Back in March I was able to test iJoomla.com’s new SEO component called, somewhat appropriately: iJoomla SEO. It didn’t impress me much. You weren’t able to add metadata to menu links or third-party extensions which meant that the homepage and many key sites pages were missed. 6 months later and a new version arrived, so I gave it a spin. My opinion this time was much different:
For several months now I’ve been hinting that we have a major geographic domain name to launch on Joomla. Well, life got in the way … the Joomla training classes became really popular, we had other sites to launch and almost everyone we work with is having a baby this year. So, although its missing a lot of features that are currently unpublished and being worked on, its time to soft-launch AppalachianTrail.com. The A.T. is huge, running all the way along the eastern side of the U.S.. It starts in Maine, up by the Canada border, and finishes down in…
Student: “What’s going on with Joomla 1.6?” Steve: “User management is going to get more sophisticated, you won’t be restricted to sections and categories for articles any more.” Student: “OK, but these guys are volunteers, right? How much have they got done? When can I see what it’ll look like?” Steve: “Errrrrr ….. ummmm …… when I get back I’ll take some screenshots of the current Alpha version and write a blog about it.”
One of the confusing things for anyone optimizing a Joomla site is that there are so many options out there. We ran a Joomla SEO class in Atlanta last week and one thing became clear … it was easy to grasp that there are several SEO extensions available and several issues that they fixed with Joomla. The problem was … which extensions fixed which things? This chart is an attempt to make that much more straight-forward:
Its time for us to put the coffee on and get some more Red Bull … starting tomorrow we’ll have a really busy week over at Joomla Training. In total, there are 8 classes in 8 days coming up on the JoomlaTraining.com schedule, including 3 in the Mid-West, 2 in Texas and 3 in the South-East. Mid-West All three classes are led by our expert teacher, Rod Martin. They take place at the beautiful Mets Center on the Ohio and Kentucky border, right next door the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport. About four tickets are left for each of these classes:…
Back in October 2008 we released Bolt which we marketed as “The World’s Fastest Joomla Template”. Several other template developers asked for copies to test against their own work, but the results were clear. Nearly 10 months later, someone has come along and beaten that mark. We’re proud of course that a company with 12 full-time template designers feels the need to compete with 2 guys working in their spare-time. I kind of wonder what took these professional developers so long? 😉 Since we released Bolt a lot of other companies such as YooTheme have worked on making their heavy…
That’s the clear conclusion of the data from Google Trends. Drupal has been substantially behind Joomla in popularity ever since the two projects were founded. WordPress has constantly grown its following and may even overtake Joomla this year, whereasDrupal has grown very slowly and steadily without ever looking likely to catch either. Drupal is great software and powers many amazing sites, but is it destined to always be the higher-end, boutique (and yes, less-popular) cousin of WordPress and Joomla? Comparing searches for Joomla compared the other two between 2006 and 2009: WordPress has gone 0.66 >> 0.72 >> 0.81 >>…
Time moves quickly. We did our first Joomla class in June 2008 and little more than a year later we’re approaching class number 50. Our 49th class is in Phoenix this Friday and then the big #50 will be our beginner class in Atlanta next week. To celebrate, Christmas is coming early to our students in that 50th class. We’ve arranged for a huge bag of Joomla goodies. If you can’t make it to Atlanta, don’t worry. At our current rate, we’ll reach class #100 around Christmas time and we’ll make sure the bonus bag for that class is even…
Brian Teeman posted earlier this week about Joomla.me which tries to find the most visited Joomla sites. The results were somewhat strange with quite a few minor sites appearing high up. On closer inspection it seems that the major problem was their methodology was using Alexa.com, a notoriously unreliable guide to website traffic numbers. So I’d like to open this up to community. What do you think are the most heavily trafficed Joomla sites? I’m particularly interested to hear from any of you with traffic numbers for large sites. Using Compete.com and data the sites have published about themselves, here’s…
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.…