Montano Designs | Specializing in Joomla Website Design | Located in Charlotte

You are a pleasure to work with. You are a savvy lady and a good business woman. I had good vibes from day one! I appreciate your help. --

Jim Lundy
Wow, awesome, superlative, radical, exciting... you the woman!
Eric Zandes
I needed a professional, creative website right away. After my first conversation with Cindy at Montano Designs I knew I had found the perfect company to help me achieve my goal. Montano Designs is not only creative, but also very knowledgeable about the functionality of a website and all the latest secrets on search engine optimization.
Michelle Rostan-Frenzel
"Cindy Montano has a lot of experience in implementing quality websites with the Joomla! CMS. I have had the pleasure a few times to work with her on a few of her projects. If you need something done, you hire Cindy!"
-- Robin Muilwijk
RobINK
I very much like the look and feel of the new site!
Isabelle Fabian
Chief Executive Officer
Christian Bernard Jewelers
I contacted Montano Designs with little understanding of web site design. I spoke with Cindy and asked her if she could construct a site that could serve as my graphic design portfolio. Cindy seems to have a gift of being able to hear and envision what you want. She was able to design a professional site that captured my style and personality. Cindy was able to accomplish everything quickly and smoothly. We worked over the phone and through e-mail with ease.
Kimberly McCaskey
Thanks again for the patience, understanding and ongoing help. The new site will enable me to reach many more people who need help with their speech.
Judith L. Bergman
p.s. It's really very professinal and attractive.
"I can not express to you the gratitude I have for helping us complete this."
-- Annie Crawley
Dive Into Your Imagination
Thanks again for all the hard work. I really love the site, it is beautiful. Now that it is running quickly, we are getting many compliments. THANK YOU!

Devon Diaz

Ease-e-Waste
I want to thank you very much for your professional attitude and persistence in dealing with what must have been a very difficult job.

Philip Bryant
Balloon Federation of America
The move that has been most productive is hiring Montano Designs, based in Charlotte, N.C. to revamp www.shopadorabella.com. Orders increased dramatically.
-- Jennifer Spiegelhalter
Louisville Business Journal
“Cindy has been a long time supporter of Joomla! and is actively helping out users within the community whenever she can.”
-- Brad Baker, Sites and Infrastructure Coordinator, Joomla!
Cindy picked up on exactly what I was going after and had several different design layouts to show me. She listened to my suggestions and then came up with the final design, colors and fonts that made it work. I think it came out great. It's sophisticated and stylish. My clients tell me it's Impressive!
--Joan Schecher
I love my website that Montano designs did for me. It's fun, colorful and informative. In the first few weeks that my website was up I got a new annual customer for my magazines that more than paid for the website. I'm very happy with the excellent service that Montano Designs provides.
Peg Casey
Thank you Cindy for your patience & hard work making My Inspiration Lounge look the best it can be!

Best,

Misty Gibbs
"Looks great and more importantly runs like a champ. THANKS FOR ALL YOUR HARD WORK."
-- Chip Traub
Wylie Boat Rentals
We just cannot say enough good things about the staff of Montano Designs. They really went the extra mile for us. The added research and extra work done for our site has really made it stand out. Our client response has been overwhelmingly positive. We look forward to continuing our website relationship with Montano Designs.
Rick Pharr
Oh my Goodness! Oh my Goodness! Oh my Goodness! That's exactly what I wanted.
--Rebekah E.W. Hoskins, Intuitive Works
Montano Designs has far exceeded our expectations. After telling Cindy our ideas, we received a custom design website that portrayed our product in the true professional manner it deserved. It looked unlike anything we had seen before. Thanks Montano Designs!
Michael McAllister
Fitness Together
I have the great pleasure of having Cindy as a sister in law but the real benefit came when I found that she could help me with a project that had been on the back burner for me for some time. I needed a web site for my business. All can say is if she not only showed me how easy and user friendly it could be. Cindy has helped me grow my business in ways I never thought I could.
Jon Montano

