In this section you can read Alledia blog posts containing interviews with people in the Joomla world.
Today, we’re delighted to welcome Christopher Adams and Brad Baker from Rochen.com, to the Alledia interview hotseat(s).
Chris is the founder and CEO of Rochen. Brad is a member of Rochen’s management team as well as being the Joomla Sites & Infrastructure Coordinator and serving as the Joomla.org Forum Admin.
Rochen host the main Joomla! website at www.joomla.org.
Continue reading “Interview with Chris and Brad from Rochen.com”
Today, we’re delighted to have the chance to talk with Ryan Szrama who has just announced the launch of Ubercart, a new E-Commerce platform for Drupal.
In our comparison between Drupal and Joomla, we noted that one of Drupal’s major drawbacks was its lack of strong ecommerce capabilities. After today’s very promising Alpha release, Ubercart looks as if it has the potential to solve that problem.
Ryan very kindly took the time to explain more about the who?, why? and what? of Ubercart.
1) Hi Les & Andy. Could you tell us a little about yourself? How did you come to Joomla? What’s your background?
Well, I can tell you one thing is for sure, I don’t have a big ego, I’m way too cool for that! I guess that summarizes everything, so just click on JoomlaStorm.com.
All joking aside, my experiences in this grand ole world range from having my diapers changed by my mother to jumping out of perfectly good airplanes. I’m a big fan of the outdoors, I love the Discovery channel (Man vs Wild), I wig-out to Pink Floyd, I attended the US Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, I’ve lived in big cities like Chicago, New York City, and Phoenix, I’ve been in Men’s Fitness magazine, and every co-worker I’ve ever worked with has been more nervous than a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs wondering what prank I would pull on them next, and with all of that, somehow my family and relatives still consider me to be an ideal father to my four beautiful kiddo’s. I ran out of breath on that one, I hold my breath when I type. Was that a run-on sentence?
I am a home schooled computer geek with a passion for graphic arts. I can remember being first introduced to Joomla! about 6-7 years ago when an IT guy at one of my previous places of employment brought my attention to Mambo. I was captivated by the concept of Content Management and knew instantly this technology would one day shape the future of web design, and Joomla! is well on it’s way to doing just that!
Now, the guy that spends all day making me mixed drinks and opening my fan mail is my fearless partner Andy! Andy is one of those so called "edu-ma-kated" guys who spent 4-6 years acting like they were in college to learn, when truly they were there for chicks and beer! The mere thought of it makes me, uh-um….moving on.
Andy graduated college two years ago with a degree in information systems analysis and design. Apart from mixing me drinks and reading another letter from some obsessive fan of mine, he designs web sites for some software development firm in the travel industry. He’s a newbie to Joomla! but can say the alphabet backwards in binary format while juggling eight bowling pins. I keep telling him he picked the wrong career field. You wanna hear someone tear it up on an electric/bass guitar, Andy can "RIP"! He’s in a well known local band, Left on Sunset. He gets all the chicks, but where does that get you?? Yeah right! When we disagree about something we settle it over a good ole Guitar Hero 2 competition on the PS2. Andy dreams of one day beating me, hopefully he doesn’t read this!
2) Have you worked or designed with other systems apart from Joomla? If so, how do they compare?
We’ve both worked with PHP-Puke, I mean "Nuke". That’s about all I’ve got to say about that! Joomla! or bust!
3) What are the origins of JoomlaStorm? You seem to have developed a distinctive design philosophy – big, colorful and clear…
Andy and I are both dreamers. When laying the road map for JoomlaStorm, we knew one thing for sure, we wanted to be "Simply Different" and stick out from the rest of the Joomla! theme sites and clubs that were already available out there, and as everyone knows, there are some great ones! I’d like to give a shout out from JoomlaStorm to all of our friends at:
These sites as well as several others have done and continue to do a great deal to promote the advancement of Joomla! Andy and I knew the time was now to join the pioneers and do our part to take Joomla! to new heights. Our philosophy is "Build it and they will come!" and our goal is to do more to touch some of the hundreds of thousands of designers and developers out there that have never heard of Joomla! before. We search the web everyday for new places to drop a line about Joomla!
Andy and I also spend a great deal of our time researching new web trends, tips and techniques to share with our Members and the Joomla! community. Just recently, Andy and I have both been inspired and intrigued by the Web 2.0 philosophy and the concepts behind it. Web 2.0 is all about standing out from the crowd with big bold attitude, vibrant contrasting colors, code so clean you could eat off it as well as graphical world domination! The key to success is becoming more comfortable slinging around CSS than the Swedish Chef is wielding rolling pins and handguns! For all of those Swedish Chef fans out there: check this out!
