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Drs. JoAnne and Jim Carland and the Carland College First of all I would like to introduce to everyone who doesn't know them the Drs. JoAnne and Jim Carland, founders of the Carland College. JoAnn and Jim have raised two sons, co-founded more than a dozen companies, taught several thousand students, consulted with several hundred entrepreneurs, written more than a dozen books, published more than 70 articles in scholarly journals and more than 200 papers in proceedings. The Drs. Carland, who have 25 years of experience in higher education, have designed nationally recognized entrepreneurship programs. They are among the best known entrepreneurship educators in the world. I am proud to call them my teachers, my mentors and most of all, my friends. I met the Drs. while participating in their Masters of Entrepreneurship program at Western Carolina University. This was a pioneering program that was one of the first, and in my opinion, best of its kind. It still is. What's even better, is that JoAnne and Jim have gone off and started a new company, the Carland College, to further their goals of educating entrepreneurs of all types, sizes and ages. Carland College is a specialty, online university. Our mission is to employ state-of-the-art technology to deliver high quality, post-secondary education in entrepreneurship to adult learners throughout the world. We serve prospective, beginner and experienced entrepreneurs by disseminating, communicating and inculcating the skills, abilities and perspectives required to launch, grow and lead entrepreneurial ventures. The college is fully accredited and was granted a license by the State of North Carolina on January 11, 2008, to award the BS in Entrepreneurship and the Master of Entrepreneurship degrees. I urge everyone to check out their websites and talk to them about the possibilities. It will be well worth your time just to get to know this fascinating pair of wonderful people. |
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Joomla! is one of the most powerful Open Source Content Management Systems on the planet. It is used all over the world for everything from simple websites to complex corporate applications. Joomla! is easy to install, simple to manage, and reliable. Best of all for an entrepreneur struggling to bootstrap their way into business it's free, not just with money but time as well. I've used Net Objects Fusion, Adobe's Dream Weaver and Microsoft's FrontPage. I have even attempted to use the new Microsoft Expressions software to design my websites. These programs are all great if you have all the time in the world and the creative ability to develop not only your content, but design the layouts, build the pages, integrate the databases and do all the other stuff that web designers do. On top of that, they cost a good bit of money. With Joomla you can have a basic functioning website installed on your site and ready for content within a couple of hours. Spend a little extra time to find a free template, or spend a little money (under $100) on a commercial template and you can have a very nice website ready to go. This website is based on a template from Rocket Theme. I joined their template club and have access to all their existing templates and a new one every month. This particular one is based on the HiveMind template. To get beyond the basic web pages, you may have to install a few extensions and plugins - I just call them accessories. These accessories extend the functionality of your website to include blogs, e-commerce, easy to design forms, and on and on. For example, our blogs are powered by MyBlog and JomComment. Both are software extensions developed and sold by Azrul.com. These are two easy to add accessories that add a lot of functionality to the site for little money or time. The bottom line is that if you are a do-it-yourself entrepreneur that is in need of a quick and easy website CMS then I urge you to explore their site at www.joomla.org. And if you run into trouble, give us a shout and we will be glad to help where we can. |
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