Home Brewers are going to love this remodeled website! With new functionality and content organization, visitors will be able to find everything they are looking for from the latest recipe to back issues from long ago. 

The Client

Brew Your Own, the sister site to WineMaker Magazine, had similar needs. However, as they have been publishing for over 12 years, they had more of everything. BYO needed banner ads, online newsletter, online search, polls, e-commerce shopping cart, blogs, photo galleries, supplier directory, and a recipe calculator, so we set to work.

The Solution

Brew Your Own Magazine is a magazine for hobbyists who enjoy brewing beer at home. The magazine is released 10 times per year, and the website supports the magazine. Some, but not all, of the magazine articles are available online.

Brew Your Own needed all the same things that WineMaker Magazine did. The content needed to be sliced and diced in a variety of ways, including view by issue and view by interest.

We were able to accomplish this via a Joomla extension called JoomSuite Content. Poll, search, and banner ad functionality is native to Joomla. We use the VirtueMart shopping cart to replace the old Yahoo store. We used MyBlog for easy blogging by non-technically oriented beer enthusiasts, and RSGallery for the photo gallery.  Finally, we recommended Constant Contact for the online newsletter. All of these Joomla extensions are either commercially available or free to download, so custom programming was kept to an absolute minimum.

The designs and layout are similar to the WineMaker Magazine website, and it functions in a similar manner. That way, not only is the branding and interface similar between the BYO and WineMaker websites, but the administrators don't have to worry about learning new systems.

We again used our Contacts4Web Joomla extension to use as a supplier directory (for advertisers) a directory of where to buy Brew Your Own Magazine.

The result is a site that's much easier to use and navigate over the old site. The design is exactly what the client wanted, with lots of functionality in the left and right columns. The client is actively updating the site with new articles, blog entries, and photos, as well as managing their online store.