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There are always great things happening at Kontent Design so we'll keep you up to date on exciting news here.

Using Joomla Now Gone to Press

09 December 2009

Using Joomla book

For over a year now, two of our talented people at Kontent have been planning and writing the ultimate Joomla book with O'Reilly Media. The book, titled Using Joomla, is the most complete tome ever written (over 400 pages) on the most popular content management system—and by two members of the Joomla Leadership Team.

Ron Severdia and Ken Crowder took a very basic approach for beginners to get into building their first website using Joomla, walking the reader through a simple installation, then all the basic functionality and how it interconnects. It's helpful for new users to know a little HTML and CSS, but it's not a requirement.

These basics are worth the price of the book alone, but the real value is for when the beginner advances into an intermediate level. Around 25% of the book is devoted to real-world usage of Joomla. Follow Helen, a fictional pet store owner, as she sets up a photo gallery, discussion forum, e-commerce, an online calendar, and much more.

The book also covers best practices for security and ways to improve your SEO/SEF to increase your site ranking. If you want to get a preview walkthrough of Joomla 1.6, there's an entire chapter devoted to the changes. Advice on choosing the right extensions, understanding the Joomla framework, and crucial tips you'll wonder how you ever lived without are also covered.

Using Joomla is now available for pre-order on Amazon.com and the Safari eBook is available online from O'Reilly.

Tags: news, joomla

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Kontent Design updates the look of Amherst

24 November 2009

Amherst

Amherst, one of the top broker-dealers in the world of finance, came to us a little over a year ago in need of a facelift, new brand guidelines and a new family of websites. Over the years, expansion had left things disparate and disconnected.

First, we approached everything from the ground up, taking stock in what they had and discussing the vision of where they wanted to go. They needed a wide range of print materials for both potential and existing customers. They also wanted their websites to be dead-simple and be as consistent as possible.

We refined the Amherst colors into a more harmonious palette that they could use in print and on the web. We then created a range of designs that fit their brand essence—honing in on the one that gave them a clean and modern look to offset them from the average "stodgy" look and feel of their competitors. We settlied on using Adobe Garamond Pro and Helvetica Neue as their primary and secondary fonts.

Tackling AmherstHoldings.com and AmherstSecurities.com came first (followed by Amherst Derivatives Trading and Amherst Funding). This became a challenge since the client didn't want any images on either site and they wanted as much white space as possible. As the epitome of simple and usable, the site features contact information, financial updates, downloadable documents, and other pertinent company information. We also built an addition to their company intranet to provide a central repository for shared documents like brochures and media assets.

We put together a draft of the new brand guidelines early on, but they've been refined throughout the process of building each of these crucial pieces. So they'll go through another update to sync up all of our hard work over the past year in the coming weeks. We're very pleased with how things have come along and will continue to partner with Amherst in their event planning and other media needs.

Tags: news

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