Joomla in Faces. Richard Gosler (outreach department coordinator)

Richard Gosler is the Joomla Outreach Department Coordinator and the founder of Pixelhaus, a digital agency he has been running since 2003. With extensive expertise in eCommerce and years of experience in the web industry, Richard has been an active contributor to the Joomla community, helping to strengthen its global presence and collaboration. We talked to him about his journey, his work with Joomla, and his insights into the evolving world of eCommerce and open-source technology.

I originally trained in commercial photography (back in the days of real film cameras!) and spent my formative years shooting for the biggest names in UK catalogues and advertising such as Argos, John Lewis, Great Universal and the V&A museum.

I built my first website for myself in 1997 and, like photography was immediately drawn to the blend of technical and creative. Ironically as digital encroached on photography it allowed me to expand into webdesign on a more or less full time basis by the early noughties. Because I had that catalogue experience I’ve always been drawn to ecommerce and built my first eCommerce site in the last century on an entirely client side javacript/frames based product called Shop Assistant.

I’ve run my own agency since 2003 (called Pixelhaus) and outside of web design I’m founder and drummer for an eighties synthpop band called The Breakfast Club. I’m also a trustee of a music charity called Absolute Music Trust.

It’s never been easier to launch your own online store thanks to SaaS titans such as Shopify and BigCommerce but when merchants get serious, these platforms are not just expensive but restrictive. Although they dominate, there’s still plenty of room for open source platforms such as Woocommerce, Opencart, Magento, Prestashop and so on. These platforms power some of the biggest ecommerce sites and give their owners complete data sovereignty which SaaS cannot.

And of course, there are all of the more niche carts which are addons to CMSs such as Virtuemart, Hikashop, Eshop and J2Commerce which allow designers and integrators to create unique experiences which allow store owners to stand out.

When I’m pitching to potential clients, I explain very clearly what Open Source means and what the benefits are. They’ll trust my business advise so I don’t think I’ve ever had any pushback on that point.

I stress the importance of data sovereignty, not sharing your most valuable business asset, ‘your data’ with big tech to which you’ve granted them access to. Being able to control your own business destiny: as we saw recently when AWS goes down many of those big platforms you assume to be invincible go down too.

I’m proud to have played a very small part in Joomla’s journey and look forward to working with my fellow Joomla stakeholders to see Joomla continue to evolve and celebrate many more birthdays.