IMAP and Exchange are different products. We don’t like Exchange or anything Microsoft so we won’t be able to help you with that transition.

Sorry.

PS. Microsoft privatizing email is not something I would ever want to support.

Your arrogance and myopia is typical of the denizens of NY.

The banker/trader parasites harbored in New York make more money. Everyone else? In relation to the prices/rents, not really.

New York is a horrible place to live, unless you have more money than sense.

It is harder to get a Joomla site to look like something else than the default template. There are a lot of Joomla developers who neglect to do so. Still there are enough offenders on the WordPress side as well (Thesis sites anyone?). Fair point.

We have non-stop culture, and most of it is affordable. I realize that what we can afford and what you can afford is different.
We make more money here.

>> You simply cannot build the same quality of site in Joomla that we can build in WordPress in the same time. Joomla at the low (and for the most part middle) end looks like Joomla: and that is bad news.
That is pure nonsense. You can make any Drupal, WP or Joomla site look like anything.

And what does a Joomla site look like?

[examples stripped as unfinished development sites]

I agree that a person who does not know what they are doing will keep the default templates. The same goes for WP sites.

Thank you for your detailed response.

Actually Scott our Euro is worth more than your American dollar. Sure NYC is an overpriced hellhole, but I would not characterise Bratislava/Vienna region as low-cost. I would say our standard of living is a great deal higher than yours: we enjoy the clean Danube, nearby forests, reasonable café prices and far more affordable high culture. Nor do we have to face ludicrous rents.

Through agile development and experience, we manage to eliminate a great deal of “process” passing the savings directly onto our clients.

You are cherry picking prices: $2,500 to $15,000. We do build sites up to $25,000 but that includes content work which I did not include in the development budget.

You simply cannot build the same quality of site in Joomla that we can build in WordPress in the same time. Joomla at the low (and for the most part middle) end looks like Joomla: and that is bad news.

Our clients are all over the world, including in New York City. I don’t know how you can stand the NYC clients btw: the most unpleasant and unreasonable we face. It’s that population density thing: rats become very aggressive as well when packed too tightly.

Basically you are getting your clients through personal networking. We get most of our clients via referral and repeat business as well. The exclusive (dis)advantage I can see for your clients is that they get to meet with you in person. Our clients for the most part never meet us face to face, although we do video conferencing and hands-on training via screensharing.

We’ve built helped many clients build businesses from X hundred thousands per year to X millions per year as well.

But we are getting a long way away from CMS here.

I do not think building peer to peer selling would be any more difficult in WordPress than Joomla.

For instance I am building a site where you can have peer to peer selling with triggers based on actions or inaction.
On the lower end, I can build a site in Joomla just as fast as you can in WP.

In order to do a fantastic job I must go through the correct process. That means discovery, IA, wireframes, and mock-ups.
A budget of 2,500 for me precludes that.
But I am in New york City, not Slovakia.
Our cost and standard of living is much higher.
Our population density is also higher and we have larger business who can afford to pay my rates.
However I am starting a division for lower budget sites and would hire your companies like yours for those jobs.

As to having a crappy site of my own, I am simply too busy, but I am finishing off phase one of my new corporate site.
I do not get business from people searching for a web developer, I get it from word of mouth.
My company builds business, nit just a site.

You’ve just made my point beautifully above:

Clients can pay you $50K+ for custom Joomla and Drupal sites.*

Or they can pay Foliovision (or other first rate WordPress developers) between $2,500 and $15,000 for WordPress sites.

I can see that situation is very advantageous to you. I cannot see that it is so advantageous to your clients.

I really don’t understand the pride you and your partners take in having crappy sites. Happily for the community, not all Joomla developers are so indolent. Brian Teeman’s site is superb.

You are fortunate to have such tolerant clients who are happy to be paying more for less.

* Sites with a lot of lock-in as Drupal requires a lot of unique code for every site.

** Sites with very little lock-in as most of the functionality can be built out with existing public plugins. Most of what is custom can be programmed in a minimalist way, using existing calls comparatively easily unravelled by a new programmer.

I also manage servers for a major Arts company in NYC. (The server gets 20K + uniques a day, so the server has to be optimized with Caching).

In 2012 I am building my own CMS based on the Joomla Framework form from eBay https://github.com/eBaySF/joomla-platform I already have 20 monthly clients waiting for it.

My clients do not care if I have a nice site or not. I am not a designer, but a builder of sites. I create functionality and I hire designers to achieve the look a client wants.

I solve their needs.

When I was dealing with sites below $5,000 (which is WordPress) in budget it was very important to have a nice business site. Clients in that range were more concerned with shopping. They did not have the time nor the budget to invest in going through a process.

When I moved up to the $50K+ level, I found they did not care at all. They wanted my expertise.

If you want to look at a public site that uses Joomla and I created look at jfkmc.org.

A very low cost Joomla site is commonsensefund.org
(Under $3,000)

I have many others but in most cases I work with Branding and Marketing companies who take the credit. (and yes they also have crappy sites).

Any site can be hacked, if the hackers are motivated enough.

The issue with a build-off is that it would have to be done in controlled circumstances where the number of developers working could be monitored and one could be sure that the requirements were not pre-leaked to one team or another.

But one could say we are in a build-off every day against Joomla and Drupal. We’ve lost a couple to Drupal (huge budgets, web development an incidental costs in comparison to content generation and advertising) but none to Joomla.

There are lots of complex WordPress sites in our portfolio. I’ve referred to a few by name above. Try not to be so repetitive Scott. It’s boring for everyone, including me.