4) What design resources would you recommend for someone working on improving their design skills? Are there blogs and sites that you read often to pick up tips?
The truth is out there? Does anyone know the URL? These are some of our favorite sites for building your CSS design skills:
5) Are there any features or scripts you see on non-Joomla designs that you would like to implement on your templates but can’t currently because of the way Joomla works?
No, not really. You can integrate anything into Joomla! There are so many designers and developers out there that are more than willing to help that I think the sky is the limit. That’s the beauty of Open Source, use it to your advantage. Let’s dream and design together! If anything, come over to JoomlaStorm, we’ll try our best to help each and every member succeed in their dreams. Our reputation thus far has been to help each and every member as if they were our only member! Stop by and ask some of our current members what they think!
6) What can we expect from the new Designers Club that you’re launching?
JoomlaStorm has recently taken the next step in it’s evolution! We have transitioned from a Theme Club to an all inclusive Designer’s Club, a one-stop-shop and complete resource for any web designer. In addition to our Joomla! Themes and support forums, we have also added several other features such as a Store for non-members, offering a wide variety of graphic design elements, JoomlaStorm Themes, and Flash elements/tools that all add those finishing touches to your projects and designs. We have also added a Pligg based NEWS section available to the entire community to promote their own sites, products and interests that relate to web design. We are also in the process of adding a section completely devoted to tutorials, tips and tricks about anything and everything that is cutting edge in web design that will prove to be a priceless addition to your browser bookmarks! And that’s just to keep us busy for now, We also have bigger dreams and more impressive goals, but if we were to share those plans, Andy and I might receive a visit from "Vinnie" and that wouldn’t be healthy! If you still have any doubts on our determination and staying power, just keep an eye on us and see where we go! If you’re the best of the best when it comes to design, keep in touch, we will be expanding in the future and that means we may make you, the next "American Designer"!
7) As someone highly involved in design, what benefits are you looking forward to with Joomla 1.5?
Andy and I are trippin’ out on 1.5 Mark my words, 1.5 is going to set the bar so high that other CMS groups out there might as well just jump on our wagon and ride it to the top with us. One major advantage of 1.5 for theme design will be the ability to modify the HTML output generated by Joomla! The HTML output will be moved to extension templates, which can be overridden so a designer can remove tables and change the CSS classes in an effort to make the site more accessible. I definitely am looking forward this one!
Well, I’d like to say thank you to Steve for the invitation to take the "Hot Seat!". Steve has a great thing going here at Alledia. All Andy and I can ask of everyone here at Alledia is to come check us out at JoomlaStorm when you get a chance. Take advantage of our free resources and if you find a theme you like, just get a membership and add your name to the list of possible winners for that awesome MacBook Pro we’re giving away soon! We can only succeed in our dreams with you and others working with us!
I’ll leave you all with the following words of wisdom, "The meaning of life is to give life meaning."
We’re delighted to welcome Anthony Olsen from JoomlaBamboo.com to the interview hot seat.
Although it may not look like it, Joomla is a only one of the strings to Anthony’s bow, as he told us last week….
I have a fairly mixed background actually – with a few different areas of interest. My main focus (read day job – although web design is fast becoming my other day job!) is in alternative medicine specifically Chinese Medicine and Feng Shui (Ive been an Acupuncturist for three years and Feng Shui practitioner for ten). But the creative side of my life has always been in making music and soundtracks for theatre and some tv.
Its only recently that I’ve switched from my ears to my eyes to do my creative work. My music has always been pretty minimal and I guess that Ive tried to recreate that aesthetic in my web design. A few years ago I started making the web sites for the theatre productions I was involved with – at that stage using Photoshop, Quark Xpress and Fireworks and getting a bit of a buzz out of it so I kept going. The sites were pretty reliant on images and mostly used slicing and dicing and sticking them in tables – pretty ugly as a process really.
It wasn’t until I joined a server which had fantastico and Joomla installed that came I across the concept of CMS. I’d heard of it but had no real idea about its benefit or simplicity. I tried a few of the scripts on the server and decided I like the way Joomla felt and especially liked the number of extensions available – its pretty mind blowing. So my first few sites were based on the project I had already had going. As I mentioned, I have a focus on alternative medicine and as a sideline I have a range of audio CDs and software for students that focus on learning technical information.
