Our Philosophy
First and foremost, personalized service and individualized attention to our customers' needs and wants is our primary objective. We continually strive to provide our customers the highest possible value at the lowest possible cost. Our choices in the technology we utilize and the 3rd party services we recommend are all predicated on how to best serve our customers.
At Amherst Partners we also believe that you should be in control of your web site, not us. That is why we build the majority of our sites using the Joomla Open Source Content Management System (CMS). Joomla provides a rich platform for implementing a wide variety of web sites with a wide variety of visual styles. There are literally thousands of free, or inexpensive, templates available for the Joomla platform that offer an almost endless variety of site styles.With a little training, Joomla's rich administrative interface let's you, the owner of the site, develop and publish new content for your site without the help of expensive webmaster and/or web developer resources. Our goal is to provide a web site that you can maintain. Of course, we'll be there to help with any issues you may run into or if you choose, to update content for you. And when you need our help, we keep it affordable because we can usually make changes much faster and more easily due to the technologies we utilize.
If your requirements include the need for an online store we may suggest the VirtueMart Add-in for Joomla or the osCommerce Open Source platform for ecommerce. VirtueMart is designed specifically to integrate smoothly into a Joomla-based web site and offers all the features you would expect of an on-line storefront. osCommerce, like Joomla, is itself a CMS however it is designed primarily for implementing large ecommerce sites having many products for sale. The osCommerce platform also has a rich administrative interface for maintaining product catalogs, customer lists, customer mailing lists, invoicing, shipping, and many more online store functions.
If you've read anything at all about Content Management Systems (CMS), you'll probably know at least three things: CMS are the most exciting way to do business, CMS can be really, I mean really, complicated and lastly Portals are absolutely, outrageously, often unaffordably expensive.
Joomla! is set to change all that ... Joomla! is different from the normal models for portal software. For a start, it's not complicated. Joomla! has been developed for the masses. It's licensed under the GNU/GPL license, easy to install and administer and reliable. Joomla! doesn't even require the user or administrator of the system to know HTML to operate it once it's up and running.
