Steve’s Blog

August 10, 2009
87 Comments

Lifestyle Businesses or Why I Quit Web Design

There’s a Japanese show that moved to the BBC as “Dragon’s Den” and is in the U.S. now as “Shark Tank”. The format is simple: one business owner stands in front of five millionaires and tries to get investment in their company.

I watched two episodes of the BBC version last week and one phrase kept getting repeated “lifestyle business”. This meant:

Started primarily because the founder enjoyed doing what they’re doing
Depend largely on the skills of one person, with a few possible hangers-on.
Are difficult to scale in income or quantity.

Needless to say, they didn’t get investment. The more I listened, the more it sounded like the situation I was in a couple of years ago.

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July 27, 2009

Breeze – the World’s Easiest Joomla template

We don’t launch a new template very often, but when we do it needs to be special.

Back in October last year, we created Bolt which was the fastest ever Joomla template. Now we’re happy to release Breeze, which is the easiest Joomla template ever.

EASY: Breeze has exactly the same configuration as Joomla’s default Milkyway template so all you need to is upload the template and your logo. No other set-up needed!

SIMPLE: Besides the easy configuration, this is also a ridiculously fast template. Depending on how it?s configured, it can use as little as 4 HTTP requests and only 2 images.

STYLISH: Breeze is clean and professional with a slick, horizontal menu:

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July 26, 2009

The Prodigy Start Fires With Joomla

The Prodigy were the sound of England for much of the 1990s. For people of my age, growing up in the UK, only Oasis or perhaps Blur could claim to be as popular or as cool. My friends and I have a lot of good memories set to tunes like Firestarter, Voodoo People, No Good and Poison.

10 years later they’re still hanging around and their new site is built in Joomla. TheProdigy.com is a fairly straightforward but well-executed site that uses these extensions:

Jomsocial for the community
Jomcomment for the comments
RSGallery for the photos
Seyret for the videos

The template seems to be based on the JA-ZinC design from Joomlart.com, but people can choose another design for the site via the “Skins” link in the top menu.

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July 24, 2009

Special Weekend Discount on Training and Templates

It’s been a great week (and as a consequence, you might have noticed less blogging) … its was my birthday, my sister’s birthday, my wife’s birthday … oh and my sister-in-law had a baby too (Rory, on the right here)

So this weekend, from now until Sunday evening, we’re offering a special discount … use “happyweek” for a 20% discount on any of our products. It might be a template, an SEO club subscription or any of our August training classes. Offer ends just over 48 hours from now when I come down to earth again and have to go back to work on Monday morning.

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July 15, 2009

NewOrleans.com Runs Joomla

We uncovered some other large geo-sites using Joomla including SanDiego.com and TimesSquare.com but I have a new favorite: NewOrleans.com.

Back in 2006 the site was rebuilt in Joomla by a company called Silicon Chisel who gave a detailed rundown on the move. Not all of those pieces are still in place but the core of the site is still Joomla and I think its a very effective, professional set-up.

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July 9, 2009

Joomla 1.6 and SEO

If you haven’t done so already, you need to head to Joomlacode.org and download Andrew Eddie’s presentation on Joomla 1.6. Its also on video at Vimeo. After reading, I’m more encouraged about Joomla’s future than I have been for months.

The presentation has 39 detailed slides, so I won’t try to recap them all – look for that in a blog post next week. Today, I’ll focus on what’s important from an SEO perspective:

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July 7, 2009
10 Comments

The Best Content Versioning in Joomla

During the last few weeks I’ve been working on taking our Joomla training classes online and we’ve been sending out a free weekly newsletter with Joomla tips and tricks. Last week, I decided to spend some time answering two really common questions:

“What happens if someone makes a mistake in an article? How can we roll back to a previous version?”
“We have a legal requirement to track the articles that appear on our website – how do we do that?”

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June 28, 2009
11 Comments

British Telecom Rolling Out Joomla To Customers

We had a student at our Cambridge class who put me on this trail of this … apparently British Telecom are rolling out Joomla for nearly all of their customers’ websites. With the exception of e-commerce,it seems to be their default system for building customer sites. For those of you not familiar with BT, it is far and away the biggest telecom company in the U.K.

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June 15, 2009

Joomla Classes in the U.K.: London and Cambridge

London Joomla It is that time of the year again … I’m headed back the U.K. for a couple of weeks.

Mainly the trip will be family-orientated as I’ve sisters who are graduating, getting married and having babies. There’s a lot to catch up on!

However, it’s a rare vacation nowadays that doesn’t involve Joomla in some way. So we’re holding two Joomla training classes, one in Cambridge on June 25th and another in London on July 1st.

Both classes will be identical to the ones we run in the U.S. with the same materials, resources, price and even the same bad wisecracks. I may just have to edit the Powerpoints a little to replace somes “z”s with “s”s and find some Essex jokes to replace the Redneck ones.

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June 15, 2009

SEO Template Presentation from Joomla Day Netherlands

Joomla Day Netherlands took place this weekend and by all accounts it was a great success.

There was the official release for Joomla’s new Resources Directory, a presentation with useful security tips by Brian Teeman, and a really good overview of how to create a Joomla SEO-optimized template:

Rene Kreijveld from Webcreatives.nl does a great job of explaining how to create a basic source-ordered template. “Source-ordered” essentially means putting the unique, original text on a page higher up in the code, so that search engines don’t have to wade through lines and lines of repetitive code before reaching tha text. I’d recommend viewing the slides in full-screen as some of the code displayed is small (click the icon on the bottom, second from the right):

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June 10, 2009

What’s Your Favorite Joomla Analogy?

People who teach Joomla know they feeling … things have been going well, but suddenly there’s a blank look. The student’s stuck on one point. You’ve tried a few ways to explain it, but they’re not getting the big picture. You rack your brain and start, “well, Joomla’s just like a … ” and you try to dig out a comparison.

Here are my top five favorite analogies to help people grasp Joomla’s key concepts. Please feel free to post your own in the comments.

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June 8, 2009
11 Comments

What’s Happening With Joomla?

Listen.. people be askin me all the time,
“Yo Mos, what’s gettin ready to happen with Hip-Hop?”
(Where do you think Hip-Hop is goin?)
I tell em, “You know what’s gonna happen with Hip-Hop?
Whatever’s happening with us”
If we smoked out, Hip-Hop is gonna be smoked out
If we doin alright, Hip-Hop is gonna be doin alright
People talk about Hip-Hop like it’s some giant livin in the hillside
comin down to visit the townspeople.”

Lyrics from Fear Not of Man by Mos Def

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