Open Questions

Do you know of any major companies using Joomla?

I’ve decided to set the bar high by looking for sites that do over half-a-million uniques per month or belong to a truly substantial company. A good rule of thumb is “do they have a Wikipedia entry?”

Here’s what I’ve found so far:

• Angelica (Publicly-traded health services company)
• Avis (The car rental company in Nicaragua)
• Burger King (For a special promotion)
• CW.com (Main corporate site)
• Danone (A lot more than just yogurts)
• Derbi (Motorcycle maker – part of Piaggio)
• English National Ballet (England’s flagship ballet company)
• IBS Software (Software for airlines)
• IT Wire (Most popular IT site in Australia)
• Jetstar (Airline owned by Quantas)
• Latvia (The country’s official site)
• Mansfield Oil (Large U.S. Gasoline Distributor)
• Mistubishi Venezuela and Poland (The car manufacturer)
• Mountain West Sports (Cable TV sports channel owned by CBS)
• Nikon Instruments (High-quality technical products)
• Olympus (Camera maker’s Australian site)
• Peg Perego (Italian child accessories)
• Porsche (Brazilian site)
• Quizilla (Heavilly modded Joomla site owned by MTV)
• Scandinavian Airlines (Official crew guide)
• Schneider Electric (World leader in power and control solutions)
• Sprint (Customer feedback site for cell-phone company)
• TNA Wrestling (Pro-wrestling organization)
• Toshiba (Greek site for the electronics giant)
• UNRIC (Branch of the United Nations)
• Vodafone (Cell-phone company’s Icelandic site)
• Visat (Danish site for Scandanavian TV and telecommunications company)
• Yamaha (Musical instrument company’s Mexican site)

Feel free to post more sites in the comments and I’ll add to this list whenever we find a new one.

Earlier this week I posted my talk about Joomla SEO from the JoomlaExpo in Chicago. The penultimate slide was a list of sites that ranked #1 on Google and some people responding with details of their own success with Joomla.

I’m going to be giving variations of this presentation a few more times in months to come and so I thought I’d give you an opportunity to boast:

Do you have a Joomla site with great rankings? 

Feel free to post as many or as few details about the site as you wish. I’ll include the best ones in the presentation.

Joomla recently announced that they’re looking for white papers, proposing ways to make the next version even better than 1.5.

So, together with some of Joomla’s brightest SEO minds, we’ve taken up the challenge and are writing a paper with our suggestions for improving SEO in 1.6.

We’d love to hear ideas from the community to include in the proposal:

What SEO improvements would you like to see in Joomla 1.6?

Already on the list are ideas such as improving control over metadata. What else should we do to make Joomla the most search-engine friendly CMS available? 

Open Question Thursday again:

Most people reading this blog make some money from the internet. For some, perhaps even a majority, its your largest source of income.

Continue reading “Open Question: How Will You Survive a Recession?”

Over the next few weeks I thought it would be fun to throw out a few open question. We’d love to here your answers to the first questions:

What kind of success do your Joomla sites have with Google Alerts?

• Are your blog posts always picked up for the keywords you’re targeting?
• Do you end up in the blog or news category?
• Do you have any particular tricks to make sure your posts are emailed to as many people as possible?

My personal experience is that I can set up a WordPress site tomorrow and have 100% of the posts picked up. However Joomla sites have been much more hit-and-miss.