One of the questions I get asked most frequently is, “should I use an automatic metatag generator?”.
Should we leave our metatags for machines to create?
My answer depends on your website…
Continue reading “Should I Bother to Write Joomla Metatags?”
Steve’s Blog
Joomla URL Week Part 3 – Artio SEF Review
In the third part of our series on optimizing Joomla’s URLs, we’re going to take a look at Artio SEF.
Artio is the new kid on the block, having been in the hands of its current developers for less than a year. It has quickly earned a strong following with nearly 50 reviews on Joomla.org making it among the most talked-about extensions around.
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How Can I Keep Track of People Visiting My Website?
Anyone like myself who spends all day online and browsing across many different websites, will be able to tell you one thing: “spotting an old-fashioned website is as easy as spotting an old-fashioned movie or car”.
Wheres an old movie may be in black-and-white and an old car may have a running board, its easy to spot old-fashioned websites because they contain something that looks like this:
These are hit counters, which increase by 1 every time a visitor comes to your site. They are the Ishtar and Yugo cars of the Internet. They are not only outdated but also a problem for your website. Let me give you three reasons why:
Problems With Hit Counters
• The numbers only go up. If a website has 2 visitors in January and 1000 in February, that would be great. However, you could have 1000 visitors in January and 2 in February. That would be a big problem, in both cases the hit counter would say “1002”.
• They are ugly. See the picture for proof.
• They allow other people to see your visitor details. Your website data should be a competitive secret rather than being openly available.
Fortunately, there is are options that will allow you to collect information about your visitors in a much more detailed, unobtrusive and accurate manner. In this article, I’m going to talk about the most popular option:
Google Analytics
Back in April 2005 Google purchased a small company called Urchin that provided data on who was visting people’s websites. Now Urchin was charging between $495 and $895 per website per month for it services. It took a while to Google to properly integrate Urchin’s software into its own setup but in August 2006, they announced that the previously expensive service was available for free, to everyone.
It really is great news and if you’re not taking advantage of this free service, you’re losing the opportunity to see a lot of valuable data about your website.
This is available from http://www.google.com/analytics/.
• Sign up for an account
• Click “Add Website Profile”
• Take the code that Google will give you and add it to every page on your website. The code will never show so people who not be able to see your visitor data.
There are over 80 unique reports available, showing everything from the location of your visitors from around the world, to which pages they used to enter and leave your site. It’s a powerful for everyone to learn more about their website.
Google Analytics Problems You Should be Aware Of
- Some people say that Google often under-reports the number of visitors to websites. Its always worth having a second data collection source to make sure.
- Occasionally it can slow your website down.
- Some people may have ad filtering software on their computer which may prevent Google Analytics collecting data about them.
Overall, we have installed the software on over 50 sites and have found these problems to be relatively minor in comparison to the usefulness and accuracy of the data that the program collects.
Is Flash a Good Choice for My Website?
Flash is it allows a web programmer/designer to implement animated graphics, movies, and even sound at a website. It can be used to create an entire website or just small pieces. It is the tool used for some of the most creative websites yet seen by web users, such as LeoBurnett.com. However, its popularity has been challenged because of various problems experienced by users. In this article, I’ll talk about those issues and help you decide whether a Flash website is right for you.
1) Not Everyone is Able to View Flash
This problem is not as big as it used to be. The number of web users who are able to view Flash has been steadily climbing. Currently around 95% of visitors will be able to see a Flash website.
2) Flash Websites Don’t Rank Well in Search Engines
True. Site such as LeoBurnett.com are such extraordinary endeavours that they can get some search engine traction simply because of the number of people admiring their work and linking to them. This is a problem with all but the best-designed Flash websites. Increasingly, cutting-edge designers are coming up with ways to enable search engines to index the content of Flash files. However, for most new Flash websites and for nearly all Flash websites designed more than two years ago, a good search engine ranking is impossible.
3) Flash Websites are Difficult for People to Update
Also true, I’m afraid. Most people with Flash sites end up never updating them or relying on their designer to make all the necessary updates. On today’s Internet neither solution is really satisfactory, because fresh, regularly-updated content is the essential for a successful website.