The product range is called Creative Memory Tools and Joomla really gave me a fresh more professional outlook for the site – streaming audio, download section, online shop etc. I was really blown away by how easy it was to control my content and so I started to adopt Joomla for a few other previously non-web based products. The culmination of this I guess is the Chinese Herbal Desktop Reference; a Chinese herbal formula keyword search. Its pretty simple really but it can really help when your dispensing herbs and trying to cross reference about 100 different formulas.
Im really inspired by the concept of web 2.0. I think as an aesthetic it just really makes sense – considering the internet can be an overstimulating medium at times. As soon as you visit a site that has some good design elements it changes the way that you read the text and therefore interact with the site. There’s nothing worse than squinting at the screen and trying to find a particular part of text that you’ve searched for, or if you look away from the screen finding it impossible to see where you had just been reading a moment ago. So the Joomla Bamboo range are really trying to nut out providing depth to a site but maintaining its simplicity. I think there is a constant challenge to make something feature rich but still accessible.
This year Joomla Bamboo will continue to expand and add templates to the catalogue, but we also hope to add some more modules and little tweaks to help with the micro aspect of site design and maintenance. This includes our first module hack called "Thin Log in". Its a really simple mod of the core Joomla log in module that reduces it to two boxes and one submit button. The login shouldn’t really take up too much space and so I created this module that has a very small footprint.
There are also plans to:
This week, we’re delighted to welcome Patrick (PK) Gillock from Isara.org to the interview chair. Isara is a charity based in northeastern Thailand that uses Joomla as a platform for their innovative fundraising efforts. Instead of asking for money, they only ask that people use the tools they have online (such as bloghosting, short URLs and more) so that they can raise money from advertising.
You have fun – they raise money for their humanitarian work.
Currently their sites are:
1) Hi Patrick. Could you tell us a little about yourself? Where do you come from? Where are you now and what are you doing?
My name’s Patrick Kirk Gillock (or just PK) and I’m originally from Texas, but for the past 4 years I’ve been volunteering in northeastern Thailand. I originally came to volunteer for just 3 months but I quickly fell in love with the Thai people and their easy-going way of life. The food is pretty good too!
2) Isara began offline before creating a web presence. How did the project start and what were its initial goals?
Isara (ee-sa-rah) means "freedom" in Thai and it started as a way to help bridge the gap between the rich and poor. After volunteering in schools and colleges for two years I decided to open a Learning Center, a place where we would teach children and adults for free. During that time I noticed A LOT of students, all over the area, were being injured and killed on motorcycles (80% of Thai people use them). The police weren’t doing much to enforce the helmet law, so Isara decided to educate about safety and donate helmets. Thanks to donations from friends and family, Isara was able to donate more than 1,300 helmets to students around Thailand. But, more importantly, schools have made it mandatory for students to wear helmets on school property and the police started enforcing the helmet law. The only side-effect to this project is that I’m known as "The Helmet Guy" around town.
After the success of the Helmets for Students program we focused our efforts on other areas that needed immediate assistance. But that doesn’t mean we find a poor area, give stuff, and then move on. We try to find long lasting solutions to the problems. Isara gets teachers, students, police, and government officials involved with every aspect of the project. Donating helmets or school supplies is just a quick fix. Isara tries to inspire others to get involved so real change can occur.
3) What was the purpose and the process behind taking Isara online?
When Isara first started we did what most small charities do; we went to friends, family, and web forums to beg for donations. Which is fine, but we didn’t want to beg each time we did a project (I’m sure our friends would agree. lol). There had to be a better way. And there was. We’ve all seen websites become rich by getting a lot of visitors and then selling ads, right? The more web traffic they receive the more money they get. We thought, why can’t a non-profit do the same thing? But, instead of making it rich, we would be making a difference. So in November, 2005 I built a small web portal and invited people to make it their homepage. Just by making that small change in their surfing habits they could make a BIG difference in their world. For free! It slowly started to catch on and by early 2006 we were able to create projects that were paid for by just ad revenue and NOT donations. 100% of everything the site makes goes to the projects. This way visitors know that their clicks matter.
4) Did you consider building Isara.org with any other systems apart from Joomla? If so, why did you choose Joomla? What components did you find particularly useful?
