Steve’s Blog

Interview with Barrie North of Joomlashack.com

barrienorth.pngIn Week 2 of our series of interviews with people in the Joomla world, we’re delighted to welcome Barrie North from JoomlaShack.com and CompassDesigns.net.

Barrie was kind enough to take a while out of his busy schedule to talk about template design, SEO and where he and Joomla are headed in 2007.

1) Hi Barrie. Could you tell us a little about yourself? How did you come to Joomla? What’s your background?

My background is pretty mixed. I started out as a rocket scientist. No – really! I have a Masters in Physics and spent a while at England’s Atomic Energy facility researching nuclear waste leakage. After starting to glow in the dark a bit (joke) I took a sideways step and taught High School math and science for a good five years in the US. I ended up helping start two schools, one for students that didn’t fit in the traditional mold that was very hands on in the classrooms. Most recently I decided to strike out myself into the business world. I think that I probably relate to some of the students that the school was for, someone who doesn’t fit into a traditional path! Who knows what I will do next…

2) Have you worked or designed with other systems apart from Joomla? If so, how do they compare?

I actually have not. I started a plain old vanilla web design business in 2005 and stumbled across Joomla. I quickly came to the conclusion that there was no real point in static web design. I would give my clients a CMS even if they hadn’t asked for one.

3) What are the origins of Joomlashack and what’s your role there? What can we expect to see from the site in 2007?

I joined Casey Lee as a partner at Joomlashack at the end of 2005.  I rate Casey as one of the top designers around right now and I am honored to be working with him. We have grown as a team and have been joined by Waseem Sadiq and Dean Marshall in the UK and Cory Webb and Tom Elliott from the US. In 2007 we aim to push the envelope with Joomla template design. I am pretty sure that we were the first guys to come up with width/fontswitchers etc. which was has been a catalyst for other template shops to really innovate.

We are excited about 1.5 and hope to provide as much help and guidance for people with tutorials and examples that we pass on to the Joomla project. We just released a big one for 1.5 templating that Johan has up on the dev site now. I think the potential is very big for Joomla and more prominent sites/companies will be considering Joomla as a serious option. I think that the Shack is unique in the Joomlasphere in that we have a very strong commercial template identity and a strong custom development program. The University of Delaware, Yale Law Journal, Rochen and Tito Ortiz (!) will be sporting designs from the Shack this year.

4) In addition to running on of the largest Joomla companies around, you also have CompassDesigns.net. One of the remarkable things about this site is its SEO success. It ranks high in Google for almost every major Joomla-related keyword. Could you tell us a little about how you became so interested in SEO?

I think its my hard science background. I find SEO a really fascinating concept. Its an entire interdependent system governed by rules that we don’t really know. Its really like science, you can come up with theories, but all you can really do is set up experiments and test them, you can never know for sure. I have been pretty happy with the performance of www.compassdesigns.net, especially as its often the only site you will see in the top ten that doesn’t have the word Joomla in the URL! I should really put some ads on it or something 😉

5) What SEO resources would you recommend for someone working on improving the rankings of their Joomla site?

SEO resources, mmmmm. Well, there is the flawlessly written guide by those guys at Compass at http://www.compassdesigns.net (lol)

OK, seriously. I think I use all of these tools on a semi-daily basis:

http://www.pixelfast.com/overture/
http://www.webuildpages.com/cool-seo-tool/
http://www.webuildpages.com/neat-o/
http://www.webuildpages.com/seo-tools/top-competitor-tool.php
http://www.pr-prowler.com
http://www.wordtrackerkeywords.com (must have)
http://www.yourseobook.com

More recently I have been getting into Google Adwords:

http://www.perry-marshall.info

I used to use keyword density tools, but that strategy is becoming more diluted now.

6) What SEO strategies would you recommend for someone working on improving the rankings of their Joomla site?

OK, so here is the thing with “SEO”… its dead. What I mean here is that SEO used to be about stuffing some keywords onto your site and buying links and trying to game Google. It won’t work anymore. The point of Google is simple, it wants to match search terms with relevant content, and trust me, those Google guys and girls are smart, much smarter than we are. So trying to trick your way around the algorithm is fruitless. So a much better strategy is to embrace Google. Build high quality relevant content and THEN you will see traffic coming to it, for all the right reasons. This is where Joomla has the edge, its a CONTENT management system. Its DESIGNED to add lots of content quickly and efficiently, so use it. This is my advice again and again when I see people in the Joomla forums spending hours trying to get SEFXXXXX to work. Just ditch it and spend the time writing content instead. I honestly think that has been the success of compassdesigns.net, lots of (I try!) high quality content.

7) As someone highly involved in design and SEO, what benefits are you looking forward to with Joomla 1.5?

Hands down has to be the work Louis and Johan have done re-engineering the template system. There is now the potential to completely override the core content output in your template. If you are a University you can create an accessible and tableless site. It you are an SEO nut job like me, you can create a template that is a lean SEO machine. Looking into my crystal ball, I think you will see 3rd party providers creating these “template override packs” for various applications.

