So you have an idea and you want to build a website.
You discovered Joomla and you are very happy that you can quickly create something nice with almost zero knowledge of HTML, Javascript, CSS, mySQL and other technical jargon.
After playing around, reading available documentation, asking for help on the Joomla forums and experimenting, you manage to create your site content and organize it in Joomla categories and articles. You have mastered the Joomla page concept with the creation of menus and have your site navigation just like you want it.
You have also placed some cool modules on your pages to add more spice to your content layouts.
So now you take two steps back and start thinking about the next steps.
All the great content is in place and basically anyone can see it, but ... you have no idea who is actually looking at what.
Well, you could use some analytics tools to get some information about your visitors, but you want more than some anonymous reports based on IP addresses.
You want to engadge your audience and interact with your website readers. You want to find out who they are, what they like and dislike about your site, what they would want to see next. You want to address your content reader community at a more personal level.
After some research on the Joomla forums and the Joomla Extensions Directory, you discover the Community Builder listing page and check out the great reviews.
You are getting really excited about the possibilities. You download the latest Community Builder release and install it (video) on your Joomla site. You go through the Getting Started articles and grab the CB Primer Book pdf and start reading. While reading the book, you discover more cool video tutorials and spend some time watching and learning.
All of a sudden you realize that all of this is still free!
You create your new website CB registration form filled with extra fields that will help you learn more about your readers. First and last name fields, a birthday field (video), gender selector (video), interest multiple choice field, country location text field are extremely easy to add. You can even mark individual fields as required. And of course you have email contact information for all your registered users. Your now named-users can login to your website and see all the information they gave during the registration process on their own CB user profile page. You can even ask for more information about your users on their profile pages and let them upload their photo (video) or even a CV file (video).
You can easily configure things so your users are activated only if they confirm their email address by clicking on a confirmation link (video) they get from your website.
Wow, you say - this is really cool!
You start thinking about your Joomla content and go back and update some of it so it is only available to logged in users. This gives people an incentive to register.
What other incentives could you give?
You go back to your CB Primer Book and discover the CB User list concept and start thinking. Why not make a nice list of already signed-up registered users and use it as a motivation incentive? So you create your first CB User list and make a new Joomla menu to it and make it public so your anonymous readers can see the list. But you are still keeping the CB User Profile pages private and only viewable to logged in users.
Your website is now starting to look and feel much more engadging and interesting to your users and your brain is already thinking of ways to make things even more appealing.
(end of part 1 - to be continued)
{kunena_discuss:233361}
