Steve’s Blog

Be Careful of Joomla Automatic Translation Tools

People love short cuts. People particularly love short cuts that they think will reach 1000s of new customers. So, its easy to understand why people might love automatic translation tools.

  • "I’ve just translated my site into 12 languages by installing a module! Cool!
  • "Hey, my website’s in Chinese now … thats a billion new customers!"

However, this is a clear case where easy is not best.

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Knol.com

Knol.com Another Joomla Site in the News

There’s been a lot of hype this week about Google’s new Knol project that people have been comparing to Wikipedia, and there’s a Joomla connection…

Who are the owners of Knol.com?

Knol.comIts a Dutch vacuum cleaner company who have been in business since 1969. They have a Joomla website using Virtuemart and a Rockettheme template. Apparently it crashed in the aftermath of the announcement, but its back online now and the owner Hilco Knol says he’s not selling:

 "Till now have google don’t take contact with us we are positif suprised for using the name KNOL because it is my own name.

We want to launch our own products what you can see on our knol.com Internet site.

For the rest we see whats happening."

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Joomla SEO Site Review

Update to a Joomla SEO Site Review from June

Joomla SEO Site Review Back in the summer of this year where we had a short series offering free site reviews to companies who didn’t mind having the advice made public to help others learn. We had an email this week from John Parker who asked us to examine his site va-home-loansonline.com which provides home loans to Texas military veterans. You can see what the site looked like before the review at Archive.org.

He’s really done a great job of taking our suggestions from the analysis and SEO Book, and then implementing them successfully. Here’s his update, 6 months after the initial review:

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Working Hard This Week

Lots of New Changes at Alledia

Working Hard This Week Over the last week we’ve been working really hard on changes? here at Alledia, aiming to make the site better for SEO Club members and people who are just visiting.

Changes for SEO Club Subscribers

  1. New chapters of the SEO Book dealing with Joomfish, multilingual sites, international sites plus case Studies with real-life examples of improvements we’ve made to clients’ websites and the impact they’ve had.
  2. New checklists making it easy to ensure you’ve optimized your site for launch, for local search and when you’re upgrading.
  3. A really active and supportive forum helping you to get all your Joomla SEO questions answered.
  4. Redesigned the navigation for logged-in users to make browsing the site much easier. You won’t see any more adverts at all.

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The Top Rated Joomla Book on Amazon

I don’t often talk about work with private clients, but I had one really interesting experience that taught me a lot.

Early in 2007, I was asked by Apress.com to be the Technical Reviewer for Dan Rahmel’s new Joomla book: “Beginning Joomla! From Novice to Professional.” As a blogger it was fascinating to get a small glimpse into the world of book publishing and the processes they have for making sure a book hits the shelves ready-to-roll, with all spelling, grammatical and tutorial bugs squashed.

I’m really pleased to notice that its now the best-reviewed Joomla book on Amazon.com.

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Read More on Your Joomla Frontpage

This is a guest post from Tom Maiaroto of ExpandTheRoom. In this post he explains how to set the "Read More" on your Joomla frontpage to appear after a certain number of characters. This is useful to keep a standard appearance for your articles when you have a large number of people submitting content.

This post grew out of comment that Tom made on our original discussion about the "read more" on Joomla’s frontpage.

We welcome other guest posts. Simply login and click "Make a Guest Blog Post" in the right-hand menu.

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Video Explaining Google Analytics Goals in Joomla

Today is the first in a series of video blog posts about setting up Google Analytics on your Joomla site. We’re getting started by explaining how to setup goals – how do you track whether your site is doing what it was designed for (selling products, generating leads, making you money).

In the video I talk about sending everyone to a single page once they’ve completed a goal on your site. Click here for those instructions.

For experienced Analytics users we have five advanced tips.

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