Website Beginners Guide

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Building a Website with Joomla 2.5 Beginners Guide

Filed Under: Joomla, Website Guides

I did not work on a new Joomla website since I wrote Joomla! 1.5 SEO as I was more interested in working with WordPress at that time. I wanted to see if, and if so, how much better WordPress was / is when it comes to search engine optimization.

I will tell you how that turned out in a new post later this month. For now I am trying to get into the Joomla 2.5 game and see how much has improved with this new version.

Did I work with Joomla 1.6 and 1.7? No, and I almost did not work with 2.5 either. I was disappointed with the discussion on the way things went with the version numbering and with the fact that going from a 1.5 to a 2.5 Joomla website also was not an upgrade but instead again a migration. I do believe a lot of potential Joomla! websites owners choose another CMS for that reason. Some even migrated their old Joomla sites into new WordPress websites.

Now back to the topic on hand, I just recently started a new website based on Joomla 2.5 and I wanted to get some guidelines on how to set it up for good results.
I am no newbie when it comes to Joomla so the basics did not change that much I guessed, so why not get a book that could guide me through those changes and show me with clear how to steps how to build this new site.

At this point, I got a hold of Joomla! 2.5 Beginners Guide from Eric Tiggeler (who is Dutch just like me). It turned out to be the right guide to start with, and I can recommend it to anyone who tries to build a Joomla! based website.

A short content introduction with a chapter overview so you can see what topics are covered by this book:
Chapter 1: Introduction: A New and Easy Way to Build Websites
Chapter 2: Installation: Getting Joomla Up and Running
Chapter 3: First Step: Getting to Know Joomla
Chapter 4: Web Building Basics: Creating a Site in an Hour
Chapter 5: Small Sites, Big Sites: Organizing your Content Effectively
Chapter 6: Creating Killer Content: Adding and Editing Articles
Chapter 7: Welcoming your Visitors: Creating Attractive Home Pages
and Overview Pages
Chapter 8: Helping your Visitors Find What they Want: Managing Menus
Chapter 9: Opening up the Site: Enabling Users to Log in and Contribute
Chapter 10: Getting the Most out of your Site: Extending Joomla
Chapter 11: Creating an Attractive Design: Working with Templates
Chapter 12: Attracting Search Engine Traffic: Tips and Techniques

For me Chapter 4 and beyond give me the information I was looking for. I did not create the site in one hour, it took me several hours. The reason for that is that I wanted to get some good pictures for the site, and my search on Dreamstime and iStockphoto was longer than expected. Not that the images are hard to find, there are just so much of them to go through and to choose the right ones :-).

Besides getting the site up and running I also enjoyed the book from Eric and learned more on the design part and how to give my visitors a better experience in navigation on the site.
The SEO part is a good introduction, but to limited for me.
All-in-all I recommend this book to anyone who is new to Joomla! and wants to build a good performing website with this great Content Management System. Eric Tiggeler really knows how to make work with easy to follow clear instruction. So if you are in need of such a book or want to give it to someone who wants or needs it, just get it over at Packt or from Amazon Joomla! 2.5 Beginner's Guide
.

It’s Done… The Joomla 1.5 SEO Book is out Now!

Filed Under: Joomla, Joomla Seo, SEO

For those who have missed my writings, this is why you did not see much blogging going on here over the last 10 months…

Joomla 1.5 SEO Book

As it is just released Packt is promoting the Book with a special discount that will expire on the 24th of Oct 2009.

So get your copy NOW with the special discount at http://www.packtpub.com/article/exclusive-discount-offer-joomla-seo before it expires.

And I promise I will start blogging about SEO again on a regular base :-)

Need more info on what you can find in my book, check out http://www.packtpub.com/joomla-1-5-search-engine-optimization-seo/book

I hope you will enjoy reading it as much as I did writing it.

P.s. A big Thank YOU to all the people at Packt Publishing that have worked with my on the creation of this book!

Why Joomla, WordPress and Drupal all Fail at Search Engine Optimization

Filed Under: Drupal, Joomla, SEO, WordPress

Yes, that is right, they all fail at Search Engine Optimization…

I have been reading several new posts about how well WordPress is doing SEO compared to Joomla! and how good Drupal is in SEO compared to WordPress and….well, you get the general idea.

it seems that every time people are defending their choice to use a certian Content management system. Which is a good thing, you can show people the reasons why you love the system(s) that you use.

