It can be hard to find web design agencies and developers who have experience with the Joomla CMS platform, so we like to keep an eye out for web design companies that work in this relatively uncrowded field. One web design studio that caught our eye recently is i4 Dezin, located in North Georgia. i4 Dezin appears to be a smaller company (headed by Cindy Poole) that has launched an ambitious marketing and SEO campaign targeting clients in Georgia, South Carolina, and the Southeast in general. The i4 Dezin website features a very clean design and content that focuses on Joomla and E-commerce platforms.
The claim made throughout the website is that i4 Dezin provides affordable "custom Joomla website design". Curiously, this claim is modified on the actual portfolio page to "Complete Joomla Web Design." Three out of the first four web design examples in the portfolio use this term, while the fifth - "Southern Pride Web Design" - switches back to "Custom Joomla web design." Why the switching back and forth from "custom" to "complete"?
Exploration of the i4 Dezin Portfolio provides some answers. The first site, Miss DESIGNality - a "complete Joomla web design" - was built for a graphics/print shop in Texas (click on thumb for full-size):
When we look at the source code (in Firefox (just hit the 'control-U' keys or "View Source" in the browser 'View' menu), we see that the template used in Miss DESIGNality is a commercial template bought from Rocket Themes, one of the two best known Joomla template design companies (the other one is YOO Themes).
So i4 Dezin can't really claim to have made a "custom Joomla web design" for the client since the i4 Dezin purchased a commercial template for about $50, added the client's logo, modified the graphics, and so forth.
So what's wrong with using a commercial template for a Joomla web design? Commercial templates are certainly popular, especially with do-it-yourselfers and agencies that may lack strong development resources. They provide an inexpensive, quick and convenient way to develop a Joomla web site, and the rampant use of commercial templates in i4 Dezin web design portfolio likely ensures the affordable price promised throughout. Commercial templates provide an extraordinary range of features such as dropdown menus, accordion panels, lightbox-style galleries, dozens of module positions, instant style options (would you like lilac or gothic?), and so forth.
On the other hand, a Joomla web design made with a commercial template comes with hidden costs and terrific limitations. Providing all of the eye-catching options and module positions requires an eye-popping amount of code. In other words, commercial templates tend to be bloated and unwieldy. Changing the layout or the dimensions of the primary content boxes is extremely difficult. The template options are often coded with a whole series of external stylesheets and javascript files, adding to the page load time. The result: commercial templates will consistently underperform in search engine page rankings. Their built-ion features (menus, lightboxes, etc.) also create potential security liabilities because it is not really feasible to update these components.
Code bloat and security vulnerabilities are two reasons reason we do NOT use commercial templates, even for clients with limited budgets. But our primary discomfort with commercial web design templates stems concerns the fundamental disconnect in the web design process itself. When you use a commercial Joomla (or Wordpress) template, you force the client to choose from a boilerplate solutions rather than create a web design that is organically and technically in sync with the client's marketing goals, branding strategies, and messaging. In our experience, this fundamentally flawed approach is always a stopgap measure because in our experience, clients never feel comfortable with a web design that is just like hundreds - even thousands - of other web designs on the internet.
We find that as a long-term strategy, a truly custom Joomla template saves the client money over time since ongoing maintenance and security costs are less expensive and the web design itself will tend to have a longer viable lifespan.
Let's come back to i4 Dezin - they do claim to offer custom Joomla web designs for their clients, and the first example in their portfolio is for Southern Pride Web Design, run by none other than Cindy Poole (!?):
That's a web design that clearly aims for a niche market, and we wish Cindy and Southern Pride/i4 Dezin all the best!
