Thanks to the Coastal Quilters Guild of Santa Barbara/Goleta for inviting me to participate as a panel speaker October 9, 2010 when they hosted the Southern California Council of Quilt Guilds’ meeting. The program was entitled “Marketing your Guild as a Business” and focused on using the internet to increase guild attendance, participation and membership.

• The other panelists were Wendy Breakstone Ladd, a marketing specialist who owns a new quilt shop in Santa Barbara/Goleta. A summary of her talk is available on her blog “Quilt Guild 2.0 – Reviving Your Guild Using Web-Based Techniques”.
• Sherilyn Guernsey, webmaster of South Bay Quilters Guild, discussed her successful use of Social Networking services such as Facebook and Twitter to increase participation in guild activities. Her presentation can be downloaded as a PowerPoint or PDF at the bottom of this page: http://www.southbayquiltersguild.org/links.html.
• Bonnie Barber, Coastal Quilters webmaster, talked about how content can draw people to a website. She emphasized the use of photos and video to make a website more interesting. View Bonnie’s presentation with demo links “Winning Guild Website Content”.

I spoke on the benefit of using content management systems such as Joomla! to create modern, functional, and easy-to-manage websites. Read on for the full story...

There are many great things about Joomla! It's free, open-source software. Any developer can access the code, improve it and extend its functions. There are hundreds of developers around the world working to make Joomla! better. As a result there are more than 6000 extensions available, most are free - some are commercial but the charge is small ($15 - $60) compared the work necessary to duplicate what they give you! Just about anything you've seen on the internet can be done with Joomla! And using an extension means you don't have to hire a team of developers to write the code. That's already done for you. All that's needed is to install and configure Joomla! and your selected extensions, set up the organization of your website, and create the content (text, graphics, photos, even video).

And the best thing is you don't have to know code to create and update content! There's a private, password-protected Administrator section of the website where you login and work with the content in a text editor similar to Microsoft Word. You don't even have to look at the code. You can have a number of administrators, each responsible for a particular section of the website. This allows for immediate content updates rather than waiting for the monthly newsletter to get important news out to your members.

OK, so what can be done with Joomla!? Glad you asked. That's what most of my talk was about, viewing websites and demonstrating a number of extensions most likely to be of interest to quilt guilds. There were so many I ran out of time and didn't get to show them all. So I created this page so I could show the entire list - with explanations of what it does and why you might want it on your website.

So let's get started!

Create your own social network! Think Facebook on your website. Members can be restricted to paid guild members only, or open to everyone. Members complete their profile, connect with other members, send private messages (emails within the site members). See this example of a member profile on the Cotton Patch Quilters of Kern County website:
http://www.bakersfieldquiltguild.org/member-profile/userprofile/CeCe.html
Plus a “Wall” displaying short items you'd like to share, where others can respond. You can even add YouTube videos on your wall:
http://www.quiltmax.com/my-profile/userprofile/quiltkitten.html

Blog
Each member has their own blog, which is basically an online diary to write about your thoughts and ideas, share their knowledge and interests. Others can comment and add to the conversation. Post video in a blog also like this:
http://www.bakersfieldquiltguild.org/sharing/quilt-videos.html

Comments
http://www.bakersfieldquiltguild.org/sharing/tips.html

Photo Gallery
Community members can upload their photos into the gallery. Your photos also show up in a tab on your profile. Others can vote and comment on photos.
http://www.bakersfieldquiltguild.org/sharing/photo-gallery.html
http://www.quiltmax.com/photo-gallery.html

Slideshow / Gallery
Sometimes you want to show a group of photos as part of a story, separate from the public gallery. You can still display them with captions and a nice pop-up “Lightbox” effect to show large images when you click on the small “thumbnail” images. The links below are examples of a very flexible and easy-to-use gallery plugin. Upload photos to a folder on your website’s hosting server and they automatically show up in the gallery. This is one of the few commercial extensions but it’s only $15!
http://www.bakersfieldquiltguild.org/sharing/quilt-show-gallery.html
http://www.tehachapiwinegrowers.com/photo-gallery.html

Links with Rate/Review
Sure, every website needs a page of links to great online resources. But who decides what links to put on that page? A single webmaster? Why not make it possible for your members to suggest links, plus rate and vote on them? If everyone participates, you'll soon have a pretty good list of links that everyone agrees are great! Those that have poor ratings can be removed.
http://www.bakersfieldquiltguild.org/sharing/web-links/weblinks/54-quilt-patterns.html

Library
Every guild has a big library of books, but do your members know what books are available? Do they have to pick through a stack of books at each meeting. Some guilds do provide a list of library books on their website, but it's not much more than the book’s title. Try this on for size – Book cover images and descriptions are pulled from Amazon. Members of the website can write reviews of the book. There’s a link from the book page directly to the Amazon page where members can buy the book - and if they do, the guild gets a commission for the sale!
http://www.bakersfieldquiltguild.org/sharing/lending-library.html?catid=1 view the Paper Piecing category for a good example.

