WK Unplugged - Made with JA Bellatrix

[douglas]

Thought it was time to show off our new site.

SITE LOCATION: Trail, British Columbia, Canada (home of world champ hockey legends and numerous NHL stars)

SITE NAME: West Kootenay Unplugged

SITE URL: http://www.westkootenayunplugged.com

SITE TEMPLATE: JA_BELLATRIX (http://template.joomlart.com/ja_bellatrix/content/view/13/9/) from Joomlart.com. Have learned a lot about this very fine template developed by Joomlart.com. Serves our purpose very well.

SITE DEVELOPED BY: Douglas MAC and Randy MAC (brothers) Douglas Mac - heavy equipment operator. Joomla newbie and this is my pet project. Randy Mac has over 25 year experience in the software industry. He's building two other sites, and just helping me at times.

SITE PURPOSE: Regional based web portal serving the West Kootenays Interior region of British Columbia Canada.

SITE FEATURES: News (sports, local, national, news feeds), magazines and articles created by members, member views, comments, Community forums, Recipes, online games, popular casual game downloads, regional web link directory, Trading Post Classified ads, regional Real estate listings, Amazon fed stores offering various Amazon products. Will be adding much more West Kootenay and British Columbia regional information such as photo galleries and more in the next few weeks. I live in a beautiful country and this site is designed to spread the word to the world to visit the West Kootenays of Bc Canada. The 2010 Olympics in Whistler British Columbia Canada is getting closer and our goal is to make our new site the premiere tourism destination site serving the whole of British Columbia.

MAIN SITE JOOMLA EXTENSIONS USED: Frontpage Slideshow 1.0.1 Joomlaworks, MOSETS TREE, JoComment from Azrul.com, various components and extensions from Joomlaworks.gr, JCal Pro from Anything-Digital.com, Xe-Games AD plugin from Xe-Media Software, Missus PMS from Bárbara Irene Meclazcke, Joomlaboard Forum Component from TSMF, Community Builder from JoomlaJoe and Beat, Xe-MusicGal V1 from Xe-Media, Mosets Hot Property from Mosets Consulting (plan to switch to EZ Realty from Kathy Strickland soon), Ricettario 1.03 from joomlaitalia.com, Marketplace Classified Ads by Achim Fischer, and many other great extensions.

LONG TERM GOALS FOR SITE: We currently have 5 domain names pointing to this site location, and one parked domain name, with a goal to branch out from the West Kootenays of BC, to the East Kootenay region of the BC Interior, and then to include the Okanagan region, and spread it out throughout the whole of the BC Interior in the first 8 months of 2007, and then finally the whole province of British Columbia in the last half of 2007 and into 2008. Population of British Columbia is over 3.8 million. So it will be a process to get this site established and producing quality content and a revenue stream, but we are patient to make it happen.

1. http://www.westkootenayunplugged.com
2. http://www.wkunplugged.com
3. http://www.eastkootenayunplugged.com
4. http://www.ekunplugged.com
5. http://www.okanaganunplugged.com
Parked domain not linked yet:
6. http://www.bcunplugged.com (still a parked domain and not linked yet. It will be available later this year)


LENGTH OF TIME TO DEVELOP: I started as a complete newbie to Joomla in March 2006, and WK Unplugged is my pet project. I have learned enough to develop a number of Joomla based sites for clients, and I feel that joining Joomlart.com was a good choice for Joomla templates. Yes, I use some free templates and other template providers, but I am pleased that I spent the time with Ja Bellatrix. I plan to optimize the front page load times, in the next few days and weeks. The NEWS SLIDE SHOW takes a bit longer to load than I would like to see for members and visitors.

SITE TRAFFIC: The site traffic is increasing daily. I plan to start advertising it more now that I have enough content and a base of active members and return visitors.

SITE UNIQUE FEATURES OVER COMPETITOR SITES IN AREA:
I recently got Joomlaworks FrontPage Slideshow working with JA Bellatrix, which took a few days, but I am pleased with the results. More improvements coming this week. My site gets good reviews from members and visitors as it is based on a clean template from Joomlart.com, and well tested Joomla extensions.

