Undoubtedly, Joomla has its quirks, but I can get sites set up pretty quickly now with the software and the sites look professional enough with a free or commercial template.

Here is a list of some of my favorite Joomla resources:

SEF Advanced: One of the annoying things about Joomla is that it doesn’t create “clean” URLs right out of the box. I thought they were going to fix this in Joomla 1.5, and while the default URLs are better, I still like installing this product if I am serious enough about the site. You do need to have Ioncube installed on your site to get this working. Eric also has some other useful components on his site worth checking out. Whenever I have ever had a problem with one of his components, Eric has gotten back to me very quickly.

Reviews for Joomla: Reviews for Joomla is a fantastic script that enables you build a professional and easy to use product review website, like Amazon. You can see it installed here on my Japan Hostels website.

Hot property: Hot Property is the best property component that I have tried for Joomla. It is easy to set up and easy for users or companies to add properties to your website. If you want to charge people to list their property or product, you need another component, but for free listings, it works great out of the box. It is also easy to set up and change it so people can list any product or service, like jobs, hotels etc. Mosets would be great if they updated their product more frequently, but I haven’t ever had any major problems with it.

Joomla Templates: I am not a designer, nor do a enjoy designing websites. I do enjoy putting websites together and getting the look I want for a website. Fortunately there are some great free and premium templates available for Joomla. I recommend and use Joomla Shack and Joomlart for most of my Joomla templates.

Eretailers’ review and feedback sections have grown by nearly 25% since 2004. In fact, according to MarketingSherpa data, 58% of consumers prefer websites with peer-written product reviews.

Source

A user generated review website is a great model to build a site on, either as a stand alone site or an addition to an established website. Once the basic framework has been set up – categories and fields, it is just a matter of adding a few items to each category. People visiting the site provide the content by writing reviews. You could even allow them to add new items to grow the site automatically.

You can then either display some ads on the site and/or include an affiliate link for each product to make money. To create a successful review site (like any site really) is to choose a suitable niche. If you choose hotels for example, it would probably be better to select a single country or region.

Some ideas for sites could include:

- digital cameras
- Japanese movies
- sporting goods
- hotels/hostels
- video games

Some people might be thinking that they would need a team of programmers to build a review site, but fortunately there are scripts available that make it possible for anyone to set up their own review site. I just set up Reviews for Joomla today on my Japan Hostels site. I have used it a couple of times before, and it really takes no time to set up.

The new jReviewsEverywhere component enables you to integrate reviews into several popular Joomla components. The hostel site is running HotProperty another component which I like, but hasn’t been updated in a long time.

Reviews for Joomla is only $79.99 and the Everywhere component is an additional $35. I believe that this is a bargain. The component is very powerful and if you compare it to what internet marketers charge for their crappy ebooks, it represents great value. The support forum is very active with the developer providing much of the responses.

By the way, this isn’t a paid review I was just impressed by this product that I thought I would share it with everyone.