From Clover Kid to e-commerce entrepreneur

STE. GENEVIEVE, Mo. – Cade Reynolds isn’t your typical 16-year-old 4-H member.

He’s the owner of CSR Enterprises, short for Cade Scott Reynolds Enterprises, and builds websites using Joomla, a content management system used all over the world to power websites.

Cade describes himself as “computer savvy” and Amy Patillo, University of Missouri Extension 4-H youth specialist for Howell County, describes him as a “natural” with Web design. Cade began his 4-H career as a Clover Kid.

Cade attended a Joomla session at the 2012 State 4-H Congress. Patillo said he navigated the system quickly and began moving around the room working with other 4-H members to see how he could help them. “In less than four hours, 95 percent built their own Joomla website, installed a Joomla template, uploaded graphics and built a blog site,” she said.

She was so impressed with Reynolds’ abilities that she invited him to attend the Joomla World Conference in San Jose, Calif., at the eBay headquarters when she was invited to speak.

The funds for Cade’s first flight, hotel and travel expenses were made possible through members of his community, the Ste. Genevieve County MU Extension Center, the state 4-H program, and the MU Extension Community Economic and Entrepreneurial Development program (ExCEED). The Joomla video team paid for his conference admission and put him on the video team at the conference. He was the youngest person at the conference.

Through the conference he has been able to rub elbows with employees of eBay, Google, Sears and other big-name companies.

At the 2013 State 4-H Congress held recently in Columbia, the high school junior made a presentation during the “Geek Out With Us! Ecommerce and Joomla!” Web design session.

About Joomla

Introduced in 2005, Joomla is a free, open-source content management system for publishing content on the Web. It is written in PHP and uses object-oriented programming techniques and software design patterns. It has been downloaded more than 30 million times since March 2012. For more information, go to www.joomla.org.

For more information about the University of Missouri Extension 4-H Center for Youth Development, go to 4h.missouri.edu.