Joomla Tip of The Week

Joomla Tip of The Week
Written by Cindy Montano
Monday, 13 October 2008 20:20
wait for it.... That is the question! Not necessarily an original title, but it sums up the point I'm about to make. As some of you may have noticed, Montano Designs got a little web botox a couple of weeks ago. You know the saying about the cobbler's children having no shoes? Well it's the same with web designers. If you're any good, you don't have much time to work on your own site. I've recently been creating a lot of Joomla 1.5 sites and have begun to fall in love with it's features and new website smell. I was afraid that upgrading my site would be a royal pain so I delayed the inevitable. I found a great component that I've blogged about here that made the migration really easy. An interesting byproduct of the upgrade was a dramatic increase in website traffic. The above graph is a comparison of the dates 8/20-9/12 and 9/20 (upgrade date) to 10/13 (today). You'll see a 61.33% increase in visits, a 76.99% increase in page views and a 9.71% increase in pages viewed per visit. That's AMAZING! I didn't change any of the content, I just displayed it differently. My once hard to find web design articles and blog were brought to the front. I changed the portfolio to be more user friendly and I tweaked the template. Joomla 1.5 is much cleaner code. It is easier to manage content and menu links. And with the exception of one major security hole (now fixed), it is much more secure than previous incarnations. My personal recommendation is upgrade, that is the answer!

On the way to the forum....

Joomla Tip of The Week
Written by Cindy Montano
Sunday, 12 October 2008 19:42
To forum or not to forum, that is the question. Many, many of my clients tell me they want a forum on their website. Not a problem! There are some great components out there for Joomla that make it very easy to start a forum on your site. I personally like Fireboard, but there's a new up-and-coming forum called Simplest Forum. I like simple stuff. Here's the dilemma: Do you have the time and manpower to maintain the forum? Do you have a large enough audience to make your forum interesting? Are your topics of interest? Because you build it doesn't mean they'll come. I've run my own forums in the past and I'll tell you the truth, they are a royal pain to maintain. Pardon the rhyme. Spammers are so sophisticated these days they have programs that crawl the web looking for free places they can post their adds for drugs, websites of ill repute and the like. When you run a forum you need to keep it cleaned up. You're visitors get enough of this junk in their email boxes and don't want to see it on forums. Flame wars, FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Dread) and Trolls. Sounds a bit like Lord of the Rings doesn't it? These are people with nothing better to do than cause trouble on forums. You have to make allowances for freedom of speech, simultaneously reining in the trolls. If your forum becomes acrimonious people will stop coming. Forums are a great way to get people to your site. A by-product of an interesting forum is people will visit your other pages. You can also earn money from sponsored ads and increase your page rank by having people link to your forum. The bottom line is forums are work with reward. You have to make the call to determine if you have what it takes to maintain it.

Keyword Density

Joomla Tip of The Week
Written by Cindy Montano
Tuesday, 22 April 2008 11:21
Keyword density is the number of times a keyword or phrase appears on your web page compared to the total number of words measured in percentage. Keyword density can be used as a factor in determining whether a web page is relevant to a specified keyword or keyword phrase in the world of search engine optimization.
Read more...

How to move your Joomla site.

Joomla Tip of The Week
Written by Cindy Montano
Friday, 11 April 2008 12:55
There's the long way and the short way to move your Joomla site. This Joomla! tip of the week will focus on the short way. If your web host offers cpanel with file manager you're good to go. Log into cpanel on your old host and select file manager. Create an archive of the files you want to move. If your site is in a sub-directory, open that directory first then select all. This will save you a step later. Download this archived file to your hard drive. Go back to cpanel and open phpMyAdmin. Select your database from the list and click export. Save as file should be ticked. Download this file too. Go to your new hosts cpanel open MySQL databases and create a new empty database. Don't forget to add a user to that database. Back to Cpanel and open up phpMyAdmin. Select the database from the list. Click import and import the sql file you saved from your old host. FTP the archive file over to the new host. Back to cpanel and open up File manager. Extract your archived file. Open up your old configuration.php file in Dreamweaver or some html editor. Change db name, db user, db password to reflect the new information, and the two absolute path references to the new hosts path. Upload changed configuration file to the new server. TADA! If you wound up with your Joomla files in a subfolder, you can use cpanels file manager to move them to the public_html or httpdocs folder.