We all do, we all like the system of our choice, whether it is WordPress, Joomla!, Drupal, Modx, Typo3, etc,etc. They are all great open source content management systems.

The Big Three, WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal.

I have written before how Search Engine Friendly WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal can be, but they don't do SEO…, YOU do SEO…

That is right, they don't do anything else then giving you the tools to get your website ready for higher rankings and better performance in the search engines!

You are the deciding factor in how well search engine optimization is done. You and the webmaster and content writers of your website.

None of the content management systems will come up to you and say, here is a great keyword rich title for your post. None of them will provide you with the keyword rich quality content that attracts visitors and back-links.

That is all up to you.

None of these content management systems will give you the right structure and internal linking ideas for the content of your site based on relevant keywords and none of them will do that keyword research for you.

They are just what they say the are, content management systems. You can use them for building websites, for building blogs, for building community's, but they still remain content management systems.

They are the engines that drive your website and/or Blog, but you have to work with them to get a really search engine optimized website.

The deciding factor for great search engine optimization

It is up to you to get the most out of the system of your choice and you will see that you can do it!

Either with WordPress, Joomla! or Drupal, or any other system, you have the knowledge and the ideas to get better rankings for you site.

You know your system of choice and you are the engineer that knows how to fire up that engine to drive it up to the best possible spot in the search engine results pages!

So don't blame or praise a website building engine for getting search engine optimization done right, praise yourself for doing a job well done.

The new Joomla Extensions Directory JED Policy and SEO effects

Filed Under: Joomla

In the last week of this year Joomla announced that the Joomla Extensions Directory (JED) is going to be Only Joomla 1.5 GPL licensed Extensions as of July 1st 2009, and more importantly also all Joomla 1.0 extensions will be unpublished on the Juni 30th 2009.

After the Only GPL Listing announcement, there are heated debates on this decision on Joomla Forums and Blogs like for instance by Barrie North from Compassdesign and Steve Burge from Alledia, both stating there mind about where Joomla should go from here and how to evolve.

Af course this discussion is once again largely about the GPL License on which I am not an expert :-)
More interesting to me are the effects for Developers and users of the JED since Commercial and Encrypted Extensions will no longer be allowed into the Directory.

I want to point you to some nice discussions on the same GPL and Commercial extensions on some other Open Source Content Management Systems, just to show you that the debate is not that new:

Reading those articles you will find one common idea on all of them, mainly that if you want to be listed, your extensions have to be GPL.
So it seems that Joomla is just catching up to the main stream now…well they are not that old so that, as one pointed out in the forum " these are just growing pains".

The Search Engine Optimization point of view

Well, it is not only SEO, but also a conversion issue (which in light of my previous post should be considered SEO!)

If you read the post on the WordPress forum the comment by Magic Toolbox is very clear and I quote "Without a listing in the directory, we've found it hard to promote the tool".

And this is actually the main reason for many Joomla Developers (not all) to react on the decision to ban commercial and encrypted extensions, they heavily rely on the JED to bring them their customers.
So for many their livelihood and business is at stake here and now they have to change their business model to sell support or build membership sites, which is completely different than what they are used to.

In the WordPress community there is one big example at the moment that has turned their business model around from selling themes to selling support and publishing their themes under GPL terms.
That means people like Brain Gardner and Jason Schuller and the rest of the Revolutiontwo team

Also the conversion of the old WordPress theme site and the more recent cleaning action of the WordPress Themes site to remove any non GPL and Themes with "sponsored" links  (well actually buying links from theme developers to get more incoming links) has brought in a lot of comments.
If you look at the WordPress theme site (PR7) you will find at the bottom a link "Commercially Supported Themes", guess to what site that is going :-) 

The Joomla Extension Directory currently has a PR8 ! which gives it a lot of power and possible page rank improvement for your website if you are in that directory!

Removal of the link will drop your ranking and visitors substantially. Some may have experienced this in the last months already as the JED team not only moved to a Joomla 1.5 based site, but also moved extensions into different categories.
The later actions was not that well noticed by most people, but did improve the usability of the directory itself.

So where to go for Joomla Developers? I really can't say, some will change there business model, others will try to hold there traffic an sales by using more PPC campaigns.  
And some will need to improve their websites with some basic SEO Skills

What I do know is that Joomla 1.0.x website owners will be lost in finding extensions for their websites, so they either need to move to Joomla 1.5 (which is not an easy job) or not extend their sites anymore.