8) Do you have any new projects in 2007 we should be looking out for?

Well, I would have to do the obligatory shameless plug about my book. If I didn’t my publisher (Addisen) will send me mean emails! Its almost finished and due for publication Q2 of 2007. Its going to be an end users guide to help you go through building your site from scratch. I (hope) I have leaned heavily on my teacher background to write something thats highly readable and really teaches you some of the key concepts. Don’t worry, there are no homework assignments! Oh yeah, its also completely about 1.5, the new release of Joomla.

I plan to build the Compass blog more, really start digging into both Joomla and the world of a web business. Of course at Joomlashack we plan to continue to push the template envelope to show people what can be done with Joomla.

We have a couple of other things brewing, a component called IntelliJoomla to integrate Joomla into Intellicontact for example. Watch this space 🙂

Europe has Wide Lead in Joomla Development

Joomla Yellow PagesJoomlaYellowPages.com has been going for 4 months now and in that time we’ve found Joomla developers in 42 countries.

It seems like a good time to run down where the commercial Joomla world is today. Which areas of the world have the Joomla bug? 

Which continent has the most developers? Europe with 68 companies. There’s even a Joomla development company in tiny Andorra. That’s more than twice as many as the Americas which have 32 in North and South combined.

Which country has the most developers? France with 20 companies.

Which city has the most developers? Toronto with 3 companies.

An assortment of other interesting statistics: 

  • In America, interest in Joomla is mainly along the East and West coasts. We’ve yet to find a developer in the vast majority of Mid-Western states.
  • The pattern of companies springing up along the coasts is also true in South America, Africa and (not surprisingly) Australia.
  • Joomla is very popular in west Asia, particularly Vietnam and India, but seems to have generated little interest in East Asia, in Korea, China and Japan.
  • The most northerly developer is up in Iceland. They have the wonderful domain name: io.is
  • The most southerly developer is down in Chile.

Where to Get Free Joomla Templates

Template clubs, template clubs, template clubs.

There are literally dozens of template vendors jostling for attention in the crowded Joomla market,  trying to compete for your $30 / $50 / $80 per year.

 

While free components are still produced every week, it seems that the free template has gone the way of the dodo (or reduced to an advertising move in order to attract paid memberships).

 

Today, we thought it would be nice to mention those people who still don’t charge for their templates. If we’ve missed anyone, please feel free to email us and we’ll add them to this list.

 

 

Finally, Joomla.org has updated news on free template releases here.

How Do You Back Up Your Sites?

Ever since Google released its Code Search feature which made it next to impossible to safely create and store backups on a webserver, we’ve been struggling with a security question:

 

Backing up MySQL databases every day is easy, but what’s the best way to backup a site’s files?

 

There are tutorials available on how to use a cron job to use get CPanel to backup the files automatically. However, these are not really appropriate for most of our clients who aren’t able or willing to learn how to use and manage cron jobs. Many hosting companies don’t even offer the option to access files outside of the webroot.

 

There are mambots available to create simple and easy daily MySQL backups, but nothing comparable for the actual files.

 

So, its time to pick the brains of our readers……Do you have a user-friendly way to regularly and automatically backup Joomla files and store them safely away from the webserver?  All comments are welcome.

Can Joomla or Drupal Produce a RedHat?

People have already proven that big companies can be built using Open Souce software. 15 years ago Linux started as the hobby of a Finnish university student. Companies such as RedHat have built on his developments and created multi-billion dollar companies. RedHat alone has a market cap of 4.25 Billion US$.

It took 8 years for Linux to produce a company listed on the Stock Market whereas both Mambo/Joomla and Drupal are nearly 8 years old now. Can Joomla or Drupal produce a RedHat?

Continue reading “Can Joomla or Drupal Produce a RedHat?”

Interview with Cory Webb of Joomlaform & HowtoJoomla

Cory WebbWe’re delighted to announce a new feature here at Alledia.

Every Monday for the next few weeks, we’ll be interviewing people closely involved in developing for Joomla

First up is Cory Webb, the talented web designer who is involved in running two key Joomla sites:

If that, wasn’t enough, in addition to working with Joomlashack.com, he also has a full-time job.

Last week he was kind enough to submit to our questions about himself and about building templates for Joomla.

Continue reading “Interview with Cory Webb of Joomlaform & HowtoJoomla”

Signs of Life from the Open Directory?

A while ago we blogged about the slow death being suffered by the Open Directory. On October 20th their servers crashed and since then no-one was able to submit sites and editors could not update categories.

 

Finally, two months later on December 18, the DMOZ staggered back to working order. The questions is, can it recover from those recent terrible months?

Perhaps a better question is, can it recover from the recent terrible years? Want to know how irrelevant the Open Directory has become? Check out this list of websites whose homepages are missing from the site:

Some sites such as Digg.com, Friendster.com and Technorati.com get 2 or 3 mentions but try to find an major blog that you’ve read recently and you’ll be completely out of luck.