SITE EXAMPLE: WILL HELP OTHERS THAT WANT TO DO SOMETHING SIMILAR:
If anyone is interested in learning more about various sections of WK Unplugged, and how I got them working, such as what Joomla components, modules and mambots, and how I am using various extensions for site sections, please send me an email and I will be pleased to help. Contact site admin. See Contacts on site.

In special cases, I'll give you what I can to help you get a similar site up and running. You'll have to have the JA Bellatrix template as a member of Joomlart.com. The online and casual games were time consuming to place on the site, but I created templates and a process to add them, and now they are starting to be a real drawing card for my site members and visitors. What took weeks to put together last year, now takes minutes, or just hours, or a day to put together, rather than weeks of work. Joomla is about sharing knowledge and helping other Joomla users, and it's time to start helping more, now that I feel more comfortable with my Joomla knowledge.

Your feedback appreciated.

Doug and (RandyMac) my brother

[ShannonN]

Hi Mate
did we really need the full cv on you and your brother :)

I thought the site was ok, nothing spectacular, works that's the main thing.
The slideshow needs work, very few ppl can see a mid blue url on light grey background esp colourblind ppl like me, mind you stats say over 80 % of men are colourblind to some extent.

You may wish to keep this in mind, I did note really long load times ( 20 secondsplus) ( FF 2.01) ASDL T1 connection, I didn't test in IE as I try NOT to use it :) BTW I'm in Qld Australia, so if any of the overseas links are down it may explain any extended load times, but I get onto sites in Ontario quick the same time.of day um 3:30 pm Australian time.

Does the slideshow take time to initialise or pre cache?

All in all the site looks clean, but to me, still under construction if you know what I mean ... as if you are still deciding on a final layout and module combo

Thanks for sharing it with us
Shannon

[douglas]

ShannonN,

Sound like an Aussie to me. Will be having a few road pops at the local pub with friends and a few Aussie skiers on Friday. Maybe they'll bring money for beer this time.

Anyways. I appreciate your feedback critique. Load times? Yes they are too long for my liking Optimized things on the frontpage and other sections of the site. Removed all unneccessary Frontpage news articles. Had 30 old articles linking to the front page.It takes less than 2 seconds to pop up now, but it may take longer on the other side of the Pacific Ocean where you are located.

BLUE URL: and ugly gray come stock with the Frontpage Slideshow module, and I have not yet dug into modifying the CSS to change it to a much nicer and lighter contrast.

I don't want to mess with the JA Bellatrix template too much. The Ja Bellatrix template has some quirks to it, and I noticed that when I set some modules to appear on only some of the sections that all the modules in forums and other locations disappeared. Had to spend an hour setting things back to they way they were.

I will be making many improvments to the site, including refinement of the site sections, menu structure on the left side, to be more like a mini Yahoo type portal for the area we live. This is more of a hobby site for me.

The Frontpage Slideshow component and module is very new (v1.0.1) and Fotis, the head developer is fixing bugs etc, and I haven't had time to ask him about the caching stuff, but it does load much quicker now. There is a bug in the time delay, and fotis gave me a fix where I had to enter the changes manually on the server, so I might have added too much of a delay in these temporary settings. He says the new update will fix this.

When I have seen many site showcases, I usually see this: "Check out my site at: URL

Nothing more about the site, who developed it, how long it took etc., what extensions, modules etc they used. Just a site. So I thought the post I made would be read by some or passed by. The link for the site is at the top so people can read it or not.

As far as my brother's CV, I essentially copied some sections of another post that went to a client of my younger brother. And yes I am proud of his accomplishments. I shortened it as he doesn't like me being boastful about him. And he doesn't like me telling people about his friendships with Steve Jobs and other industry luminaries either.

And yes, the site is under construction, like any site that evolves. I'm building my better half a site for her archery business, and that takes time. Too much to do, so little time and I have a full time job as this is more of a pet project for me. More time for wobbly pops would be better.

I have looked at the Ja Xenia template (the newest one) and thought about using it but I didn't like the slideshow jumping all around, so I am sticking with Ja Bellatrix and the frontpage slideshow, even though I know it has some issues that have yet to be resolved by Joomlart.

As a matter of fact it's Friday soon isn't it. Time for a few beer.

Doug

[ShannonN]

Hey Doug
Hope you didn't get too drunk trying to match beer for beer with Aussies, do you still have that weak nearly non alcohol beer called Labatts over there? I had some many years ago in UK as the crowd were shouting us beers cause we're aussies and loved the world over :) and found it took prolly 16 before you knew it had alcohol in it, oh well I think they have Fosters over there by now dont they ?

