Steve’s Blog

Joomla 1.5 Out in Beta

Here it is, Ladies and Gentlemen… Joomla 1.5 (in Beta form at least).

You can read the official posting here: http://www.joomla.org/content/view/2088/74/

The long and the short of it is that 1.5 is a developer-friendly leap forward from the older framework. Non-coders won’t see a huge difference in how Joomla operates until developers start putting forward their new components. Then the potential of the new software will hopefully become apparent.

This is a crucial release for Joomla that will go a very long way to deciding whether it continues its current, impressive momentum:

  • More than 60,000 registered users on the Official Joomla! community site forum and more on the many international community sites.
  • 1168 Projects on the Joomla! Forge (forge.joomla.org). All for open source addons by third party developers.
  • 890+ extensions for Joomla! registered on the Extension site (extensions.joomla.org)
  • Joomla.org exceeds 2 TB of traffic per month!
  • Alexa report [October 2006]: Joomla.org at #492 of top 500 busiest websites in the world.
  • Community forums, over half a million posts, and 60,000 activated users. Growing at over 1200 posts per day and 150 new partcipants each day!

Drupal ? Creating Blogs, Forms, Portals and Community Websites

Drupal has suffered somewhat in recent months, in comparison to other CMSs such as Joomla.? Whereas Joomla, which many developers consider to be a technically inferior CMS, has steamrollered ahead, Drupal has kept on plodding along. If you don?t believe me, go to Google Trends and see how the number of people searching for Joomla has doubled every three months while Drupal has inched slowly upwards, barely doubling in the last two years. Part of Joomla?s comparative success has been its branding success. Whereas Drupal has a slightly intimidating blue head for a logo and a staunchly community-orientated focus, Joomla presents a more friendly image with a colourful logo and plenty of commercial options available.

Whether the Drupal community wants or needs to keep up with such a rapid expansion is one question, but books such as ?Drupal ? Creating Blogs, Forms, Portals and Community Websites? by David Mercer can certainly help encourage more users.

It is stronger than many other CMS books for two key reasons, First, it hasn?t been been translated in the somewhat uneven and typo-strewn manner of similar books. Second, it attempts to show people the wider picture of what is involved in building a website ? it delves into how to plan and think about your site rather than just the nuts and bolts of how to build it.

The first chapter introduces Drupal with a heavy emphasis on using Drupal.org to find out more. This is sensible as so much introductory material is available online. The second chapter on setting up a development environment is the chapter I had most problems with, because it doesn?t quite explain things simply enough for someone setting out to build their own website for the first time. If you now how to use shell command to set up a Drupal site on your own computer you?ll be fine but otherwise you?ll just be following instructions without gaining much understanding.

The book then hits its stride in Chapter 3 (administration), Chapter 4 (frontend functionality) and Chapter 5 (access control). For anyone wanting to learn how to run a Drupal site, this middle section is invaluable as are Chapters 6 and 7 deal with adding content to your site. This section alone makes the book worth the purchase price because of its numerous screenshots and clear explanations.

Chapter 8 is the theme chapter and is more involved with modifications to existing themes than explaining how to create them. Chapter 9 is an odd mixture of ?advanced features? that could do with more focus and explanation. At one point it mentions, ?use something like the following command line?? which is not very useful for beginners. Partly however this is a limitation of Drupal itself which does require quite a lot of code work to run particular task. Chapter 10 goes beyond the title of the book to focus not just on creating but on running your Drupal site, including throttling, cron jobs and SEO.

Overall, ?Drupal ? Creating Blogs, Forms, Portals and Community Websites? is recommended. I?ve given it to clients in recent weeks and will continue to do so. It explains the Drupal basics but also has enough meat to help people to move beyond to develop a more advanced site.

Out of Site, Out of Mind – Buying Domains

When setting up a retail business, there are many hoary clichés and pieces of advice. “Out of sight, out of mind” is among the oldest and the hoariest. It basically warns you to buy or lease the best real estate available to you in order to make your company visible.

Well, what was true in the 1900s is still true today, and thus you should be thinking about buying good real estate online. Domain names are often referred to as “21st century real estate” and this is declared with good reason. A good domain can make a business. A bad name can have the opposite effect.

