I will keep you updated…:)

Finally the outcry may stop because as of  October 24th, 2011  we are starting to publish all our pages in both official languages of Canada. That also calls for translation of the existing pages one by one. This will not only allow us to offer our services better and reach a much wider range of clients who may need our services, it will also contribute to showing how imoprtant the CMS WordPress has become. In partnership with our child companies WPBPDEV ( launching soon ) we will be offering fully functional bilingual themes and plugins, configurable for wordpress/buddypress. I can hear a sign of relief from many of our readers, but that’s just the beginning. It will get better from here!

At first, I thought I might be missing something, then I realized it is not that surprising given the Huffington Post is one of the biggest News site on the Internet today with 3000 contributing bloggers. The AOL starts to make sense as soon one realizes that an active blog means fresh, original, user generated content which leave search engines “kill one another” to list because they love it. In other words, the bigger, the more active, the more content a blog can generate, the better. AOL knew this very well and calculated their bid carefully both to increase traffic and add another touch to lift its face in an Internet world where fresh content is winning the war by scores!

The main point of this post was to emphasize the point that I made a few years ago that blogging is definitely not something “people with too much time” do. They showed up some five or so years ago, but it seems blogs are poised to stick around  for much longer. The sooner one understands this and gets their own, the better !

I embarked on this project when I was called in by the  GeekyBoys based in California to take on the project. Everything from design to backend funcitonality is our addition!

That’s the excitement actually. As of the new release, the wordpress Multi blogging functionalities are included with regular wordpress. There is a whole lot more about this major breakthrough as you can read from wordpress.org , I just wanted to share with you the exciting news!

I was just sharing the news and hope we get to merge WP mu and regular WP soon. Meanwhile, enjoy!

You can visit the wordpress plugin I created based on that  by visiting in the the main wordpress plugins repository at  http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/facebook-foot-panel/

You can also find more info about the plugin and details on new versions at my site I dedicated to share my wordpress expertise at http://www.wprooms.com

If all goes well, I will be releasing the regular wordpress plugin within the next week or so.

Customer satisfaction is measurable, and can be summed up based on a few factors as I am going to share below.

Quality of work (ability to deliver beyond customer’s expectations)

First of all, a buyer hires you simply because they think/hope you can do what they can’t and hopefully with as much details as they have in mind (though this is not always possible). It then makes sense that most buyers want good well done applications.

Delivery time.

The time it takes from the  time a project is assigned to the time it’s handed as complete.  It is another factor that site owners especially take very seriously. There are many  possible reasons, but the clearest to me is that most of them are web entrepreneurs who want to use their websites to generate some revenue. The sooner that money can start flowing the better. Most of my clients are reasonable with time delivery ranging from 2 days to 6 weeks  so far depending on the project at hand.

Affordability

Why would someone pay $2000 to get a wordpress theme they could get done at $600? My clients have told me over and again that they were impressed by my service because of the fairly priced services at various levels. In other words the ” Service provided to the amount charge ratio ” falls within the affordable range. For more information on pricing, check the prices at the Pricing page.

Professionalism.

When I was working in Technical support at Hewlett Packard, the main focus was politeness and professionalism. Of course! That is what makes the customers like your company’s products and services. So far the response I have had from my clients indicate a good sense of satisfaction from as far as professionalism is concerned. I definitely owe this to my experience as a Technical Support agent and a Customer service representative for Bell Canada, where I served for more than two years.

As of January 2010 Janvier Designs is heading in another direction with a new set of principles to insure maximum satisfaction for our clients. This is the main reason the bar’s been raised in terms of price and the kind of service we offer. As a fully featured developer for WordPress and Buddypress, the focus of Janvier designs this year will be to provide excellent quality service because that is what our clients want and we should not go any lower!!!

For subsquent pages, I used the regular wordpress page hierarchy! Sometimes it pays to think outside the box. The design proved so nice that I decided I am going to use it on the upcoming Janvier Designs WordPress Themes.

With all that in mind, when it comes to customizing wordpress, there are three basic steps one needs to understand.

1. What do you want?

   Pretty trivial… I know. Like any other project, this is the step that you need to understand more than any other ahead of time. It is important to figure this part out so you know which plug-ins and themes to choose or design.

2. Do you know what you are doing?

   WordPress is a CMS. That is, it is subject to updates and upgrades once in a while as it becomes necessary. While it is possible to change its behaviour by editing core files, it is not a good idea because it comprises of more than 3000 files. This not only makes it pretty hard to figure out which file to edit to bring about the desired result, it is not recommended given that a silly mistake (error) in one can cascade throughout the CMS, ripping havoc. So, know what you want to do, and if you don’t or are not very sure, hire someone to help.  Like Janvier , or check out the net.

3. Do you know the limits?

   It may be the world’s best publishing platform, but if you expect to build an application that will be used to remotely control robots on the battle field using wordpress, I think you may be missing the point. I give this example because a few months back, I had a client approach me who wanted to build a wordpress  based social network “exactly like facebook“. My reaction was “with wordpress MU you can come close enough, but with regular wordpress, it’s fairly almost impossible, or you could pay at least $7000 to achieve that – or try to“. So, before you start customizing or hire someone to do the job for you, it is a good idea to know – or at least have an idea – of the limitations the software has. This will help you to avoid tons of headaches, but most importantly it will save your pocket from leaking unnecessary cash to freelancers!

In my next post on how to unleash the beast within wordpress, I will discuss the steps involved in carrying out the customization you need.