However there will probably will be a commercial site that will provide refuge for Joomla 1.0.x extensions as there is a very large installed based of Joomla 1.0.x sites that are not willing to move to 1.5

Looks like it is going to be a interesting year for Joomla! and the 4170 listed extensions that are currently on the Joomla Extensions site!

But to all of you, have a Happy New Year!

Weblog engines reviewed by Smashing magazine

Filed Under: Blogging, Drupal, Joomla, WordPress

Yet another great post from Smashing Magazine, this time Glen Stansberry wrote post reviewing of 10 Weblog Engines among them WordPress, Drupal and Joomla!

Af course they included MovableType and ExpressionEngine which I also tried but didn't like that much.

Looking and writing about the following aspects of each engine:

  • Programming language.
  • What features you’ll need.
  • The size of the software’s community.
  • The age of the software.
  • If you are planning on extending the Blog.

For Programming language my favorite is PHP, Like WordPress, Drupal and Joomla! (and Typo3)
Features are within the core or easily integrated with Extensions like Components,  Plugins and/or Modules.
Both these Blogging platforms have very good community to support you, although Joomla! is the biggest at this moment.
Age for me is really not much of an issue but for you looking at the first release dates…
WordPress started in 2003, Drupal in 2001 and Joomla! in 2005 as a fork from Mambo that was build from 2000 (Open source Dual license in 2001)
Extending your "Blog" is really easy with all the packages I favor.

Focus on Blogging

But when it comes to Blogging, WordPress works best for me and in the Smashing magazine post Glen wrote one simple statement under Drupal and extend it later on to Joomla!
        "it’s not just blogging software. Drupal is community software. "
Which is exactly how I see it…
You can use Joomla! for Blogging and with Drupal you can do the same thing, but I just don't like the Drupal control panel that much to write blogposts.

One other great article comparing Drupal and Joomla  mentioned in the post is from Steve (Hope you get a lot of traffic from this Smashing magazine article!)  over at Alledia on Joomla and Drupal.(Needs an Update since the release of Joomla 1,5 ;-)

All in all, a nice overview of the Blogging Engine landscape of today from Smashing Magazines, and for me its good to see that Joomla now is also considered a Blogging Platform although still with some limitations.
But those limitations can be overcome with the right setting and Blogging Components for Joomla.

Joomla 1.5.6 Security Fix and Some advice on Protection

Filed Under: Joomla

Joomla just released version 1.5.6. of its Open Source CMS.
This release is a security fix that fixes a leak that “will allow an unauthenticated, unauthorized user to reset the password of the first enabled user (lowest id)”.

So if you run a Joomla 1.5.x website, make sure you update soon! asap would be fine :-)

For the rest, you can read that even a seasoned Joomla administrator sometimes forget to put a basic security practice in place.

Here are some tips to make your Joomla site just a little safer:
– create some new users after installation and give one of them super-administrative rights, make sure you know the user-name and password to login.
Then Login under this user-name and delete the first user called Admin.

– Set your configuration.php file permissions to 644, or even 604 to prevent php injections and overwriting your configuration.php. Do the same with your index.php file.

– Make sure your administration directory is secured by .htaccess and password, the easiest way you can realize this is mostly done by the cpanel of your hosting company.
Otherwise, there is a good tutorial on Joomla Add-ons

– Make a proper backup of your website after your last changes or at least on a weekly base.
Also, have a copy of your configuration.php and index.php files on your local PC.

From an SEO point of view, a hacked website can get you into trouble because Google will take you out of the Index (may take some days, depending on your crawl frequency) and you have to do a re-inclusion request once the site is back up again.

If you want to keep an eye on your website, use a program like http://mon.itor.us/ or the one I use Site24x7, both can send you a warning email if something goes wrong.
And both will give you the possibility of a free account and don't overcharge for their service.

Water & Stone Reporting on Open Source CMS Market 2008

Filed Under: Drupal, Joomla, WordPress

Today I read a Report from Water & Stone, a big name in the Mambo community as one of there Templates is a great looking one with a lot of installations.

The report (which you can download here) brings numbers and conclusions on Market shares of Open Source CMS like Joomla!, Drupal, WordPress and many others like e107,Typo3, Modx, Elgg en more…

In the report there are clearly three Big names in Open Source CMS, not that we did not know who the leaders are, but Rik Shreves does a great job by bringing in the numbers to proof it!