The sad truth is that the DMOZ has been completely left behind by the Web 2.0 generation of sites, in terms of its relevance and its technology.

The surprising is that sites such as Alexa.com still rely on it for listings and search results. What can they be thinking?

Well, despite its recent troubles, the traffic patterns for the site don’t reveal any major troubles. The site is still doing better than it was during most of 2004 and 2005:

DMOZ.org Traffic During 2000 to 2006

However, it is true that there has been a drop in the last two months. Whether it  can recover from this current drop in traffic will go a long way to determining its long-term health.

DMOZ.org Traffic During 2000 to 2006

 

 

Duplicate Content in Joomla and Why it Matters

A few weeks ago we mentioned that there was some good news for those people who have duplicate content on their site. A Google staff member mentioned that there was no longer going to be an active penalty for websites that committed this particular mistake.

 

Some people were happy. Some were dubious and belived the penalty still existed. Some simply said, "what the beep is duplicate content and how does it affect my Joomla site"?

 

This post is that for that last group of people.

 

What is duplicate content?

When a website has several pages, all with substantially the same content.

 

Why is it disliked by search engines?

Because spammers can use this to make their site appear much bigger than it really is to search engines. If you come across an apparently small site that has 50,000 pages indexed by Google, its a fair bet they are using duplicate content to trick the search engines.

 

Do you think the penalty still exists?

No, but I believe duplicate content can still cause you a lot of problems and that it should be avoided. Aaron Wall, writer of the web’s most popular SEO book, has recently mentioned that you can increase your search engine ranking, simply by preventing fewer junk pages from being indexed. Duplicate content produces a lot of junk pages and eventually Google’s bots will get tired of visiting your many useless URLs. 

Why is it a problem with Joomla?

Because Joomla has a tendency to produce many different URLs to just one page. We’ll use this page as an example. The following six

URLs can reach this page. Each URL has the same content and the same metadata. Its duplicate content hell:

  1. Regular, non Search Engine-Friendly URL
  2. Regular, non Search Engine-Friendly URL with a menu Itemid
  3. URL to make the page display as a PDF

  4. URL to make the page display in print view
  5. URL to make the page display in Print view with a menu Itemid

  6. URL with Search-Engine-Friendly URL component turned on

Adding more components can produce even more URLs.

 

How can you stop your Joomla site being penalised?

  1. Unpublish your PDF and Print buttons for all articles.
  2. Use JPromoter. Analyze your site and then go to "Optimize Your Site". Search by using "Group by Same Titles". Make sure you choose "No index" and "No follow" for all but one copy of each page. This means that Google should only index the pages you want indexed.
  3. Start your site right by choosing one SEF URL component and sticking with it as long as you possibly can. Different SEF components often render links in different ways.
  4. Instead of simply creating menu links to a component, create a URL link to the SEF URL for that component. For example, instead of having a menu link to "index.php?option=com_login&Itemid=65" you can have a menu link to "login". This makes sure that only the "login" URL is read by search engines.
  5. If you’re a spammer …. stop!

Using the Alias as the Page Title for Joomla SEO

I had the pleasure of talking to Phil Braddock, a Melbourne based Joomla developer, over the Christmas holidays.

 

He runs Salsa Internet and is someone who comes at Joomla from the perspective of someone focused on trying to improve Joomla’s SEO performance. There seems to be an increasing number of us! As the number of people wanting to use Joomla increases, a lot of people are working out how to improve its less SEO-friendly aspects.

 

One of those is inability to create a unique meta title that might be different from what actually appears on the page. To give an example from Phil’s site, his portfolio page is simple has the words "Portfolio > Websites" on the top of the content item. That makes sense to a reader, but is next to useless if it was also the meta title. Look up to the browser bar however, and you’ll see the page’s actual meta title is: "Joomla Web Design and Client Website Portfolio of our work, Melbourne, Australia". Stuffed with valuable keywords!

 

How did he do this? In Joomla content items you have the "Title" and the "Title Alias". Often people don’t utilize the alias field, but with a little hacking you can add your super-duper meta title in the "Title Alias" field and still have your nice simple title on the page.

 

What do you need to do? Follow these five simple instructions:

Continue reading “Using the Alias as the Page Title for Joomla SEO”

A Beginner’s Guide to Domain Hacks

Over the last few years the domain business has profesionalized rapidly with big corporations forming, each controlling thousands of domains. Companies like iREIT and Moniker have led the way using large statistical packages to analyze every feature of a domain and its value.

 

However, there’s one aspect of the domain world where the only limit is your imagination (oh, and your willingness to deal with obscure government organizations in tiny islands and countries).

 

Domain hacks are basically puns. The simplest way to describe them is that they are domain names that actually use the extension as part of the word.

So for example, Blogs.com is a traditional domain name that might cost you millions of dollars, but Blo.gs is a domain hack available for a much cheaper price. All you need to do to get a .gs domain is to hunt down the registry for the South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands.

 

The most famous domain hack of all is del.icio.us which utilizes the .us code for the United States.

Continue reading “A Beginner’s Guide to Domain Hacks”