Isara was originally just static html pages, but it quickly became too difficult to update. A database system with dynamic pages was the best solution and Joomla stood out from the rest. It was the easiest to get online and the community support was incredible. In February, 2006 we made the switch to Joomla and have never looked back. We also added Simple Machines Forum, Gallery2, Bookmarks, and a few other modified scripts. We really like that Isara is powered by Open Source software.
5) What can people do to help Isara and the people it assists?
All Isara needs are visitors. So just by making Isara.org your browser’s homepage it will help A LOT! We also ask that you spread the word about Isara. Just tell your friends and family or put a link to us on your website. That’s all it takes.
6) Where does Isara go from here? What ambitions do you have for 2007 and beyond?
2007 is going to be an interesting year for Isara. Our projects will be getting bigger, we’ll be expanding into other countries, and we’ll also have our first volunteers come to join us.
As far as the website, we will continue to develop it and add more features. We’ve also just begun work on our own search engine (Code-name: ACORN). It will hopefully develop into the world’s first non-profit search engine.
Thank you to Alledia for this opportunity to tell your visitors about Isara. Keep surfing and keep making a difference!
For the fourth interview of our series, we’re delighted to welcome Phil Braddock, the Internet Marketing specialist from Salsa Internet in Brunswick, Australia. Phil took our questionss and ran with them producing a wealth of useful SEO tips and tricks for Joomla!
1. Hi Phil. Could you tell us a little about yourself? How did you come to Joomla? What’s your background?
Hi Steve. Firstly, thanks for the opportunity to be interviewed! My background is in IT Web Systems design, and architecture, and also a bunch of IT Management roles. I started my career in online Directories working for Sensis, the Australian Yellow Pages company, where I spent 8 years in the 90’s working on search and database engines of various types (Directory Assistance, Data Matching tools, worked on Australia’s first White & Yellow Pages sites and managed the IT teams looking after the local Altavista.com.au mirror, and white/yellowpages.com.au for a while). I left yellowpages in 2000, and then moved into a small publishing company as a partner, building a large online document imaging system for the Australian property information industry, and then worked on a team building a large web based risk & compliance management system using Java/Tomcat/Turbine and various other apache Jakarta projects.
So I guess a fairly diverse IT background but most of my recent IT experience has been working with open source systems. I came to open source software after one of my team (a really talented IT practitoner by the name of Mark Edwards who worked for me at Sensis) convinced me that altavista.com.au would run better on 3 compaq proliants running LAMP, which was bleeding edge at the time, rather than the 2 DEC Alpha 16 cpu 8400’s we were using back then. …I confess I was skeptical – but he ran up a proof of concept, and it worked beautifully (so we cut it into production in late ~98) – a really fun project to be part of.
I came to Joomla via PHP Nuke –> Mambo –> Joomla. (I used nuke for a while, then I recovered haha). A few years ago, I met Peter Lamont from Miro a couple of times (we’re both based in Melbourne, Australia, and got to know some of the history of the Mambo story….it was very interesting to hear about the different perspectives in terms of the origins of Mambo, and how it evolved…. and to get an understanding of a different "side" of the Mambo story than you read in the forum posts.
On a personal note, I’m married to Marcelle and we have 3 kids, Emily, Jacob and Liam who are all under 10yrs old and just a delight. Between family, and racing Nissan Skyline GTRs in my spare time, and then Salsa Internet – it all keeps me pretty busy.
2. Have you worked or designed with other systems apart from Joomla? If so, how do they compare?
In the late 90’s I had a fair bit to do with Documentum, and ATG Dynamo so got to see Content Management from the larger scale implementations early on – then got into smaller website CMS systems with PHP Nuke because at the time (~2002) it was one of the more popular website CMS’ around….then the explosion occurred in CMS’ and so now there’s an abundance of great CMS tools to choose from.
Of course the big end tools (Documentum et al) are in a bit of a different beast than the smaller packaged CMS’, and aren’t really website management tools – they’re more of an enterprise toolset for implementing very large custom solutions. The skillsets required to implement them (Java / C / Oracle) properly and the budgets required are simply massive, but if you have a huge platform or product to manage with hundreds of thousands of users, stakeholders and complex permissioning, content workflow and other such challenges, then of course they are good tools for the job. Having said that packages like Zope, and Alfresco are pretty impressive these days and if doing that sort of thing today, I’d almost certainly take the open source route.
