This year, more businesses are seeking to expand their company and utilize a partner in the digital world to help them grow. Now, more than ever, businesses are harnessing the power of the cloud and getting rid of on-site servers that are costly to setup, run and maintain. Instead of hiring specialty workers who must be on call 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, in case of a server meltdown, companies are instead putting their IT staff to better use and moving their server operations off site to a data center.

According to a survey of IT decision makers in North America, done by Digital Realty Trust, 43% of businesses are looking to expand their operations offsite in 2012, and another 44% are planning expansion in 2013. If your company is one of the many planning for an expansion, there are four important factors to consider when deciding where and how to partner with a company.

1. Server management and maintenance

Your business is going to trust a partner with one of its most powerful commodities: knowledge. Therefore, the servers they use to store this powerful information need to be in the right hands and maintained properly so that you can be confident it will always be accessible and safe from destruction.

2. Operational reliability

Reliability is crucial when partnering with anyone in business. You are handing over a piece of your success and putting it in the hands of someone else. In order for your company to be successful, you must be certain that you can trust your new partner to be there when they say they will be and to be reliable enough to do what they promise.

3. Infrastructure management

The infrastructure on which your data is stored is holding valuable information that cannot be replicated if lost. When choosing a partner, it is important to know how they manage their infrastructure to protect against natural disasters or loss of equipment.

4. Location

Prime locations are now data centers in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles and Phoenix. If your company is located in the New York area, for example, try looking for a NY data center facility. That way, you can stay close to your servers and partners who are managing your digital information.

A reliable company who has the operations, servers and infrastructure in place to properly store and manage your information is crucial when looking for a place to expand your operations in the coming years.

Technology happens to be one of John's favorite things to write about. If you'd like to find out more about digital realty trust, please visit www.digitalrealtytrust.com

With immense excitement Google Summer of Code has announced Joomla! for it's 2012 summer mentorship. Google's  goal is to encourage and inspire student developers by introducing them to open-source software, life experience in working with real world situations and help improve the students employment opportunities and even earn cash.

The Google Summer of Code starts with a student who has a creative project idea. Students will then present their ideas to an open source software company, such as Joomla!. They will have the summer to program and build their project. At the completion of the project the students will have the chance to receive an award and earn money!

This opportunity Joomla! has to participate with the Google Summer of Code  expresses the importance of community that Joomla! greatly values. 

Student applications will be open on Monday, March 26, 2012 at 19:00 UTC.

To sign up or find more information check out their site Google Summer of Code.

Due to be released in January 2012 is the new version of Joomla called 2.5. Some of the new features included will be update notification, new search functionality, and multi-database support.

Making the jump from Joomla 1.7 to 2.5 is made easy with a single click upgrade. The nice thing about Joomla 2.5 is that it will be able to run most of the extensions from Joomla 1.7.

The new update notification takes out the guesswork by telling you it's time to update Joomla. Site administrators will know exactly when to update right after they log-in. The best thing about this feature is that it allows the site to be easily updated with just a one-click process. 

Joomla 2.5 has a new search functionality that boasts a feature with stemming and auto-completion. With stemming, it will allow you to run a search using a root word to find and local matches.

The new Joomla 2.5 is also more flexible with the ability to support new databases. MySQL is the database that Joomla has traditionally worked with in the past. If you were using a MS SQL database, making updates with Joomla could be a difficult process. The new Joomla 2.5 will work with MS SQL with a list of additional databases soon to follow.

These are just a few of the many great upgrades offered in Joomla 2.5. The awesome thing about Joomla is the amazing growing community that makes all of these new features possible.

How do you go about determining a budget for your company website? The whole process should start by establishing a realistic marketing budget. Most experts will agree that a marketing budget will vary depending on your industry. A general rule is that the budget should be between 2% - 12% of gross sales. If you're a million dollar company, you should set up a budget between $20,000 - $120,000. If you're a $100,000 company you should set aside a budget between $2,000 - $12,000 to market and promote your brand.

A custom website can be a powerful way to promote your business and help you reach new customers. Many business owners must realize that they are building a brand and not just designing a website. Of course a website is not a stand-alone marketing tool. In many cases a website is your customers first impression of your brand. Making a great impression is crucial to the conversion process.

The price of a custom website can vary greatly by the needs of your business. It should be tailor made to fit each individual company and it can be compared to adding options on a car. The more options you add to it, the greater the price.

Just like a car, a website will also need to be maintained. Who will update the content? Who will add new pages to the site. Who will add more products to the online store. Who will be there to fix the site if it goes down? These are all additional costs that needed to be added into your marketing budget.

Another important part of website that gets overlooked is SEO or Search Engine Optimization. This is very important to how your website gets ranked in the major search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

There are definitely some costs to having a great online presence. The key is to understand those costs and plan for them because it is the key to a successful future.

First, I will talk about the state of design today. I can start off by saying that there is a handful of great designers that have all of the right principles in mind that do some unbelievable work. They are out there. Sadly, most companies don't use them.

Sometimes it's their nephew or friend who is "great with computers" or someone who attended college a while back for multimedia, but in a whole smaller businesses get results that are less than what they deserve when it comes to their website work and design.

Here are some important design factors for 2012

Design for mobile:

Your website may look beautiful on a 19" monitor, but what about a 4" phone? More and more people are using their mobile devices as their way of getting on the internet. It truly is becoming the "personal computer", replacing that thing you blow off with the air can once in a while and plug into the power surge. You can tackle designing for mobile in different ways. Usually, you can create an entirely different site, throw it on a subdomain, such as m.yoursite.com, and redirect mobile traffic to it. To take that a step further, certain sites can be designed for specific phones, such as the iPhone and Droid. You can also do it a bit simpler on a content management system, where you don't have to create the information twice. Just create mobile templates to route the traffic to.

Implementing Social Media

Facebook usage pretty much has passed email usage by now. Think about that. That is astounding. Really, more people are apt to check their Facebook than their email. Since social media is so important, why not tie it in so users can have their lives at their fingertips at all times?

Designing for social media could easily have it's own book, let alone blog post, so I will just mention a few implementations that can be used for a better experience

• Facebook fanbox widget
• "Like" this page
• Recommendations
• Site specific comment box
• Live twitter feeds, styled to your site
• more

QR. Link a graphic to your website

What a cool way to sync your business card with your website. Or anything in print for that matter, using a QR code easily lets users with smartphones access any URL. If you look around, all of the large corporations seem to get this concept. Yet, this concept seems to fall on deaf ears with the small to mid sized companies.

Although the concept isn't brand new, the idea for a small business to use QR codes still seems to be new. This makes using QR codes an important step for any small business looking to stay ahead of the competition with technology.