Calendar
Full page monthly calendar of events. Click on the event name to open details page. Notice in the right sidebar the Upcoming Events module. There is also a mini-calendar module that can be displayed on other pages of the website. Days with events are highlighted with a link to that day (see second link below).
http://www.tvrpd.org/ 

Quilt Show Entries online!
By using a custom forms component such as RSForms! Pro, Quilt Show entries can be handled completely online. Avoid the problems of illegible hand-printed entry forms! Cotton Patch Quilters of Kern County in Bakersfield used this system for their last quilt show in 2010. They had 2 forms: 1 for display only quilts; another for judged quilts. There was a small fee for each judged quilt entry, which we were able to collect online through PayPal. Payments were then transferred directly into the guild's checking account. Submitted entries can be emailed to any number of people, plus they are stored in a database on your website server. This database can be accessed with a login account - same place you go to manage your website. Entries in the database can be exported for use on your computer. Everything is vastly simplified over manually processing every entry. And the good news is, once your custom forms are created, they can remain on your website server (but not displayed on your website) until your next quilt show. Then all you do is update them and you're ready to go again! RSForms! Pro has a lifetime license for only 19€ (currently about $26.50 USD), so you only buy the software once, and you get free updates forever!

Directory
This can be used to display services of your members, such as long-arm quilters, and local businesses that support your guild. This component can be set up to charge a fee per listing or certain options, plus allow those listed in the directory to login and manage their own listings. the link below goes to a category view. Click the listing title or Read More... to go to the details page. Try Kohnen's Country Bakery. Notice each listing has tabs for ratings/reviews, photos, downloads and an interactive Google map. Click the red flag on the map to get driving directions.
http://www.tehachapiwinegrowers.com/wine-tasting-attractions/restaurants.html 

Downloads - Mailing List Sign Up Form
Do you have files for visitors to download on your website? Things like BOM, newsletter, materials list for a workshop. Use a dedicated downloads extension that keeps track of when the file was posted, updated, it's version if changed, and how often it was downloaded. This example on award-winning quilter Nancy Rink’s website also demonstrates a mailing list sign up form.
http://www.nancyrinkdesigns.com/free/bom-french-market-medallion/bom-instructions.html 

Maps
So how do people get to your meetings, workshops, and quilt shows? You want to show them a map of the destination. But why not make it an interactive Google map where they can get driving directions from wherever they are coming from? Google maps can be displayed at any size to fit anywhere in your website content.
http://www.tehachapifoodandwine.com/map-and-directions.html

Weather
There are 3 good weather modules available for Joomla! - all free. This is my favorite because of the attractive graphics:
http://www.tehachapiwinegrowers.com/ and scroll down to the bottom right.

Facebook and Twitter feeds - Share buttons
Just because you have a social network on your own website, it’s still a good idea to have a presence on Facebook and Twitter. You can display details from these accounts on your website to inform visitors about them and give them the option to connect with your there as well. Share buttons are also useful so visitors and members who find useful content on your site can easily share them with their friends. On the website below, notice the Share buttons on the right side of the main article. On the left edge click the Tweets button to view the latest Twitter activity. Below the main article is the Facebook feed. In the right column is a graphic that displays "1753 followers" on Twitter with a link to Follow Me. And at the bottom is a bar with all sorts of ways to share content on this website. All these functions are free and once installed operate automatically without any further attention!
http://www.morganbotanicals.com/j15/
See also the Share button on this article. This is a Joomla! website, too!

Forum
A forum or message board provides a format for online discussions. Topics are organized by category. Someone begins a discussion by asking a question or offering information. Others will comment on the first post, perhaps answering the question, and on and on it goes. Each post is related to the same topic so all discussion is related. Other topics begin in another discussion “thread”. Well, it’s sort of difficult to explain, so just look at this example. This is the website of the Joomla! forum extension called Kunena. This is an attractive and full-featured forum, and of course it's free!
http://www.kunena.com/forum

Other website features you can create with Joomla! extensions include:

Groups as part of your online community. Members can create their own sub-groups. Use them for Friendship Groups, philanthropy programs, round-robins, whatever!

Chat - live chat with other members logged into your website. Similar to what you can do on Facebook, or like instant messaging. There's a fee for most of these chat extensions, but they are reasonable, and a great way to add more interactivity to your website.

Classified Ads

I could go on and on, but we're both getting tired at this point! One last thing that’s very important. You’re probably asking, “So how do we learn how to manage the content on our Joomla! website once it’s set up? Very easy. I’m creating a series of training videos demonstrating exactly how to update and add new content to your website. The video shows my computer screen as I go through the steps. I explain what I’m doing and why. My training videos are posted on my YouTube channel and this website for anyone to access and review at any time. And I’m continuing to add new videos covering new aspects on website maintenance. Eventually I plan to have videos detailing all aspects of managing a Joomla! website readily available.

Joomla Training Videos
http://www.youtube.com/user/SparksArtsDesign

OK, bottom line. The Joomla! system works great. It's attactive, modern, functional and easy to use. But... it still has to be set up before you can begin to manage it. That involves installation and configuration of Joomla! software and all the extensions. The site is then organized into sections and the navigation menu links created. Like any software, Joomla! and extensions are occasionally updated with bug fixes, security patches, and new features. It’s important to keep your website software up-to-date. This is the technical part and what you will need an experienced website developer for - initial set up and occasional updates and maintenance.

Thanks for sticking with me through all this! It’s a lot to cover, so you can see why I didn’t get through everything during my presentation in Santa Barbara!

If you’d like to know more, please contact me by email or cell phone. I’d love to hear from you!

Richard