Without wanting to sound too negative, PHP Nuke was a bit of a problem for me. It was exciting early on to be able to do some basic content management through the sweat of my own brow, but security plagued my Nuke experiences (there’s only so many times you can be "owned" by a 13 yr old script kiddie and keep your your sense of humour), and the tool just wasn’t flexible enough in terms of ability to present well-styled content in different ways on a site. Mambo, once I started using this (in 2003) was a breath of fresh air. I really love the Mambo/Joomla templating system and modules/components infrastructure, and I’ve found Mambo/Joomla to be a powerful but simple toolset in terms of the ease with which you can create a great looking site with plenty of flexibility around how it’s presented.
3. What are the origins of Salsa Internet and what’s your role there? What can we expect to see from the site in 2007?
While at Yellowpages.com.au, I had the good fortune to do a lot of work with a boutique web consultancy called Cambridge Technology Partners, which was a very exciting firm to deal with in the 90’s. It was at this time, that I met Adam and Alfred (my partners at Salsa). There were both working in technical roles at Cambridge. Alfred and I had the entrepreneurial itch, and we had a shot at creating a couple of business opportunities after the dot com bust – eventually going into business with Adam in 2003 to build eCommerce stores for Pizza shop owners to allow them to take orders online – Salsa was born.
Like most businesses – where you end up is rarely where you started, and so Salsa Internet evolved quickly into a open source website development company. Early on we dabbled in every open source tool under the sun from osCommerce, Zencart, phpShop, phpGroupWare, phpSurveyor, Bugzilla, FlySpray, phpNuke, and SugarCRM. Eventually we realized that our ability to focus on a small number of customer needs allowed us to be far more effective. We moved on to Mambo & osCommerce as the mainstay of our website development, and then in 2006 we stopped turning away SEO and SEM customer needs (we used to refer our clients to 3rd parties for these requirements), and so Salsa is now focused on Website development, and Website marketing (oscommerce, Joomla, PPC Marketing & SEO).
I was a silent partner in Salsa until mid 2006, (Adam was the fulltime MD) when I joined full time as the ‘Search Marketing Director’ to build the SEO and SEM practice within the company.
In 2007, you should expect to see us launch a more formal blog, and start to release some more of our Joomla hacks, tips and techniques to the world at large. We have 8 developers at Salsa working all day long on Joomla and osCommerce sites and so we have developed quite a library of techniques for building all sorts of cool extensions and modules for Joomla and helping clients achieve specific website goals. We want to share more of this with the community. We’ve benefited enormously from the open source community, and I’d like to be able to give back where we can.
4. You come to Joomla from a strong PPC background, right?
Yes, I spent 2004 – 2006 learning about Google Adwords, and to a lesser extent Overture (now Yahoo Search Marketing). This, at the time, was exclusively for our own PPC advertising needs at Salsa ie we weren’t handling client PPC work until mid 06.
We got pretty good at driving well qualified leads to our website through Adwords, and learning about things like Landing Page design, ad copywriting, bidding strategy, and also the tips and traps around implementing conversion tracking, and analytics on Joomla.
5. What SEO resources would you recommend for someone working on improving the rankings of their Joomla site?
Enedia, a Melbourne based SEO firm have a really nice succinct checklist which is good from a generic on-site SEO point of view, but for Joomla specifically – I found this free eBook from Pathos-seo to be a nice beginners summary.
There are just stacks of resources out there, and a few other tools that I’ve found really useful in my travels are:
I strongly recommend using iTunes to do a bit of searching on SEO podcasts….there’s about 5 really great one’s out there that I’ve found incredibly useful, notably Danny Sullivan’s Daily Searchcast, Mr.SEO Joe Ballastrino’s podcast “forgedaboutit” are a couple I particularly enjoy.
With enough time, and Google searching, and podcast listening – there’s very little you can’t find out about SEO, but of course when we start out – we’re all impatient to know the answers….hopefully the above links help a bit!
