Because we love our customers so much, we’ve got a special offer for Valentine’s Day:
Use the coupon "valentine" for 33% off.
This offer is good here at Alledia.com and at JoomlaTraining.com. It lasts until … you’ve guessed … February 14th.
If you’re on the East Coast of the U.S. you can use this for our upcoming Joomla training classes in New York, Washington and Atlanta. Students at those three clases have access to our special "6 Months After-Class Support" offer.
Just a quick post to let you know that the Atlanta Joomla group is expanding. There’ll now be a second meeting each month:
Thanks to Nick for help with getting this new meeting started and thanks also to Steven and Brent for their help in Alpharetta.
If you’re in Atlanta or North Georgia, feel free to sign up for the group via http://www.meetup.com/atlantajoomla/ and we’ll see you at one of the upcoming meetings!
If I’ve missed an event, drop it in the comments …
This is probably the most satisfying post I’ve written in the three years of this blog … this weekend we relaunched LakeLanier.com using Joomla.
The site has been a labor of love. We live on the lake and I can see the water out the window while typing this post.
The launch also marks the end of a long process. The site had only one previous owner and he’d run it for around 15 years, having registered the name back in the mid-1990s. It took around 18 months to go through the sale process and then another several months to build out the site on evenings and weekends.
The lake is an hour north of Atlanta and its really a beautiful part of North Georgia if you ever get the chance to visit. The Olympic rowing events were held in here in 1996 and the Superbowl of fishing, the Forrest Wood Cup, will be here next year.
This is a sponsored review of the Jomsocial extension. For details of having your extension reviewed, please contact us. Note that a sponsored review doesn’t mean I’ll like the product, just that I’ll take the time to review it thoroughly.
For several years there has really one been one social networking option for Joomla … Community Builder. Some people love it, others hate it, but it was impossible to ignore. We use it here on alledia.com because three years ago it was really the only option for expanded user profiles and networking.
Two months ago Azrul, the developer of Jomcomment and MyBlog, released an alternative social networking solution called Jomsocial. Is it any good?
We delighted to offer a new bonus for all students at JoomlaTraining.com classes:
6 months free support after each class
You’ll have all the resources and teaching materials from the class plus access to our experts for another 6 months.
After a full-day of Joomla training, you can now take home another half-year of help. We think its a great deal. If you agree, we hope to see you at a class soon.
If you’d like to know more please feel free to contact us.
Also don’t forget about the other bonuses that all attendees receive:
iJoomla.com have just relaunched the website in Joomla 1.5. They’re now using Bolt (aka. the world’s fastest Joomla template).
Big news on the Alledia front: we’re getting ready to launch the .com version of Georgia’s biggest tourist attraction … using Joomla and Bolt … eating our own dog food … getting very nervous.
Any guesses as to what the site is? The answer will be revealed in a full blog post about that launch in the first week of February. Its being moved from a static HTML site so the SEO and technical challenges will both be interesting.
You can see an updated list of live sites using Bolt here.
This post is intended to answer the question, “Can I avoid using an SEF URL component such as sh404SEF or SEF Advance? Joomla 1.5 default SEF URLs should be enough, right?
Simply – yes. There are many sites and circumstances where Joomla 1.5 default SEF URLs are enough. They are great for most people – certainly are a big leap forward over 1.0. Adding an SEF URL component may simply be adding an extra, unneccessary layer of complexity.
However, for some sites and circumstances, an SEF URL component is a must. Here is a rundown of the ones I’ve encountered most often:
"Advertisers are finding it cheaper to become the media rather than advertise on it and support its bloat"
This is my quote of 2008. I’ve thought about it more than any other because it sums up so many things from viral marketing to the decline of newspapers. The internet is brutal on middlemen and advertising is richest most prominent middleman around. Its an expensive extra layer between buyer and seller.
I left college less than ten years agos wanting to be a journalist. Its almost impossible to imagine someone having that dream nowadays. Newspapers rely largely on advertising for revenue and their business models just don’t work anymore.
The SEOBook quote has led me to try and apply the same understanding to our businesses. Where are we acting as middlemen? Where are we failing to sell anything tangible? Where are we relying on advertising too much?
If you sell ads … the first step is to radically cut costs. Long-term the only solution is to be astronomically better than advertisers at creating and promoting content. I see only three ways to do that:
If you sell products … add great content, not just great products.
We ran a series of successful Joomla training classes last year in Atlanta, Tampa, New York, Washington and Chicago. This time we’re taking things up a notch and and running 16 classes in 15 cities.
Even to me this seems like a big challenge, but we’ve done our research and are confident there’s enough Joomla interest in these 15 cities. Some of the classes, for example New York and the first Atlanta class, are already half sold-out.
The structure is almost the same as last year, except that we’ve added in an e-commerce session to the afternoon and we’ll be unveiling a bunch of wonderful, new free resources for the students.
If you haven’t been to a class yet, feel free to browse our training site and see testimonials from past students. If you’d like to help promote the classes, we’ve an affiliate program paying out $50 per sale.
Here are the class dates:
I was dreading this particular review as so many exchange hosting companies have well-earned poor reputations. Not so with SherWeb:
They even have a high percentage of praise on review sites – that’s highly unusual as normally just the angry customers both to post. Essentially they offer sharepoint web hosting from around $10 per month. I’m more of a Basecamp fan but a lot of companies still need a hosted sharepoint solution.
The company doesn’t have a huge online brand or great SEO currently, but the present themselves well, seem to be building a good reputation and I’d give them a whirl if I needed their kind of services.