10 Easy Ways to Professionalise Your Joomla Site

 We’ll begin with 5 ways to make your Joomla site as professional as possible:

  1. Create a new favicon.ico. Yes, the default black Joomla logo is cute, but people bookmarking your site they need to see something that identifies your site rather than Joomla. If you don’t want to design on a 16×16 pixels scale, there are sites that will generate a favicon for you. Then upload it to your images folder.
  2. Make sure you backup your database everyday. We recommend the JomBackup Daily MySQL backup plugin
  3. Don’t cut and paste from Microsoft Word. It may be easy but Word produces some of the worst HTML ever seen by the eyes of man. Cut and paste into a text editor such as Notepad before adding that content to your site.
  4. Make sure you put the Search button in an obvious place. A search of the latest 20 sites on the Joomla forums showcase reveals that more than half don’t have a clearly visible search button.  Low on the left or right hand column are not great places. Try and put it close to the menu so that people’s eyes are naturally drawn to it.
  5. Utilize "Read More". Lots of visitors will never get past your frontpage. Make sure that your homepage is not a long text area and start creating some "tease" text. Articles should not be longer than 3 or 4 sentences, followed by a "Read More…" link.

5 ways to improve your site via your Global Configuration file:

  1. Content >> Unpublish the PDF and Print options. These create duplicate content problems in Google and may hinder your SEO succcess.
  2. Server >> Use Server Defaults. Setting this to 777 or 775 leaves big security holes in your site.
  3. Metadata. Don’t overload here. Keep it to a maximum of 5 description words and 5 keywords. These will appear on every page and you want to allow each page to have its own keywords.
  4. Cache. Turn it on! Your site will run faster. The cache function saves copies of the web page so that users don’t have to load your whole page every time they visit.
  5. Statistics. Turn them off! They’ll slow your site down. Go and get Google Analytics instead.

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