This month’s column is a beginner’s guide to seeking out the perfect domain name for your business.

Shorter is Sweeter

If there is one rule of thumb, it is that shorter domains will be more valuable than longer ones. The shorthand most commonly used is “L” for a letter and “N” for a number.

So I6.com would be a LN.com and 2BBQ.net would be a NLLL.net. What is the difference in price between the different combinations?

LL.com. A well-know example is KW.com which is used by Keller Williams, the realtors. There are only 676 available (26 x 26). These can fetch anywhere from $50,000 to several million dollars. EZ.com is currently on the market for a seven-figure price.

LLL.com. Obviously these are substantially cheaper than LL.com simply because there are 17576 potential combinations (26 x 26 x 26).  However, they still sell for a pretty penny – anywhere between $2,000 and millions of dollars, depending on the value of the letters. To give one example, ABC.com would be towards the top of this range whereas ZQW.com would be toward the bottom.

LLLL.com, LLLLL.com and higher. This is where people like me and you are normally able to enter the market. You won’t be able to get a dictionary word for less than $10,000 but an acronym may be available for registration or for purchase at a cheap price. Put bluntly, Golf.com is out of our range, but TSInc.com or a similar domain that makes sense may be available.

Domain Prices are Like Scrabble

Domains are often graded according to the letters they contain. It’s the opposite of Scrabble – the more common a letter is, the more it is worth. An example of a premium letter is C, because it stands for company or corporation and it also appears in a wide range of acronyms. Others are A, B, D, E, I, M, N and P. Letters that are less common are less valuable, for example: J, U, K, V, W, Z, Q and X.

You Don’t Have to Focus on .com….

…..but I would recommend it. Another possibility is .net which normally sells for around 1/20th of the price of a .com. The only real rival that I can see emerging to these is .us which sells for approximately 1/50th of the price of a .com. Deciding to go with a .us is a choice that you can make if you will be selling exclusively within the United States. If you do decide to go with an alternative, be prepared to lose some leads to the .com version of your domain name. The question is whether the extra clients are worth the extra cost.

Clients Make Mistakes – You Make Allowances

I probably make a typing mistake in every sentence I write and I bet your customers are little different. If you have a name that is easy to misspell, I would strongly recommend that you try to buy those typos of your domain also. This is particularly important for companies that have long domain names. SmithPlumbing.com may lose a lot of potential clients to someone that has a website called SmithPluming.com.

Typogen.com is a tool that can help you generate common misspellings of your name and you can also use a more prosaic method: open an Excel document and type your domain name. Press “Return” and type it again. Repeat this around 100 times and then get a couple of friends or colleagues to do the same thing. By the time you are done, you will have a great list of potential typos for your business` name.

Domains are 21st Century Real Estate

Which means that you can think of your name as an investment. If you have a generic name that other people can use for their business such as baseballbats.com or Hdtelevisions.com that it is a reasonable bet that you can sell it for more later. Domains often increase in value simply because of their age – Search Engines trend to trust older domains more than new one.s

A good domain name is an asset rather than an expense for your business – and it doesn’t depreciate in value.

Where to find out more:



DNJournal.com – This site contains a list of the all the domains sold in the past year.

Sedo.com – An online marketplace for buying and selling domain names.

NamePros.com and DNForum.com – Web forums with plenty of advice on buying a domain name.

Out of Site, Out of Mind – Buying Domains

When setting up a retail business, there are many hoary clichés and pieces of advice. “Out of sight, out of mind” is among the oldest and the hoariest. It basically warns you to buy or lease the best real estate available to you in order to make your company visible.

Well, what was true in the 1900s is still true today, and thus you should be thinking about buying good real estate online. Domain names are often referred to as “21st century real estate” and this is declared with good reason. A good domain can make a business. A bad name can have the opposite effect.

This month’s column is a beginner’s guide to seeking out the perfect domain name for your business.

Shorter is Sweeter

If there is one rule of thumb, it is that shorter domains will be more valuable than longer ones. The shorthand most commonly used is “L” for a letter and “N” for a number.

So I6.com would be a LN.com and 2BBQ.net would be a NLLL.net. What is the difference in price between the different combinations?