6. What SEO strategies would you recommend for someone working on improving the rankings of their Joomla site?
I think the tried and true approaches are always the best place to start. The structure of your own Joomla site is within your control (where external inbound links are less so), so I recommend that people begin by looking at their own on-site factors. While not comprehensive or thorough – you could do a lot worse that employing the following simple techniques:
a) identify 8 – 10 2-word keyword phrases that are relevant to your business i.e. if you were in gardening – they might be "garden maintenance", "garden care", "landscape gardening" etc etc.
b) use a search volume/popularity checking tool to narrow this down to 3 – 4 2-word combos which have the greatest search volume to ensure you are optimizing for terms that will deliver you good volume of qualified leads
c) ensure your Joomla site can support unique page <title>s – I have a little hack here if you aren’t running one of the bigger SEF patches/tools – and ensure that these titles are well written. (A nice podcast with an episode on title authoring can be found here.
d) ensure you have unique meta descriptions and keywords using Joomla’s meta info tab in static content, and ensure these also contain your keyword combos – again, don’t "stuff" these full of duplicate keywords however.
e) ensure your website page wording / copy is well written, and makes reference multiple times to your important keyword combo’s (don’t stuff the page with keywords though, it needs to read and flow naturally).
f) submit a sitemap using google’s webmaster tools …be sure to only do this after taking care of your titles, keywords, and descriptions however otherwise you might get penalized through the sitemap submission process.
g) keep the content on your site fresh, and focus on building new content on a regular basis….blogging is a good technique to build fresh, relevant content, and importing relevant RSS feeds doesn’t hurt either.
This should get you on the road to a good ranking with Joomla (or any other site / cms)…..then focusing on building quality inbound links from other well built, and relevant websites will help do the rest. Regular article authoring and submission is also worth some focus.
7. If a client came to you with a new Joomla site and $1000 to spend on Search Engine Marketing. How would you recommend that they split up the money? PPC? Technical improvements on their site? Link building?
Well $1000 will only get so far down any of these paths, but how you spend it would in my view, depend on your situation:
If you are a well established business with a website that’s been around for a couple of years – then I’d definitely spend it on some basic on-site SEO ie technical improvements to <title>s, meta tags, page structure, headings, internal linking strategy. You can leverage your site’s history, and hopefully established trust and brand – to boost your online results through some better rankings.
If you are a brand new business, then I’d split it 50/50 between a PPC investment to kickstart your new site, and some basic on-site SEO.
If your site is using frames, or built totally in flash, or other major SEO problems – then I’d focus my investment on addressing these issues ie technical improvements to the backend.
If your site was in good basic SEO shape, and your looking for medium term growth, then link building is the way to go….focus on inbound links only – reciprocal linking is far less valuable these days than it used to be. Focus on quality inbound links ie from content sites and /or articles rather than just directory site listings although some of this should be pursued also. Focus on trying to obtain links from sites who themselves have strong pagerank, or who have quality content and plenty of visitors.
8. A lot of people are declaring Yahoo’s PPC program irrelevant. Do you buy into the idea that Google has won? How do you try to split your PPC money?
Google is a juggernaut, but the game is far from over! There are a lot of factors involved, but for a client who’s seeking a higher click volume through PPC (ie where they have a large daily budget to spend) in an industry of "average" competitive intensity (ie where the cost per click is <= $2), I recommend Google every time. Google has the volume to be able to deliver far high click volume, particularly on niched or specialized terms where the client is targeting a local market or country.
Regardless of the stats through industry bodies – I consistently observe Google referring the vast majority of traffic to my client sites, and Google PPC delivering the cast majority of ad impressions when compared side by side to Yahoo.
Having said that Yahoo, and even MSN are far from irrelevant – especially where the client has a smaller budget to spend, and is working in a highly competitive industry (flowers, home services, finance, SEO or other similar competitive topics). For some of these industries cost per click on adwords now is well above USD$4/click – we pay USD$5 – $7/click for SEO terms in Australia…..where on Yahoo and MSN, you can achieve clicks at a FAR lower cost than Google (Yahoo is generally around 70% of Adwords cost, and MSN even cheaper……in fact right now MSN is worthy of a look given they are in their infancy and prices for some terms incredibly low). Therefore if there’s an abundance of click traffic for your industry, then targeting Yahoo or MSN to get more clicks for your ad dollar can be a very effective strategy. So it’s kinda horses for courses, and you need to decide which channels work depending on your budget, and the competitive characteristics of the topics you are targeting.
9. You qualified as an AdWords Professional? Could you tell us what that
involves? What was on the exam? Is it worth taking?
I found the Adwords Professional exam to be really surprisingly good, in that it requires a 75% pass mark, was run by a professional testing company (IBM/Prometric) and had a good broad range of Adwords topics covered – certainly enough to weed out those who were trying to just ‘game’ the test after only a few hours of reading. You need to have spent a bit of time using Adwords to get the breadth of subject matter – but it’s definitely something you could study hard for and pass with reasonable success. There’s a fee (~$75) to sit the test, but you can repeat it if you fail.
