Father time has not treated the SourceCoast website well. Originally launched as a 'brochure-ware' site for pitching Joomla consulting services, it morphed into the home of the best extensions for Facebook integration with Joomla and LinkedIn integration with Joomla. Because of the large shift in focus, and the drastic shift in web technology and design, the old site had become a bit of a mess as content sprawled in different areas and wasn't as easy to find as we'd have liked.
So, late last year, we began the migration process to move from Joomla 1.5 to Joomla 2.5 and got in touch with our good friend Cory Webb and Manos Crafted. Cory and his lead designer, Brendan Pittman, put together this amazing site design you see here. I can't describe how excited we were when we saw the first mockups, and I hope you find the new design just as exciting.
The new design had one goal: Be clean and easy to navigate. It is completely focused on our social networking extensions and is meant to make answers to common questions easy to find. There was a ton of work done to make things simpler, from subscription management to improved HTML emails to a responsive, mobile design for getting information anywhere.
We're very excited to now be using Akeeba Subscriptions to manage our subscriptions. WIth the new system, we're able to offer a lot more flexibility in subscriptions, pricing, and general management. A few of the big changes AkeebaSubs has allowed for are:
It's worth noting that we also evaluated PayPlans. Although we didn't choose it, they are a great subscriptions extension that is well worth mentioning. Akeeba Subscriptions simply already worked with some of the features we had and wanted to continue using going forward.
We have moved to a new Joomla affiliate program. SourceCoast now uses ShareASale to track and payout all referal purchases. The previous affiliate software we were using was outdated, cumbersome, and more hands-on than using a 3rd party service like ShareASale.
Our affiliate program commission remains at 20%, and we hope you'll join up to be a part of this great new launch.
Previously, we offered both 6 and 12 month subscriptions. With the move to Akeeba Subscriptions, the 12 month offering was no longer necessary. With the ability to automatically provide discounts for renewals, the 12 month subscription option simply complicates things. The goal of the new site is simplicity, and halving the number of subscription offerings while still providing discounts to our loyal users was an easy choice.
We have a lot more content and minor tweaks to make. Expect more tutorial videos, more documentation, and more images of features and configuration settings throughout the site. The goal of simplicity will always be our mantra going forward and we hope to always make finding what you're looking for a cinch.
If you're interested in what's under the hood on our website, including all the extensions we've chosen, make sure you subscribe to our Joomla Extensions Blog Feed. We're planning an detailed post outlining each of our extension choices. We put a lot of thought into every facet of the new site and can't wait to share all the choices with you!
Hopefully, everything will go smoothly with the new launch. We've done extensive testing, but issues will always arise. If you run into problems, please post it in our Joomla Support Forums or Contact Us about the problem.
