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.

Our Expertise

Amherst Partners has expertise in the installation and customization of the osCommerce Open Source eCommerce on-line catalog and store solution, the Joomla web site platform (1.0.x and 1.5.x), and the WordPress blog platform. We also have expertise in installing and configuring the Apache web server, PHP server side scripting engine, and MySQL database Open Source technologies.

If you have an interest in sharing your digital photos on-line we highly recommend the Jalbum photo management and sharing application. Jalbum is an application made up of a freeware album creator tool, free hosting, and a creative community. With Jalbum you can easily create and share your own photo album site. The Gallery and Emerging Artists section of the SweetShot Photography web site featured above (Showcase Site 4) uses Jalbum and the Chameleon skin for managing and publishing it's photos. Amherst Partners can help you to start publishing your photos on-line using Jalbum.

We would be happy to help you implement your on-line web store or other community site. Please call or send us an email with your contact information and a brief description of what type of web site you envision.

Click here for some links to web sites that that we have recently implemented. Feel free to visit them, browse the store sites, and make a purchase if you like what they are selling.