4) Flash is Used to Liven up Boring Content
Simply, because the content on a website is not that interesting, some people’s reaction is that Flash is the best tool to liven things up. However, boring information is boring information. Make sure that Flash is an extra bonus on your website rather than they key reason for considering your site “interesting”.
5) Flash Websites are Difficult for Users to Navigate
- The "Back" button does not work. Clicking it will take you back to the previous website rather than the previous Flash page.
- Link colors don’t work, so its hard to tell which pages you have already visited
- The "Make text bigger/smaller" button does not work, making the site difficult to read for people with poor vision
- They are often slower to load than traditional website.
6) Flash Websites are Expensive
Normally, a well-designed Flash website will cost between $5000 and $10,000 which is about three times the cost of a static site. To me this is the key problem with Flash websites. A great Flash site can overcome almost all of the problems outlines above, but such websites are beyond the budget of all but the most wealthy companies.
Flash is a good tool to add dynamism to static webpages. However, unless you have deep pockets or very talented and generous friends, Flash should be restricted to playing a small role on your website.
Joomla Extension of the Month – April 07
As popular as Joomla is, its surprising how many gaps remain to be filled when it comes to having an extension to cover the needs of most normal websites.
We’re still searching for a decent jobboard, advertisment management and customer support component among other things. Until recently, we also lacked a good portfolio component. A quick browse around the Joomla world show that most designers have just been putting their site showcases inside of content items.
What’s Your Favorite Joomla Extension Discovery?
OK …. A very simple post today and a test to see how many people actually read this blog 🙂
One of my favorite things about working full-time with Joomla is that even though I spend 12 hours per day with my head buried in the software, there’s always another extension around the corner ready to do something so great that it expands what I think Joomla can do.
Continue reading “What’s Your Favorite Joomla Extension Discovery?”
Using Robots.txt to Keep Your Joomla Pages Under Control
The technical side of Joomla SEO can be summed up in one sentence: keep your URLs under control.
Joomla really is a powerful tool for creating content-rich websites but its also easy to end up with a whole lot of useless URLs.
In today’s post, we’ll use MosTree as an example of how to manage Joomla URLs, using the wonderful sounding robots.txt file.
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How to Control the “Read More” on Joomla’s Frontpage
A simple tip today. This small Joomla code hack is designed to help those of you who have a lot of people submitting content to their site.
Everyone writes and submits in their own way, so its easy to end up with some contributors just writing a single line in the "intro" box and others entering their whole article.
With this hack, it doesn’t matter. You can cut off all frontpage items with a "Read More…" after 200 words, giving your site a clean, professional look.
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Why Aren’t Open Source Projects on Digg More Often?
JoomlaCode.org was released last week, and it was a major step forward for Joomla.
Despite this good news the story didn’t make it far beyond the Joomla community. Amy Stephen posted on her blog, urging people to vote for it on Digg.com, but the story ended up with 40 votes. That’s about 10% of the votes normally needed to make the Digg frontpage.
That poor showing got me asking a simple question….Why aren’t Open Source projects more sucessfull on social news sites?
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Interview with Ryan Szrama from Ubercart
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.
Understanding Joomla URLs and Itemids
One of the most? frequently asked questions on the Joomla forums is “What is the Itemid and what does it do?”. Its something that frustrates even experienced developers … witness the post called “Damn you, infernal item IDs!!!” on WhyJoomla.com.
I thought a quick tutorial would be useful and along the way we can break down other aspects of Joomla URLs.
Joomla User Group in Atlanta and U.S. South East
We’re delighted to announce the launch of Joomla South East, which is one of a growing number of Joomla User Groups around the world.
We aim to have our first meeting(s) in Atlanta but also to reach out to current and potential Joomla users around the South East of the United States.
If you’re interested, please sign up at JoomlaSouthEast.com. Then you can go to the forum and help us work out where and when we can first meet as Joomla South East!
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