Background & Need
The client was seeking a low-cost, efficient and easy solution to update her website with the purpose of ultimately increasing her target market as a professional cello player. The client did not have a Content Management System (CMS). Hence, was not able to regularly update her site.
The client also wanted to upgrade her site to a design that better showcased her experience, training and education, performances, and teaching services. Additionally, she also wanted her site to be translated and localized to at least Spanish, which is her mother tongue.
Finally, the client wanted to integrate a CMS that would allow her to update the content and design on her own and also have a localization solution that would allow her to keep her site updated in other languages without having to pay future additional fees.
Market Research
My client is a bilingual cellist with extensive academic and professional experience. Part of her work includes giving back to communities in-need through community programs that teach music to children in underserved communities. Additionally, about a third of the students that she gives private lessons to are Spanish speakers.
But to get a better idea of the target market, I decided to do more research on what other languages would be valuable to localize the site.
To do this, I used similarweb.com which provides website traffic information. I checked the website traffic for my client and the top ranking cellists found with a simple google search. However, none of these sites had any data available.
I then proceeded to look at site traffic by geographic location for the most prolific contemporary cellist in the US (Yo-Yo Ma) and the site of a popular cellist in social media who is known more for his eccentric performances and social media mastery (Hauser).
Next, I searched for the most important music schools in the US to determine the same as above.
Based on the data obtained by reviewing the sites’ traffic by geography, the client would greatly benefit and increase her target market by translating her site to the following 7 languages: Spanish, French, German, Hindi, Japanese, Korean and Chinese.
Solution
Based on the client’s particular needs, target market and research on different open source CMS, I proposed Joomla to manage the client’s content and localize the site using the GTranslate extension.
Joomla
As mentioned in online tutorials and articles, the installation was the most challenging part. Additionally, the user experience is not as straightforward as it is in more popular CMS, like WordPress. The control panel is filled with different buttons to click on. There are several ways to get to the same feature, which is confusing when you are trying to learn how to do things. On top of that the whole panel can be customized, which adds an additional layer of complexity if you are following a tutorial, for example.
In Joomla, the equivalent of WordPress plugins, are extensions. However, some extensions can be downloaded directly in Joomla but others you have to download from the creator’s site and then upload to Joomla.
Once you understand the control panel and the features, creating the site and customizing it was easier and faster than expected. I used the default theme called Cassiopeia and customized it with a new logo. I added a Home, About, Resume, Photos, and Contact page and customized the menu.
how to joomla! by Alexandra AnguloGTranslate Extension
To localize the site I used the GTranslate extension. It is very easy to install. Once installed it automatically adds a language selector to the location of your choice. It automatically translates to over 100 languages per the default settings. You can select/unselect the languages you want to translate your page to.
This extension has free and paid services and also works with other CMS like WP and Drupal. According to the site’s FAQs, the free version uses statistical machine translations, which is not great quality but for a free service it is very useful. However, their paid version allows you to edit the translations manually which would be worth it if you really want high quality content.
The extension uses a built-in Javascript engine and it uses a translation proxy as a translation delivery network. Any new content that is added to the site is automatically translated so the client would not have to worry about updating other languages.
Site Before And After
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Conclusion
Using free solutions, like Joomla, required more work than using a popularly used CMS like WordPress or Drupal. These last two have a much more refined and organized user experience, and are easier even for beginners.
As online reviews mention, Joomla is not very straightforward and at first glance it definitely looks disorganized and repetitive (there are many ways to get to the same feature). However, with Joomla you can create the site you need using the thousands of extensions and resources that are available. Additionally, with the GTranslate extension, even though the client only requested translation to Spanish, it was possible to instantly translate her site to more than 100 languages at no cost.
Overall, after extensive research on how to use Joomla, several tutorials and a very steep learning curve over the span of several hours, Joomla proved to be a great free option for redesigning a site, managing and localizing content. With these solutions my client will be able to meet her goals of ultimately increasing her target market and have a site that better reflects her professional identity.
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Copyright Disclaimer
Under section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976, allowance is made for “fair use” for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, education, and research. This project is proof-of-concept, and as such does not represent the content owners or creators in any way.