I intended it to be.

    I know it is hard to make money off of this, and I also know it often involves doing what customers want for their own, often enigmatic reasons, not doing what might be best from the web developer's point of view. That's just how it is, and if it means to use WP or Joomla instead of s9y, so be it.

  6. garvin said,

    Monday, September 1. 2008 at 12:19 (Reply)

    You should see the staticpage's most recemt addition which allows for free custom fields and free backend templatimg. A great step for cms features, like maintaining multiple language variamts within the same page and optimized page types that allow to focus authors on easily entering content through indwpendent template variants... :-)

  7. Markie said,

    Monday, September 1. 2008 at 12:54 (Reply)

    Both would be very useful but i think WP is more spread then Joomla. And most important Joomla has big learning curve versus WP.
    There is always need for some CMS/Blog customization so we have to peace with that.

  8. nicole said,

    Monday, September 1. 2008 at 14:29 (Reply)

    Carl, Joomla is a CMS, and more so than most others used for blogging. Actually, it's geared primarily to ecommerce.

    If you are looking for traffic, I would go with Wordpress tutorials.......much more of a market at this point.
    Also, it is virtually impossible to find more than a few sites with Typepad tutorials. If you familiarized yourself with that, you could also do tutorials for that platform.

    I am thinking about designing some premium templates for Typepad and selling them........if I can manage the time.

  9. An American in France said,

    Monday, September 1. 2008 at 20:47 (Reply)

    I use blogger for most of my blogs except for the one I've been able to "lift" out of blogger which now uses Drupal. I am very happy with Drupal since it offers a lot more freedom than blogger.

    A lot of the themes on Drupal's main site are on the plain site. It would be nice to see more templates for it.

  10. Dito said,

    Monday, September 1. 2008 at 22:22 (Reply)

    Hmm...Well, All I need is Idea to Write, No need to worry about making website or a html/scripting programming :-) Just Idea and Brain :-)

    WP its oke,Drupal Oke too..

    Cheers..

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