Hi Ronni, Can you tell us about yourself?
My name is Ronni K. G. Christiansen i am 35 years old and live together with my girlfriend and 4 kids. On top of that I am the founder and CEO of redWEB ApS which contains the branches www.redcomponent.com www.redweb.dk www.redhost.dk and www.iredhost.com
I have worked in the web industry since 1993 where I started making web pages - from 1995 I have worked commercially with the web and in 1998 i stood behind one of the first CMS / Ecommerce systems that was a mainstream product here in Denmark.
I have been working with ecommerce solutions for more than 15 years and this is part of the background as to how redSHOP came to be. Since 2003 i started working with Mambo and then later moved to Joomla with everyone else and my only hobby I guess you could say is Joomla!.
I work, play with my kids and play with Joomla and thats about it - with a 100 hour working week there isn't much room for anything else :)
redWEB is maybe most famous for bringing redSHOP, what makes redshop stand out comparing to other Joomla e-commerce extensions?
redSHOP is not a webshop component but a webshop CCK toolkit that focuses on features that will help sell more products and understand what ecommerce is. If you venture into ecommerce, either as a merchant or as a webshop builder, you quickly experience that your shop needs to be unique and stand out.
To do so you either need to develop it from the base up yourself or have a strong tool for customizing your webshop so it can carry a unique story line. Today shops sell on discount or a story (even discount is a storyline) and the shop needs to fully underline the storytelling of the webshop in all aspects for it to maximize its potential.
Beyond that tools like the incredible SEO/SEF tools, integrated with SH404sef, and segmented newsletters (which can more than triple sales on newsletters) and action emails (that can increase sales by up to 10-20% a year) is really tools that are well thought of and fully implemented to improve the outcome of running a webshop.
Lets face it - a webshops role is to sell products - and for that you need the prober tools.
Recently, Joomla! Day Denmark was hold, how was it?
Joomla! Day Denmark was fantastic - this was the 3rd year we held the event and took part in organizing it and we had around 200 attendees in total over both days.
We had a very vibrant and upcoming community in Denmark and we can see how on the first year it was nearly redWEB Day now it really is becoming a Joomla! Day so our goal of building a community in Denmark by taking part and helping to organize the Joomla! Day and our JUGs (www.dkjug.dk which we built too) is really paying off in the long run.
At Joomla! Day Denmark we spent most of the sponsorship budget on bringing in International Guests from all over and having the help raise the bar of our event and really give it an international perspective too and around 35% of the sessions was in English so we also had attendees from Germany and Norway who came to Kolding to attend - sadly we didnt see anyone from Sweden but i hope to see some next year :)
In fact i have a dream that one day we can make a Joomla! Day Scandinavia perhaps and get all of the community from DK, NO, SE etc. along to the same event - that would be nice.
How "big" is Joomla in Denmark?
Joomlas position in Denmark resembles the global one in many aspects except here we do have Typo3 as a rather "large" player too in the sense that alot of the Typo3 houses seem to be swapping to Drupal. Historically they do have a lot of government client so there is to some extent a bit of favorism going on in favor of Drupal on solutions like that - however we put www.kolding.dk live half a year ago as the first responsive open source website in Denmark - built on Joomla - so i do see quite a lot of room in the market for Joomla.
What's in the pipe for redWeb, what can we expect to see in the near future?
In the next 6 months we are and have recently done the following:
Released new redCOMPONENT.com portal with single sales, better support, easier access, template club etc.
First redTEAM merge into the jPlatform by Florian (happend today) we plan to commit a lot more code we hope to see both in the Platform and in the CMS in the future.
Take part of voicing a need for better structures and openness in the project as a whole and try and focus on the lead of project managers, secretaries and leaders - specially within the PLT and all aspects surrounding the code and software of the project. Simply said we believe that better management can utilize the efforts of all of those brilliant developers out there wanting to contribute even better and by focusing the efforts, lot more can come out of it.
Release redCONTENT which is the CCK we built for the municipality of Kolding offering a string of unique features amongst others including version control, frontend content creation wizard, full ACL support and many more.
Release redSOCIALSTREAM with is a multitool for brining Social Media back to your website.
Release redBOOKING for J3.x - we dropped our old redBOOKING component with J1.5 and decided to write a completely new one for J3.0 utilizing the full power of Joomla! 3.0
Release a new redSHOP 1.2 series around 1st April that will be rewritten and contain 50% less source code due to optimizations.
And a whole lot more - but stay tuned on redCOMPONENT.com for all the news as we go along :)
Ps. to any Swedes attending the Joomla World Conference here from the 16th to the 18th in San Jose in USA i will be attending too and do drop by and say hi - yes i am the Vikingsized Dane ;)
