Tweet

Brian Teeman, one of the Joomla founders, wrote an interesting post on the three types of extensions for a website. He's set aside the technical differences between modules, plugins, and components, and instead focused on how they add functionality to your website.

He defines these as eye candy (banners, blinking spinning stuff), additional functionality (forms, galleries,  calendars), and applications (event registration, shopping carts, etc).

You can take these same divisions and also think about how to apply them effectively to your website to support business goals.

Ultimately, your website should have a few well-defined site goals. You defined these goals upfront, before you ever started building your website. Anything you include in your website -- navigation, content, and all of those Joomla extensions -- need to support those site goals.

For example: let's say your site's goal is to sell back issues of magazines and subscriptions to the magazine. (This is one of the site goals for Brew Your Own.)

Eye candy: You can run banner ads promoting the back issues of the magazines on the website using the standard built-in Joomla banner extension. Ideally this catches the attention of the visitor and drives traffic to the store.

Additional functionality:  The November 2007 issue of BYO contained an article about a beer-brewing apparatus called the Brutus 10. Some readers built their own Brutus 10 based on the instructions in the article and have sent photos to BYO. The photo gallery fosters a sense of community among readers and shows positive outcomes of magazine articles. This drives sales of the November 2007 back issue specifically, and it also drives subscriptions to the magazine in general.

At the bottom of most pages, there is a form for subscribing to the magazine. If you fill this out, you are sent off-site to the fulfillment house which handles the subscriber list and mailing the magazine.

Applications: The shopping cart is an application where back issues can be purchased online. There are links to purchasing back issues throughout the site, besides the banner ads. For each magazine issue (under the Story Index - View By Issue), there is a link to the store where that back issue of the magazine can be purchased, if it is still available.

Note how all three types of extensions have been applied to drive sales of back issues, and how sales of back issues supports selling magazine subscriptions in general. Your site may not require all three types of extensions, but you should think through how those extensions will compliment each other to drive home marketing messages, send a call to action, and support the business goals of the website.

Before adding an extension to your site, think hard about the following:

• Which of my business goals does this extension support?
• Does it provide a call to action, or is it the action we call the client to take? (Eye candy asks you to buy a back issue, while a shopping cart lets you to buy that back issue.)
• Are there maintenance issues associated with this extension? (Think monitoring comments, updating calendars, etc.) Does your client have the time to perform those maintenance issues, or will you have to do it?
• Are there business processes that need to be in place in the physical world to support this website? (Think how magazine subscriptions are handled, or how fulfilling a back-issue order is handled, how inventory is handled, etc.)
• Does my client have the technical skills and the time to keep up with the requirements of this extension? Or will I need to help the client with it in some way, outside of the standard training and upgrades?
• If the site didn't have this extension, would the message of the site be diminished in some way?