Steve’s Blog

August 20, 2007

Joomla South East Meets Wednesday in Atlanta

Wednesday night should a lot of fun because its the first meeting of Joomla South East, one of a growing number of Joomla User Groups around the world.

We’re meeting from 7.00 to 9.00 pm at the 5 Seasons Brewing Company in Alpharetta. Their website is 5SeasonsBrewing.com and you can get a link to the site here. We have a conference room reserved over the brewery. It has an overhead project, wireless internet, plenty of power sockets for laptops and great food and beer.
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August 16, 2007

Domains Names as Real Estate? Don’t Make me Laugh

Sometimes a comparison can confuse more than it can explain.

One of most common is domain names are "21st century real estate". A quick search of Google reveals nearly 2 million results for the phrase, coming from companies as big as Yahoo, USA Today and Fox News.

That the phrase was just plain wrong hit me while reading Tropical SEO’s recent claim that there’s a slump in the domain market … just about the same time as old-fashioned real estate sinks in the United States.

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August 15, 2007

How to Make a 2 Level Menu with Extended Menu

Yesterday we talked about how to create a professional-looking tree menu using Extended Menu.

Today we have a quick tutorial on how to connect two copies of Extended Menu to make a menu thats twice as good. Well, maybe not that good, but will allow you to create a neat parent-child menu. You can see an example of this menu working on Ludhiana.net.in.

This way to doing this things has one major advantage and disadvantage compared to the more common child-parent setup that you can see on site such as AJC.com.

Advantage: The child menu links area only appears if any are published. Otherwise the menu area will neatly hide.
Disadvantage: This menu isn’t so dynamic. Users need to click through to see the children.

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August 14, 2007

How to Create a Vertical, Expanding Menu

In today’s post we’ll show you how to get add a clean and SEO-friendly menu to your Joomla site. This tutorial was inspired by several recent site audits we’ve done that revealed serious problems with dropdowns menus.

Four Frequent Problems With Dropdown Menus

Menu sprawl. People think that because they can have 100 menus links, they should. More menu links are counterproductive. They only confuse visitors.
Visual sprawl. Dropdowns tend to hide items underneath and often conflict with other scripts/
Bad SEO. This isn’t true for some dropdowns but if I often do SEO audits for large sites that only have 5 or 6 pages indexed. Why? They built a flashy Javascript or Flash dropdown menu.
Unclear. When someone has clicked on a dropdown option, they need to hover over the menu to see them again.

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August 13, 2007

We All Mess Up – Just Not As Badly As This

Admit it – you’ve been making changes to a live site and something went wrong. You screwed up the site and spent an hour or more fixing it while visitors kept coming and kept wondering what on earth was going on.

However, you don’t run one of the 40 most popular sites in the world…

For about an hour this morning, some poor staffer at the BBC posted an unedited photo of England cricket captain Michael Vaughan. The photo was so large that it made a complete mess of the BBC’s frontpage. 3000 pixels high and 2158 pixels wide? Woops, should have been 66×49…

The image was so big that the frontpage was pretty much unusable while it was posted. Check out the original photo and the correct one.

Click Below for Snapshots of the Mess

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August 7, 2007

The Eighty – Twenty Percent Rule

First up, apologies in advance but posting will be light this week. I’ve managed to write every workday this year, but my family are visiting from England and I’ll concentrate on spending time with them for a few days.

I thought I’d share with you a quick rule-of-thumb that I’ve stated to use to help clients who are new to the Open Source World. I call it the 80% / 20% Rule.

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August 2, 2007

Making Money from School Girl Skirts and Wedding Rings

We had a great reaction to the launch Joomla Books yesterday butA quite a few people had questions about our monetization strategy:

"Why use Amazon when the commissions are so small? For every book you sell the reward is only a few cents on the dollar. Surely its much better to aim for commissions that pay $5, $10, $15 or more each time, right? Right? …. "

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August 1, 2007

New Joomla Books Website

We’ve written our own Joomla Book about Search Engine Optimization and thought it would be useful to have one site where people could find every book written about Joomla!

So, today we’ve rolled out Joomla Books. We’ve managed to uncover 13 English language books about everything from the most basic features of Joomla to building your own extensions and templates:

Have We Missed Any Books?

Feel free to leave a comment below or to email us at [email protected].

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July 31, 2007

This Extension Had Better Sing, Dance and Juggle

Some new products immediately jump out as a great idea. Others don’t.

I have to admit that today I came across something that immediately gave me a sinking feeling. A company called Serr.biz are planning to launch a new Search Engine Friendly URL component called SerrBizSEF.

Now, I’m a sucker for Joomla SEO Tools, and I’ve reviewed just about every one available on this site – most of them with great enthusiasm. However, I don’t believe this one will fly. Here’s why:

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July 30, 2007

Why Your Joomla Site Should Be Full of Champagne

Ever see a real, live champagne tower? They look great, flow smoothly and get the party started in no time.

Allow me then, to make a very cheesy analogy: You should build your website like a champagne tower.

The tower is your site, the glasses are your pages and the champagne is that lovely link juice (Page Rank) that Google pours down our throats? Stick with me and I’ll show you how to build a great tower:

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