Independent regional news portal in Canada : iJoomla News Portal

I have used iJoomla products to make my sites easier to manage and to give them that extra professional touch ever since iJoomla made iJoomla News Portal available.

I started West Kootenay UNPLUGGED in December 2006 and shortly thereafter added the iJoomla Newsportal capabilities to it as soon as it was made available. And I am so pleased it did.

My regional focused News Portal Site in BC Canada: http://www.westkootenayunplugged.com

In 2007, West Kootenay UNPLUGGED was reaching over 9,500 visitors per month. I decided to turn WKU offline in October 2007 so as to not compete directly with my client's new site that I developed. WKU was updated and turned back online 7 days ago.

Trail Chamber news portal site: http://www.trailchamber.com

The Trail & District Chamber of Commerce news portal (also developed using iJoomla News Portal and Sidebars) has become an established Chamber web site in Western Canada and British Columbia. And my client is very pleased at the increase in visitor traffic results and they largely attribute this success to the easy to navigate news portal look and feel of the Trail Chamber web site. Naomi (ex assistant and site administrator)and Carol Anne (executive director) also appreciate being able to manage the news portal completely in house, rather than pay a web designer to manage everything.

The old site was almost dead and rarely got updated. This is now been corrected and Chamber Members are extremely pleased with the new site and the huge increase in traffic and visibility for their businesses.

The Trail Chamber site has become such a huge success for my client, and they tell everyone that I developed it for them and also trained them to use Joomla and manage the site with all its features. My client really likes iJoomla News Portal and Sidebars and how easy they are to use to manage their site content.

I now get many requests to develop similar Chamber web sites so I started ChamberVoice.com to focus on Chamber of Commerce focused web sites. I will launch this new subscription service in 2 months and plan to sell a lot of iJoomla extensions. More on this "Build your own Chamber News Portal" member subscription service and business model later.

This past week, I decided it was time to turn West Kootenay UNPLUGGED back online. Within the past 7 days, the traffic to WKU has increased substantially and my sites results in the search engines started to climb again and now I am on page 1 or 2 in Google search results. Soon, WKU will be number 1 or 2 again.

Also, my site members and people in the Greater Trail BC and West Kootenay region are pleased to see WKU back online. The local newspapers are not available or get very limited exposure online, and small businesses find their ad costs to high. As an independent news portal WKU is the favorite alternative for small businesses to gain exposure for their products and services in the West Kootenays.

With the 2010 Winter Olympics coming to British Columbia (Whistler BC) small businesses are wanting to get more visibility online. WKU offers this.

I updated WKU with the latest versions of iJoomla News Portal v and iJoomla Sidebars and changed the WKU web site template and the front page color scheme to reflect a more earth tone look and feel. My goal was to get a similar look and feel to BNet.com, as my goal is to focus on the outdoors and tourism related content to serve it up to visitors looking for information on the West Kootenay region of British Columbia Canada.

I also use Joomlaworks.gr Front Page Slideshow to draw attention to particular articles and site features.

This next few weeks I will be working on optimizing WKU's front page load times and make other changes to increase my sites appeal.

I also spend a lot of time using iJoomla products and have started to make tutorials for my new site (ChamberVoice.com) to show others how easy it is to set up a Chamber web site and my new step by step screencast tutorials will show people how to use Joomla! and extensions such as Ijoomla News Portal and iJoomla Sidebars to turn a site into a heavily visited news portal destination. Look for video screencasts and step by step tutorials for iJoomla NP and SB on WKU in the next few weeks and months. They will be a teaser for more of what is to come on ChamberVoice.com.

Thanks to iJoomla! for making such easy to use GREAT extensions for Joomla!

RandyMac McCallum
West Kootenay UNPLUGGED
http://www.westkootenayunplugged.com