The first one is K2 for Joomla. It offers a great layout and custom fields. It would make a perfect t-shirt directory to list your t-shirts in.

The next one is Zoo by the makers of Yoothemes. This one is my favorite by far. They have a paid version that offers many many pre programmed apps such as Products. Not only can you customize it to your liking, it also looks great as is.

K2 appears to be free, I did see someone say they paid for it but I could not find a pay version anywhere on their site. There is a direct link on the home page to download it for free and it is very simple to set up. Zoo is free but doesn’t include the Products app which I highly recommend. It costs a little over a $100 if I’m not mistaken and well worth it.

Go check them out and it might just be what you’re looking for.

But after that I get the famous “you must be a computer sending automated requests”. Now if I’m not mistaken Google is a search engine correct; or am I mistaken after all these years? The object is to type in queries in order to find information; or at least I thought that’s what Google was for.

I did a bit of research thanks to Bing.com allowing me to search the web with their search engine, which I must add is really nice. I don’t know if it’s just how it looks or the fact that it freaking let me search the INTERNET. Either way I am thankful and wanted to acknowledge a working search engine. The research showed that I am one of 10′s of thousands with the same problem. Go figure.

I fully understand the purpose of what Google is doing, I really do, but I am not automated in any way and therefor can not agree with this search engine giants decision to ban me. I could under stand if I was typing in raw machine code or etc, but I’m not. I am merely looking up sites, applications, phone numbers, and restaurants. How can that be offensive to Google?

Anyways It’s time for me to get back to work so I’m cutting this rant short. Reply with your comments if you’ve had the same issues.

Today making a website is a lot easier but at the same time complicated. Few people still code their sites out by hand while the rest are using CMS. What is a CMS you ask? Basically it’s a Content Management System powered by a database that stores your data while displaying it much easier inside a pre-built system, normally coded in PHP. The 2 examples I’m going to mention in this post are Joomla! and WordPress.

Joomla! which I have been with since the pre-mambo days is by far the best CMS I have ever worked with and I’ve worked with them all. It’s free and has a large community base along with very active programmers that keep it updated and running. Joomla! allows you to do more than you will ever need. Here are a few examples of what it can do with some simple add-on components or modules. Note that some components cost money but the fees are usually worth it ranging from $10 to $150 for the more advance systems. There are also more free components than paid ones so you may find what you need for free.

• Real Estate Listings
• Photo Gallery
• Business Directory
• Recipe Directory
• Blogs
• Gaming Portals
• e-Commerce Shopping Carts
• Classifieds
• and etc

I still run Joomla on several sites both for myself and clients. Updates are easy but require some knowledge of FTP and a more hands on approach. Joomla! can be designed to look any way you want it thanks to their Template System. You can convert an existing website into Joomla!, have one designed or purchase a pre-made template from the many Joomla! template sites on the web.

By default Joomla! will allow you to blog, post a contact directory with email form and vcards. It also allows you to make endless amounts of pages and includes a link directory.

The other CMS I’m going to talk about is WordPress. WordPress has been around for a long time and it’s the number one blogging software used by bloggers. Well I don’t blog you say? No problem because it doesn’t have to be used just for blogging. I use it for the following.

• e-Commerce sites
• News Sites
• Portals
• Article Directories
• Photo Galleries
• and of course blogging

WordPress is going to be ideal for those that just need pages of information or/and the occasional news update section. The thing I love most about WordPress is the fact that it’s all done by clicks. If there is an update it tells you and with a couple clicks the entire site is updated. If a plug-in gets updated it tells you and with a single click it’s updated.

As with Joomla!, WordPress can look any way you want it through a custom Template System. While I find it a tag more complicated to make template for WordPress the results are better. It’s very clean coded and search engines LOVE WordPress.

So ask yourself this.

1. What do I need my website to do?
2. What is going to be easier for me to use?
3. How much do I have to invest in my website?
4. Which CMS offers what I need the most?

And get to building that new grand website.

I wanted to take a moment and inform other Statpress users how to fix the searching error

The above error message kept appearing each time I executed the search function of Statpress. After some searching around the only suggestion I found was to rename the plugin directory and reactivate the plugin. I was afraid that might break more than just the search so instead I located and fixed the problem and here is the solution.

Around line 819 of statpress.php located in your plugins/statpress/ directory you will see the following line of code:

Change it to

That’s it!