The test covered topics such as bid management (automatic discounting, definitions of different terminology), ad copywriting (permitted length and use of copy, and legal use of trademarks, url structures), account structure (campaign targeting, geographic / regional targeting, site vs keyword targeted ads, billing information), keyword matching, and other more niched topics (mobile / image ads). I was caught out by a few tricky questions in these more niched type areas ie I hadn’t done much mobile advertising(!) and things like credit / refund policies and processes…..but managed to get through with a reasonable score.
As to whether it’s worth taking the exam – I think this is very much a marketing benefit for those offering PPC services to the market. The Google logo implies a good deal of trust, and as a Qualified Professional you get your own little mini-site / testimonial page from Google, and a statement of capability – so if you’re serious about offering PPC services to clients, then I think this test is a must. It never hurts to test your own knowledge about Adwords by doing the test, but mostly I think this is really about presenting a strong face to the market in offering Adwords services.
To become an “Adwords Qualified Company" (as opposed to an "Adwords Qualified Individual") is a much bigger undertaking, ie you need to be doing 6 figure ad spends each quarter, so we’re not quite there yet as a company – but it’s something we’re working towards over time.
If you’re thinking of doing the Adwords professional test – then I can recommend (of course!) reading my free eBook as a good place to start. It wont answer every question you’ll get but it’s a useful overview, and a good learning tool for someone who’s been running an Adwords campaign for a while – but who wants to achieve better results. I found a lot of the eBooks out there overly verbose, and it took me a looooong time to accumulate some of these insights, I’m trying to give a bit back to those just starting out.
10. Do you have any new projects in 2007 we should be looking out for?
We are preparing to launch an “email to blog” product which allows non-technical users to blog by simply posting to a publishing email address. This will be a complete web 2.0 project, and we’re quite excited about its prospects. Blogging via email has been done by a few of the larger players, but in our experience nobody has made the signup process simple enough, and the email to HTML conversion (including attached/embedded images) reliable enough so that my grandmother can write a blog – and this is what this project is about.
Anyway, it’s mostly under wraps right now, but I’m hopefully we’ll be in the market by the end of Q1 07, so keep an eye on our site for a press release. Who knows – I might be sipping a banana dacquiri on the beach in the Bahamas soon after selling out to a rich VC firm for millions (…but then again – I might be slaving away doing SEO work for client instead – doh! hahaha).
This week we’re delighted to welcome Andy Miller from RocketTheme.com to the interview chair.
Andy founded and runs Joomla’s largest template club with over 13,000 members. Oh, and in his spare time he has found time to be the creator of:
1) Hi Andy. Could you tell us a little about yourself? How did you come to Joomla? What’s your background?
Well, I’ve been involved in web development since my days in University back in the early 90s when hypertext was a new concept and gopher was the most common method of sharing information across networks. I was a computer engineering major and quickly got caught up in the excitement around the internet. Anyway long story short, I’ve been doing web development ever since.
I spent many years doing custom development in Java and eventually found PHP and Postnuke. It was a huge step forward from having to write your own administrative back-end, and I fell in love with the whole CMS concept. I quickly tired of Postnuke however, and went in search of something better. That’s when I found Mambo and really found the consistent look and feel and intuitive features really refreshing. The thing that sold me though was the templates. It was so easy to create great looking templates for mambo, much easier than in Postnuke and a myriad of other systems I had tried.
I started doing some templates and submitted a template “Planetfall” for the new mambo 4.5.2 template competition. About the same time I joined the mambo core team and began working on a new front-end template called “SolarFlare” and also a refreshed back-end template. I’ve been with the core team ever since and moved over with the rest of the developers when we started Joomla!
2) Have you worked or designed with other systems apart from Joomla? If so, how do they compare?
I’ve worked on many systems, in all kinds of languages including ASP, Java, Python, and PHP. I created several templates for Postnuke before I found Joomla! Nothing I’ve worked on really compares to Joomla! templating though, it’s just so easy to create sites that break the standard CMS mold. Some nice features for designers that were missing, have been added for Joomla! 1.5 such as xml parameters and template overrides so now the sky is really the limit!
3) What are the origins of RocketTheme? Has your sites growth to its current size been relatively smooth or have their been particular moments and templates that have really give your site a huge boost?