What is strange to me was that Twitter users tend to write more on WordPress and Drupal than on Joomla!, Where are the Joomla Twitters?

I also like the Search Engine Ranking research on page 17, on which Joomla! and Drupal score big time, but WordPress is nowhere in sight for the search terms that contain CMS.
Clearly WordPress is still mostly seen as an Blogging platform instead of a Content Management System like Joomla and Drupal.

In the conclusion pages of the report there is also a section about the future of some projects like Mambo en CMSMadeSimple as well upcoming systems like Elgg and Modx.

Get the download and read the report, it is well written with lots of graphs and gives an insight of what the market in Open Source CMS is right now!

 

Joomla 1.5.5 and SEF Improvements

Filed Under: Joomla

Joomla released a new version 1.5.5 after just three weeks of the 1.5.4. release.

That release had a serious defect in producing duplicate title code in the HTML output, that has been fixed in this new release.
But they did not stop at that… they went on to improve the SEF part of this new version.

Some of these improvements are also targeted to the SEF URLs, especially for Blog section and categories.
If you want to know more about the improvement in this version, please check Joomla 1.5.5. Released

I will keep you informed on the release of the Joomlatwork.com patch for this release.
It will still be a necessity to further improve your Joomla site for better search engine rankings.

For those who have missed the frequent update of this Blog, you can read the reason for this absence here.

This week I hope to have some time to get back into my usual Blogging rhythm again

Viral Marketing for On-line store Hema

Filed Under: Joomla

I just wanted you to see this one…. it is not about Joomla, but really about viral marketing.

This thing already has gotten an Webby Awards for Viral Marketing and they worked really hard to get this stuff done.
Building storyboards and testing in real life with real products to see if it was possible what they toughed up.

I think this kind of detail is essential if you want to create something that will be produced for Viral marketing.

This Marketing product was created to promote the new on-line store of a well establish warehouse here in the Netherlands

Well, don't let me hold you back . go see it yourself (you need flash !)

http://producten.hema.nl/

 

Flash based Viral Marketing

Joomla instead of WordPress and some Joomla SEO Works

Filed Under: Joomla, WordPress

After writing my last Joomla SEO Blog post, I started working on a Clients website with WordPress as Content Management System.

However running more into the project I hit some technical difficulties in getting the content together in a Joomla SEO Site structure (no, not the layout) to get an optimal results for Search Engine Optimization.

So I made the decision to offer the client to redo the site with Joomla, also since his site content was much more than I initially saw on this old Flash based website…
And yes, in this case Joomla was better for the larger static Website then the Chronological base WordPress Blogging platform (although you can build a Static Website with WordPress, this one needed more structure…

The layout of the site was based on a PDF example made by a graphical designer.
Is is always a challenge to get such a design into a WordPress, Joomla or Drupal template, but it works ‘almost' every time.

But as you might have guessed, this project took a lot more time out of my Blogging and Joomla SEO efforts than I would have liked.
The site is done know, it needs to get approved and put on-line now so that we can do some more SEO for it.
The site structure is now optimized, and well formed on the Layout Design as well.

Lesson learned form this… make sure you get all the info you need before taking on a project!
Note to myself:  Project assessment must be done better next time…

Joomla SEO month

I did read some fast things here and there and found some great stuff on the Joomla front:
One of the posts writing about Joomla 1.6 and SEO is this one http://www.goodwebpractices.com/joomla/joomla-1.6-seo.html a really great read!
And there is the Joomla SEO Wiki, set up by Johan Janssens as an effort to provide the Joomla Forum with a White paper or suggestions on where to go an the SEO Field with Joomla 1.6.
You can read some of the suggestions and information given there and see the suggestions on the Joomla White-papers on SEO posted there by the Team member Steve Burge of Alledia Joomla SEO Club, great Job Steve!

O, and if you got the time, the money and the need, it is really a great idea to go to his Joomla Training in Chicago after the JoomlaEXPO 2008 Chicago

I don't live anywhere near the Chicago area, and I don't even have the time to go the Joomla Dagen in Nederland which are this weekend…

They are Building bridges, so they have other people coming in on Drupal, TYPO3, Plone/Zope and sugarCRM.
Well, I just have to wait for the posts and articles…

You will see some more post on several SEO aspects the next weeks, as I am working on some posts on Joomla 1.5 SEO and looking at the new version of WordPress 2.5 which also has some nice features!

Stay tuned, and thank you for your patience!

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