Moving site from Joomla to WordPress

As you may have noticed, our site have changed. Immediately noticeable is an update of visual design, but also we’ve changed the heart of the site — the CMS it runs on, — from Joomla to WordPress.

Change of design was more of utilising the opportunity than a necessity. The previous design, pictured above, still looked pretty good, though there were several key things we decided to change:

• Simplify menu structure — on the old site we had too many links in the menu. A good sign of a complicated structure is when the authors posting on the site are not sure which category to put stuff in — so imagine what a visitor to the site thinks! So we reduced the number of links to the key ones, highlighting the one that is most important to our site’s goal — the Contacts link.
• Improve presentations of our partners and portfolio — this is something that will still require work, but the immediate change is better handling of images, making the whole display more pleasing, and easier to distinguish different items in the lists.
• Refresh the design — well, okay, I admit it, we’re all human, and we look for a change sometimes. So the site now looks lighter, cleaner, slicker. This is partially thanks to the new standard WordPress theme, Twenty Twelve, but we made enough changes to make it look like our own, following the style we’ve been following with earlier sites.

I can say for sure that design is a process, and there are still some improvements that we’d like to make — hopefully these can be implemented in the near future.

So these are all important improvements, yet the real trigger for this change was that we decided to update the site CMS, as Joomla 1.5 was getting pretty old and basic (being too complex, at the same time) by today’s standards and expectations.

Why did we decide to move to WordPress, not Joomla 3? That’s a trick question! But, yes, moving to Joomla 3 was a viable option, yet migrating from 1.5 to 3 is not easier, than migrating to another CMS altogether, which gave us a chance to look at our options with a clear head, and, seeing that WordPress makes every effort to become simpler — since our site’s goal is simple too, we decided to go with it.

For more complex sites, that require more functionality and flexibility, we can still use Joomla or even Drupal. Knowing several CMSes is a great advantage, since you can use the tool that better matches the task.

The plugin that helped us do the most work on moving content from the old Joomla site was the Joomla/Mambo Migrator plugin by Christian Gnoth.

The domain of the TechWire site also changed to alphatech-inc.com, to represent our shift to global presence (having offices and partners in the USA and UK for several years now!).

So, please welcome our updated site, and let me know if you find any issues — or see obvious further improvements that could be made to it. Thank you!