Well RocketTheme is the 3rd name change of the same club and template business that I’ve been running for nearly 3 years. I started off doing custom templates but I got a lot of requests from folks for a version of a custom design I had done, but I was unable to really reuse any of this custom work due to the agreements I had with my clients. I started the RocketTheme Template Club with a whopping 3 templates in the inventory. Membership has steadily grown since that time probably due to the increase in number of available templates. It’s been a relatively consistent ride and I think a huge part of that is just due to how great Joomla! is and how it’s popularity has risen. Sure, some templates are more popular than others, that’s just the way these things work. I try to ensure that we provide a very well-rounded selection of designs, not just the same old ‘business’ templates every month.
4) You were probably only the second or third Joomla template club around when you were MamboDev.com. Now there seem to be thousands. Aside from the designs themselves, what strategies do you use to try and distinguish yourselves from the competition? SEO? Community?
Yes, RocketTheme was the second club I think, and what sets RocketTheme apart is two-fold. First we continually push the Joomla! template envelope. We do things that have not been done before, and integrate new features while providing the best designs and the most flexibility. The second and perhaps this should of been first is our community. We have a fantastic community based around our forums and they really love to help everyone out. It’s a fun place to hang out as much as it a great resource for template developers. Also we pay very close attention to our members wants and needs, and we try to provide the designs they are asking for rather than just spitting out designs we think are cool. The last several templates have been a direct result of community requests. I think this only helps to build our community and makes everyone that much happier.
5) What design resources would you recommend for someone working on improving their design skills? Are there blogs and sites that you read often to pick up tips
There are so many great places to hone your web design skills, some of my personal favorites are:
http://alistapart.com
http://www.456bereastreet.com
http://www.andybudd.com
http://meyerweb.com
http://www.stylegala.com
http://www.unmatchedstyle.com
http://www.simplebits.com
http://9rules.com
My biggest tip, however is to use Firefox and run the Web Developer Tools. Learn how to use these as they are a great way to debug your code but also discover techniques and generally learn XHTML/CSS. The biggest thing to understand about being a template designer, is that you have to be a really good XHTML/CSS developer, it’s not just about good looking designs, the code underneath has to be solid.
6) Are there any features or scripts you see on non-Joomla designs that you would like to implement on your templates but can’t currently because of the way Joomla works?
Actually there is very little that can’t be done in a Joomla! template today. To be honest, due to the popularity of Joomla! and the huge template community based around it, Joomla! has the most advanced template’s available. Compare the current crop of Joomla! templates to any other CMS and you will be shocked at how many features and capabilities you get and probably take for granted, but just are not available for other platforms.
7) As someone highly involved in design, what benefits are you looking forward to with Joomla 1.5?
As I stated earlier, there are a number of key features available in 1.5 that I’ve been working with the other core developers on getting implemented. The first one that has long been overlooked is the ability for a designer to implement xml configuration parameters right in the templateDetails.xml. Up to this point, to configure custom elements in a template, developers have been forced to put variables in the php, but now in 1.5 we can define parameters and then these are configurable by the Joomla! administrator. For example, in the “Milkyway” template I designed for 1.5, I’ve included the ability to change the color styles, and also change the width of the template using these parameters. Current RocketTheme templates use variables extensively to configure design elements, so I’m really looking forward to having this feature moved to this new, more user-friendly format.
The overrides and custom chrome features are also fantastic. The overrides allows you to implement custom HTML for a module or component and include it right with your template. For example, I can create a custom login module html file so the layout of the login is completely changed and styled from the template. When you install the template, this new layout is automatically used without the need to do anything manually.
Custom chrome allows a developer to create a new module output style to produce a very custom looking module. These two features alone allow a template designer to create a Joomla! site that looks nothing like the standard Joomla! install, and really you no longer have any boundaries. It’s very exciting, I just can’t wait!
9) Do you have any new projects or plans in 2007 we should be looking out for?
Laugh, I’ve always got projects going, and yes there are quite a few things you can expect from RocketTheme this year. First we are expanding! I hope that we’ll be able to produce more template variations for specific vertical markets, and perhaps expand the designs to some other platforms that we commonly get requests for. Stay tuned!
In 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 🙂
We’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”
Well, Steve …
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.”
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?
Today we’re delighted to have?a chance to talk with Emir Sakic from Sakic.Net.
Emir has been?a member of Joomla’s core development team from the project start.?He is also the developer of SEF Advance which was the first component to provide Search Engine Friendly URLs for Mambo, the precursor?of Joomla!