Before you actually start building a website for your client using Joomla, you first need to understand the requirements and have a general idea of how to meet those requirements. So you will need to sit down with your client and ask him a number of questions to help you gain a better understanding of the website. The following is a list of questions you should ask.
- What is the purpose of the website? Is it for selling products? Is it for selling products and services? Or, is it for conveying information?
- What are the big sections on the website? (e.g. Home, Products, News, Contact, FAQ)
- Does it support multiple languages?
- Does it have restricted areas where only registered users can view the restricted content?
- Will it send out newsletters to subscribed users?
- Is there a theme color representing the company?
- Are contents updated frequently or are they pretty much static?
- Will there be any video streaming contents?
This is just a very short list of the questions you can ask but they are some good questions to get started. Some questions will lead to more questions, depending on the responses. For example, if the purpose of the website is to sell products online, then you will need to ask about the payment and shipping methods, return policy, customer information, and so on. Remember, the more information you can gather and the more specific the information is, the easier for you to build the website. The gathered information will determine how to configure Joomla, what plug-ins you need to use, what kind of template to choose, and so on. So it is important for you to spend the time with your client to discuss all the requirements of the website.
Research Domain Names
At this stage, you should also ask your client what domain name they want to use. Most likely it is somewhat similar to the company name. You should provide a few choices for your client to choose from. However, before providing the list to your client, you should first research on the availability of each domain name. If a domain is already taken, then don’t include it on the list. To check the availability, you can search for the WHOIS record of a domain using some online WHOIS lookup tools such as the following:
http://www.internic.net/whois.html
You can simply enter a domain name in one of these sites to search for its WHOIS record. If the WHOIS record exist for a specific domain, then it means the domain is already taken and it will tell you who the registrant and registrar are. If the WHOIS record doesn’t exist, then it means the domain is available.