Viperfish Media is the home of freelance Joomla designer and Joomla developer, John Pitchers. Based in Perth, Western Australia, John specialises in all aspects of Joomla website development.

'Statistics' show that 64% of online orders are abandoned before completion. There are some people who, no matter what you show them, simply will not let you get their email address. Concern for people's privacy hinders visitors who could otherwise follow 'the channel (the funnel to get people to your objective)'. It's so easy to make this concern go away if you give a clear privacy policy. If you don't already have a policy, you should develop one. http://www.privacy.org.au/ may be of some assistance if you need help creating a privacy statement.

Having a privacy policy in existence is not your aim. No doubt, you want to makes sure that your traffic knows about it. Advertise it. It can be on the bottom of every page. Any place where you request personal details, you can should link to your privacy policy. Make sure you have a policy against sharing personal information with third-party organisations!

I've found that if you want people to see you from a serious perspective, it is essential that your website lives under your own choice of name. Possessing "www.yoursite.thissite.com" is probably a prerequisite in establishing your credibility. You won't generate networks and visitors by asking them to send emails to This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it . Telling people to go to www.yourwebhost.com/yourname will not generate communities nor traffic. In August 2003, more than 25 million "dot com" domains have been registered. Getting a good domain these days is difficult, but there are plenty of alternatives if you can't find the right name. New 'top-level' domains have been made available recently. It's possible to register domains in .biz and .info suffixes, (extensions?), expanding all the potential names you can have. All you need is a creative list of words that are of some association with your site or solution. Do try to avoid names and initials if possible. Repetition is occasionally useful, or you can make up words, for example "Google(.com)" or "Sedocity".

Find a decent host. The effort you put into planning and building a site is for nothing if you can't (or don't) find a reliable webhost. As opposed to personal sites, business-sites and communities need to be online 100% of the time. If your site 'goes down', the harm is not just a loss in exposure during that time. Your credibility goes down the drain. It's important to find a secure webhost. Insist on something you can maintain all the time. (Viperfish members have access to their FTP 24 hours a day, 7 days a week).