LL.com. A well-know example is KW.com which is used by Keller Williams, the realtors. There are only 676 available (26 x 26). These can fetch anywhere from $50,000 to several million dollars. EZ.com is currently on the market for a seven-figure price.

LLL.com. Obviously these are substantially cheaper than LL.com simply because there are 17576 potential combinations (26 x 26 x 26).  However, they still sell for a pretty penny – anywhere between $2,000 and millions of dollars, depending on the value of the letters. To give one example, ABC.com would be towards the top of this range whereas ZQW.com would be toward the bottom.

LLLL.com, LLLLL.com and higher. This is where people like me and you are normally able to enter the market. You won’t be able to get a dictionary word for less than $10,000 but an acronym may be available for registration or for purchase at a cheap price. Put bluntly, Golf.com is out of our range, but TSInc.com or a similar domain that makes sense may be available.

Domain Prices are Like Scrabble

Domains are often graded according to the letters they contain. It’s the opposite of Scrabble – the more common a letter is, the more it is worth. An example of a premium letter is C, because it stands for company or corporation and it also appears in a wide range of acronyms. Others are A, B, D, E, I, M, N and P. Letters that are less common are less valuable, for example: J, U, K, V, W, Z, Q and X.

You Don’t Have to Focus on .com….

…..but I would recommend it. Another possibility is .net which normally sells for around 1/20th of the price of a .com. The only real rival that I can see emerging to these is .us which sells for approximately 1/50th of the price of a .com. Deciding to go with a .us is a choice that you can make if you will be selling exclusively within the United States. If you do decide to go with an alternative, be prepared to lose some leads to the .com version of your domain name. The question is whether the extra clients are worth the extra cost.

Clients Make Mistakes – You Make Allowances

I probably make a typing mistake in every sentence I write and I bet your customers are little different. If you have a name that is easy to misspell, I would strongly recommend that you try to buy those typos of your domain also. This is particularly important for companies that have long domain names. SmithPlumbing.com may lose a lot of potential clients to someone that has a website called SmithPluming.com.

Typogen.com is a tool that can help you generate common misspellings of your name and you can also use a more prosaic method: open an Excel document and type your domain name. Press “Return” and type it again. Repeat this around 100 times and then get a couple of friends or colleagues to do the same thing. By the time you are done, you will have a great list of potential typos for your business` name.

Domains are 21st Century Real Estate

Which means that you can think of your name as an investment. If you have a generic name that other people can use for their business such as baseballbats.com or Hdtelevisions.com that it is a reasonable bet that you can sell it for more later. Domains often increase in value simply because of their age – Search Engines trend to trust older domains more than new one.s

A good domain name is an asset rather than an expense for your business – and it doesn’t depreciate in value.

Where to find out more:



DNJournal.com – This site contains a list of the all the domains sold in the past year.

Sedo.com – An online marketplace for buying and selling domain names.

NamePros.com and DNForum.com – Web forums with plenty of advice on buying a domain name.

What We Do

We build small to medium size business websites and provide superb customer service.

 

That is our key business strategy. We specialize in companies that have between 1 and 1000 employees and we provide them with great website solutions at low prices.

 

Our core services are:

 

1) Website design, plus logo and graphic design services

 

2) Custom software built on top of the Joomla Content Management System.

 

3) Training in building and maintaining Joomla websites.

 

4) Consulting. Unsure as to which solutions would be best for your company? We can help.

 

5) Domain name registration and web hosting. Please see AllediaDomains.com for more information. 

 

How Much Should I Pay for Web Services?

Like so much of like, getting started on the web is often a case of trial-and-error with people making plenty of mistakes in their first months and years online. In order to help our clients we’ve developed some guidelines to help people find their feet and we though we’d share them this month. This WebSavvy is a cut-out-and-keep guide to how much you should be looking to pay for important services.

Domain Names

Under no circumstances should you be paying more than $10 per year for a .com, .net or .org domain name. The companies that actually register the domains normally get them for $3 to $6. A 50% mark-up on that is the maximum you should be expected to pay. Very reputable companies such as GoDaddy.com sell domains for less than $9. For that price you should also expect some extra such as email, domain forwarding and domain name server management. If they expect you to pay extra for them and that takes it over $10 – run a mile. Companies that are guilty of this and should be avoided include: NetworkSolutions.com and Register.com. Over at AllediaDomains.com we offer .coms for $7.45 and add-on services for a dollar.

