I believe that Joomla is the best open source content management system out there today. It's powerful but adaptable. You don't need to know PHP to use it and accomplish amazing things with it. If you do know PHP, you can do just about anything with it. It's been downloaded over 15 million times.

But as Bill Tomczak says, there used to be two TV recording formats: Beta and VHS. Everyone knew Beta was "better". But VHS eventually won the day.

"Holy Wars" have always been with us in the tech world. Emacs vs. vi, Mac vs. Windows, WordPerfect vs. MS Word -- you name it, there's a battle. And you could argue that there's another big battle looming out there, a three-way battle: Wordpress vs. Drupal vs. Joomla.

What's your rate? Everyone asks that question. The typical going rate for a web developer in my area -- the professionals, the ones who make their living doing this stuff -- generally ranges from $70 to $125 per hour, depending on skillset. Most seem to lie in the $75 to $100/hr range.

WOW, you say. WOW is that expensive! Perhaps even excessive! Man, you must live the lifestyle of the rich and famous. You must never worry about money. You're too expensive to hire. I know this guy, the son of the nephew of a friend of a cousin, who only charges $30 per hour for the same work. Why do you charge so much???

For a moment, consider what you make at your job, where you are an employee of an organization of some kind. Let's say it pays $50,000 per year. That's a little higher than average in my area of the country, and this would generally be considered a "good job" and worth staying in.

We've been working on a rather largish site recently and over the course of recent weeks, I have been reminded of a lesson learned way back in my dark ages when I was designing desktop database applications.

When developing any application but especially a customized application designed for a specific person or company, it can be easy to confuse problems with solutions. In that database I designed so many years ago, the client had been doing things largely on paper for a very long time. By the time I came along they had graduated to using was really not much more than a spreadsheet on steroids. A very rudimentary database system some board member had created in her idle moments.

They had developed ways of thinking about their processes and data that had evolved over decades based on their paper system. And that was translated into the board member's simplistic application. Conversations initially involved them telling me very specifically what my new program needed to do. But as I would look into simply doing what they told me, I would find a number of questions that needed asking. And as I asked questions, they (and I) started to see that what they wanted was actually a solution to a more interesting problem and not at all the best way to address that problem. With practice and attention, it has become almost second nature for me to recognize the difference.

Those of you who freelance or work for a firm have heard this story before.

The client needs it now! The Joomla site is 90% done and the developer has disappeared and there's just a few more buttons to click and the site will be totally done. The client thinks you can finish this in just a few hours. Plus, of course, you don't have anything else to do, so you can drop everything to get this job done.

Then they find out the price. And they're shocked, shocked!!! at how much it costs to get that little bit of work done. They'll just ask their kid/nephew/the CEO's son/go to eLance and find someone else to do it.

As they say, reputation is everything. And while there's an opportunity to make a great impression with a beautiful website, there are plenty of things you can do that will turn off your visitors.

Sites should be quick to load, easy to use, get your visitor in to the information they require and get them out. It's that simple. Sites like this let visitors know that the organization respects their time. The organization wants to help the visitor get great customer service — even if they've spoken to no one directly.

But long intro movies, badly designed forms, poor layout, and confusing navigation will leave your visitors lost and confused.

Recently, we've been dealing with some web hosting issues with our current company.  They've changed our tech support package on us, and they were bought out by another company -- all without one email communication to us. We found out after the fact.

The story has a happy ending, as we've found another great host, and we're in the process of moving our sites.

This isn't the first time in my web career that I've dealt with icky web hosts.  Some cardinal rules of finding the right web host:

For our fans, we haven't been posting much because... well, we've been awfully busy. We are thrilled with our first 9 months in business. We established a new company, just as the economy was tanking and gas and oil prices were going sky-high. Yet we've had plenty of leads, and plenty of work to keep us very busy.

Watch this blog over the next 3 months. We anticipate launching 4 large, substantial sites by the end of the year, all with various custom-coded components and modules, and of course all with custom templates.  We also have several smaller sites on the way.

Why are we so busy in this frightening economy?

I can't tell you how many calls and emails we receive each week that go something like this:

I'm a client without a lot of technical skills, and I have a Joomla site. Can you help me because:

1. My site is still under construction but my Joomla developer is nowhere to be found, won't return calls or emails, and I don't know what to do.
2. My site was built and launched, but no one ever showed me how to use the site and make my own updates, which is why I wanted Joomla in the first place.
3. My site was built and launched, and I don't know how to do X and I can't get my Joomla developer to help.
4. My site was built and launched, but now I want some more stuff added to the site, and my Joomla developer is gone.

C'mon developers, what's WITH you???