When I started working as a 16 years old, my first job was in a Company owned by a friend’s father. It was a painting company doing everything from painting homes to the buildings of local businesses.

After my first working day there, I was invited to have to have dinner with them at their house and I noticed that their own house really needed a few brush-strokes of painting – or actually more like a lot!

I asked my new boss about how it could be that he did not make sure his own home looked presentable!

After all, it made sense to me that if your profession is houses painting, the least you should do is make sure your own home does not look like it has never been painted!

The morale in this story is that when you work with something, you always end up putting clients needs in front of your own. This has also been the case for all of us in Devenia. We have been far to busy working with our clients websites to actually have time to do our own properly.

Not any more though!

Finally we are taking the time to make our own website into something we actually can be proud of. We are currently working on new content that gets published as it becomes polished and finished and we simultaneously translate all parts to six different languages.

We also have finally gotten to the point when we can start publishing some free components and modules for both Joomla! and Concrete 5 that we are pretty darn proud to have made. They will be made available in the coming weeks, so keep coming back here, and don’t forget to bookmark our site for later use!

Do you have the same problem in your company as I described above? Do you have the time to “paint” your own home? or does your business look like the picture?

Currently we are working on making this site truly Multilingual.

In other words, we are translating the entire site to six different Languages.

When we first started on the process, our first challenge was to decide on what Content Management System to use for the site. Earlier, we have used Joomla and WordPress for this site, but the Multilingual support was poor or lacking. So we decided to either drop WordPress and go for another CMS, or look for a plugin to use in order to get the Site translated.

As I tell this, several employees are working on translating the Content and we are using WPML (WordPress MultiLingual) plugin to manage it all. So far, I have seen that the plugin does work, but it has its hick-ups.

For example, I discovered yesterday that when I add a translation from English to Arabic, the page loses its parent page. That means that every time we translate any of the pages on the site, the site structure gets messed up and I have to go into each page and reassign the parent pages. This is a really an annoying problem when you work on a site with 6 languages.

I have just updated WPML, so I hope that this is a bug the developers of the plugin has sorted out.

What is your experience with WPML? Have you found many annoying bugs?

Our second site (www.devenia.com) is then moved from Joomla to WordPress. The transition went pretty well and you are now seeing the result.

The main point of moving everything from Joomla to WordPress is the fact that Google really loves WordPress for some reason. I have actually not quite figured out why they love WP so much, but it makes sense to go for the Content Management system that is “preferred” by Google when rankings in the serps is obviously our main focus.

The next step is getting the third English site of our over to WP. Will have that done in a few days.

When we have all sites up and running with WordPress, the next step is to get the blog posts from devenia.com synchronized with the other sites. I have found a neat little plugin that I believe will do the job.

What is your experience? Does Google love WordPress more than other CMS’s?