Hosting

The cost of hosting really depends on what software your website is using and how big your site is. What I can do is give you some general rules of thumb to follow. Nearly all small business can exist happily with the “small” option. The large option involves having a dedicated server all to yourself and is only necessary if you have thousands of people accessing your site on a daily basis. Of course, once you start to reach 100,000s of people per day you will need more than what is on this list, but most small companies should pay no more than $120 per year for hosting. 

   Small Medium Large
 HTML, PHP $10 per month  $20 per month  $100 per month
 ASP (Microsoft)  $10 per month  $35 per month  $200 per month

Maintenance

A maintenance contract from a web design company should cost no more than $100 per month unless they are actively updating and working on the site. You would need a very good reason to pay any more than this.

Contracts

The first thing to say is that you should never sign a long-term contract for web services. You’ve heard about how old-fashioned cell phone companies that force you to sign a 2-year contract are being squeezed by more customer-friendly brands that allow you to cancel at any time? So it is online. If you can’t pay month-by-month then you need to go elsewhere. A long-term contract is a company’s way of saying that they’re not confident that their product and prices are good enough to keep you.

Web Design

Whereas the first four topics were relatively straightforward, webdesign is a more complex area with different niches. Again, some ballpark figures might be the best idea. You should be able to higher a very good webdesigner for between $50 and $80 per hour. For very demanding and complex tasks which demand rare skill-sets you can justifiably expect to pay between $75 and $150. Any more than that and you really should be shopping around and comparing prices from rival firms.

All in all, the Internet is a great hotbed of capitalism. The sheer number of companies offering their services means that price-competition is strong. It’s a buyers market and I hope you’ll be able to take full advantage.

 

Sponsored Review of College Website

It looks like online colleges are a hot niche in SEO for 2010. These for-profit colleges like Kaplan and the University of Phoenix need to keep churning out 1000s of new students each month and so happily pay fat referral fees. This can lead to some scandals as they push too hard. But as the mortgage business collapsed and left a lot of affiliates with less revenue, it looks as if education might step up to fill the gap. One such site is bestcollegesonline.net which covers online colleges and universities. Expect many more to follow.

Joomla Trademark Discussion with Rob Schley

1) Hi Rob. Could you tell us about the trademark decision. What changes will this have for the Joomla project?

Well, Steve …

 

2) What will the policy be regarding prior use?

The Joomla! project has always taken a liberal approach to use of the Joomla! name and logo and we intend to continue to be as liberal as we can while fulfilling our responsibility to protect the integrity of the Joomla! brand.  As long as the usage complies with the terms set out in the brand manual and our trademark guide (no pornography, no warez, no trademarks, not confusing, etc.) all that is required is to register the use with OSM using the form on the OSM site and add the license disclaimer to your site.  If for some reason your use fails to meet the conditions, we will let you know what the problem is so that it can be rectified.  The disclaimer simply states something to the affect of “Joomla! is a registered trademark of Open Source Matters, Inc.”

3) Any guidelines before registering new domains? Any ways to use joomla in the name correctly or should people stick to jom, joom or j?

The policy with domains is pretty much the same as with a regular name/logo usage. We are not concerned with j*, jom*, or joom* domains unless they will create confusion with the Joomla! name.

Hopefully these will help you get started but it might be more efficient for us to just have a conversation about this.  I imagine there are a lot of potential sticking points that people will be concerned about and I generally find a dialog to be more efficient at fleshing these issues out than an e-mail thread.  I know you mentioned it the other day but I was a bit pre-occupied. How does that sound now?

4) Could you give us an example of how the team deals with infringements?

Protect Your Domain Research

Lots of people in the domain industry have suspected it but hard evidence is finally emerging that people are spying on your domain research.

Basically, if you're searching for a domain but don't buy it immediately, there is a good chance that someone will get there ahead of you.

Click here to read the relevant EWeek article.

So how do you protect your privacy?. Simple – create your own WhoIs look-up. Save the following code as a file called whois.php and upload it to your server. Voila! You can see ours at www.alledia.com/whois.php. Thanks to members of NamePros.com for this tip.

Download the DIY WhoIs (.zip file)