Major prize alert! We’re giving away 4 Joomla training class tickets this week, exclusively on Twitter.
How do you win? Simple …
At the beginning of March 2009, we migrated this website from Joomla 1.0 to 1.5.
We discussed some of the technical issues involved in this blog post, and I’m now going to talk about the Search Engine Optimization angle. I’ve had quite a bit of experience in moving sites to new platforms and my experience is that the traffic drop can vary from 0% to 75% depending how well its done. For example, the only other Joomla person to publish their data was Barrie from Compassdesigns.net who reported a 20% drop in traffic after his move to 1.5.
For the first time, we’re expanding the classes we offer at JoomlaTraining.com beyond just beginners classes. On April 22 in Miami, Rick Blalock is teaching a Joomla template design class. He’ll take you from a your basic HTML and CSS knowledge and using hand-on examples, he’ll show how to build a fully-fledged Joomla template. The class will also run on June 18th in Atlanta.
Rick is based in Miami and runs BeautyInDesign.com which was the first place on line to give people comprehensive tuition on how to build Joomla templates. He came to my attention several years ago with some groundbreaking templates including one that looked like a computer desktop and was the forerunner of many of today’s Mootools / drag-and-drop templates.
Continue reading “Template Design Class Interview With Rick Blalock”
This is a review of the AdminPraise2 template from JoomlaPraise. In fact I should clarify that description: AdminPraise2 is only a template in the way that some of the largest and most ambitious frontend templates are … closer to an serious of extensions than a simple template. AdminPraise2 changes the look and feel of Joomla’s administrator area but also adds an enormous amount of functionality.
Recently I found out that Barrie North from Joomlashack was running a university level course in Joomla. The class is “Web 2.0 Marketing with Joomla” and I asked Barrie more about this joomla foray into higher education:
I think Jen McKibben originally came up with the idea. I was speaking at the New England JUG about online communities and she thought a graduate course would be great (she is a program director at Marlboro Graduate Center). Its been a long time since I have been teaching in a classroom setting, so the idea appealed to me. I think that once you are a teacher, you’ll always have that desire to educate.
I’ve just arrived back from a long series of Joomla training classes on the west coast that culminated in Joomla Day Las Vegas on Saturday. Before I start to wade through the 4000+ emails in my inbox, here are some thoughts on the Vegas experience:
Initally I was unsure about traveling all the way to Nevada for an unconference. Part of me wondered what on earth an unconference was anyway. Even Allen Gunn who ran the day agreed that its very easy to be sceptical about a “hippy event where people talk about whatever they want”. Its also hard to market an unconference because, especially in this economy, many people want the clarity of a schedule that includes fixed learning classes.
I was wrong. It was more lively, more engaging and I met more people than ever before at a Joomla conference. In the hands of a skilled organizer like Allen, holding an unconference proved a masterful decision.
If you’ve been reading Alledia.com over the last few months, you’ve noticed that we’ve been working on a large new project: JoomlaTraining.com. We started with a single class in Atlanta last June and its snowballed within 9 months to occupy most of our time and business.
We’ve reached the point where we’re ready to start working with teachers. We’re opening up the applications process to teachers in the U.S., Canada and the U.K..
If you’re interested, please click here and use this form to contact us.
This is the outcome of various Twiter conversations over the last few days. I mentioned that the University of Washington ran Joomla on lots of sites and people started tweeting back about other top colleges using Joomla. So, with a hat tip to compassdesign, zuno, corywebb, joomladaylasvegas, mozami and more, here’s what I’ve found so far:
A great domain name is a beautiful thing and there’s a Joomla site running on one of the best … SanDiego.com.
What I particularly love about this is that the company ran the site for several years on Java. Late in 2006 they got an investment of over $1 million dollars to invest in the business … and they choose to rebuild the site with Joomla.
Geo-domains are highly popular and often emerging as rivals to the local city newspapers. Here at Alledia, we’ve got a Joomla website in the planning that will run on the .com of another very famous American location. Look for that launch later this year.
It doesn’t seem like it …
In a couple of weeks, we’re doing Joomla beginner training classes up-and-down the west coast. See if you can spot the odd one out:
So if you do use, or want to use Joomla in Seattle, we’re going to run a special coupon for alledia.com readers … over at joomlatraining.com, you can use “spaceneedle” for a 33% discount on our Seattle class.