I'm sorry you mistook my comment re: CV length seriously, I'm sure your brother has worked extremely hard to achieve the success he has. I can understand his reluctance to allow you name drop the rich and famous contacts. Being a beta tester for a few major software companies, The NDA's basically do the same thing for me, can't tell you about the people, designers rich and famous :)

I'd love to check out the site when you modify the blue url etc it just made reading all that much more difficult, I know what you mean when you say leave a working template alone, they tend to break far to easily, move a module or unpublish and things start falling apart :)

Wow you really must''ve optimised the site since i last visited it! if you get it up in 2 seconds, mind you I do have the browser set no to cache so that may account for the long load times hate mb of cached images wasting space just so the site loads quick a second time.

Just checked the site now in Opera, (fastest browser I have) and with 80 plus images to load it took 27 seconds, I was dling the contents at 44kps according to Opera if that's of any help to you?

Cheers Shanny

[douglas]

ShannonN,

Didn't make it out last weekend on Friday until 11:30 at night. Woke up in the morning Friday and felt like a MAD MAX truck hit me. Had the worst sore throat I've ever had and not even a Molson Canadian would sooth it.

Did get out at 11:30 as my better half was out and got into a bit of a hassle rumble with a crazy broad, so I took a taxi downtown and watched her back. She learned how to box when she was in her twenties, and she doesn't like it when I stick up too much for her. She can throw the punchs like Mohammad Ali, despite the beautiful loks of flowing black curly hair. A beautiful Calbrese (Southern Italy) Canadian lady with a bit of a temper when someone gives her the gears in a pub.

Anyways, I am doing a presentation to the local City of Trail B.C. (city council promotions committee at their request. They called and want to have me help local business owners get on the Internet through West Kootenay Unplugged. And they plan to fund it to get me to put them on my site in subsections. Not every small business needs a full website, so I am excited about this presentation.

I will check the number of images that need to be cached on the front page, and this Friday I will be pounding back a few ice cold frosty brown ones to sooth my throat.

Just before I cam here, to check things out, I noticed a huge increase in traffic and my Stats system indicated that the majority of the site visitors came online at 1:10 and stayed until 1:49 early Thursday morning f=after midnight here in west coast Canada.

And the numbers were great. They came 25 to 35 at a time, and pretty steady for almost an hour. And most of them were on MACOSX OS browsers, so it leads me to believe that some Macintosh publication story or online article must have mentioned my website and URL, and that the site had to be located in Europe somewhere, as they are just getting up at 7:00 in the morning over there. I am mentioned on Joomlaworks.gr stuff, but I check there, but maybe some story was written about Joomla and some components, and they posted my URL somehow.

I can't think of any other reason why this would happen all of sudden just after 1:00 in the morning.

Wonder how I could find out the source of the referring site? Any ideas? My stats programs are not updated yet, so I'll have to wait until tomorrow I guess!

Have a good weekend and thanks for the feedback...

Doug

[douglas]

ShannonN,

Your in Australia so you might know about this extension for autos?

EZ Autos
6 votes
Developer: Kathy Strickland (Think she's based on Melbourne Australia area, isn't she?)

One of my clients told me to get the best auto extension available and I was considering this one.

Any feedback about this auto component EZAUTOS?

Doug

[ShannonN]

ShannonN,

Your in Australia so you might know about this extension for autos?

EZ Autos
6 votes
Developer: Kathy Strickland (Think she's based on Melbourne Australia area, isn't she?)

One of my clients told me to get the best auto extension available and I was considering this one.

Any feedback about this auto component EZAUTOS?

Doug

Can't say I have even heard of it doug, Melbourne is 1000 miles rom here so I can't just drop in and say hi sadly, Had a look at the blurb seems ok

If you know Coldfusion and have a cf host I can give you a real estate cms I brought from a dev in canada :) you could modify it to be a car yard instead

But it may be woth emailing the raptor group or whomever they are and talking technical with them, they prolly have a live site hey'll let you access? they have a big user manul online maybe that will help you with any questions the url is http://www.raptorservices.com.au/ezautos_help/application.htm



Cheers Shannon