Steve’s Blog

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.…

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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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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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Are Smart Companies Now Supporting Several CMS Platforms?

I’m always on the lookout for business trends in our industry and I’ve spotted a significant new one in recent months. Increasingly CMS companies are supporting different platforms. The choice for each company is different, but the trend seems real: Examples of Joomla Companies Supporting Other Platforms Rockettheme: Joomla and phpBB3 Joomlart: Joomla and Magento JoomlaJunkie: Working on ProThemer.com and building for Joomla, Drupal and Magento JoomlaPraise: Working on CMSMarket.com CMSExpo: Started with Joomla and expanded to all kinds of Open Source CMS

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Joomla Classes in Nashville and Charlotte

Alledia is based down in the south of the United States in Atlanta. We started our Joomla training classes here and by the end of June we’ll have run almost a dozen Atlanta classes. Its time to spread the Joomla gospel (the Jospel?) a little further around the south so early next week we’re headed to Charlotte, North Carolina and the Music City of Nashville, Tennessee. We’ll be in Charlotte on Monday 8, and Nashville on Tuesday 9.

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Thoughts From Two Weeks Away

In the last two weeks I’ve been in Dallas, Austin, San Antonio, Houston, Atlanta, Pittsburgh, Washington, New York and even Alaska. Just one more short trip to Charlotte and Nashville left. The trip taught me something. For two weeks I kept in touch via email and cellphone but had no time for three things I’d been using every day. Two of them I really missed, the other … not so much.

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Leadership is Now The Strongest Marketing Strategy

One of the hardest things to explain to people when we’re discussing SEO nowadays is that its not about the h1 tags, nofollow links and managing Page Rank. Aaron Wood summed this up well by saying that for the modern marketer, PR should stand for “personal relationships” rather than “Page Rank”. Even more accurate is this quote from Seth Godin “Yelling with gusto used to be the best way to advertise your wares. There was plenty of media and if you had plenty of money, you were set. Today, of course, yelling doesn’t work so well. What works is leading.…

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Sponsored Review of WebHostingReport.com

This is an interesting review request that popped up in our inbox. WebHostingReport.com is a good domain name but a somewhat thin affiliate site. It aims to rank for hosting, blog hosting, cheap web hosting and other keyword terms. The site doesn’t have much going for it in terms of interest, but its a nice example of targeted lead generation. To me it looks like more a more sophisticated version of the Siteground promotional sites we discussed last year. A short list of five hosts, with one favored host almost always on top Lots of interlinking for keywords A small…

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Joomla Classes in Texas and the Mid-West

The Joomla Training bandwagon is starting to roll this year. We’ve thoroughly covered the East and West coasts of the United States, and not it’s time to do more work on the center of the country. If you’re in Texas and the Mid-West we’ve got Joomla classes coming up for you in the next three weeks. Texas Joomla Classes Dallas – May 18 Austin – May 19 San Antonio – May 21 Houston – May 22

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Feedback Request on New Joomla Jobs Component

This is a guest post by Ulas Alkan from InstantPHP.com. He’s looking for feedback on his new jobs component for Joomla 1.5. I mentioned a couple of years ago that Joomla really needed a quality jobs board. Maybe this is it … Jobs is a recruitment component for Joomla. It offers web sites owners to run their job software website. Jobs is targeting 2 types of web site (Company web sites and Community based web sites). The full product description is on this url and you can see the full demo by visiting this site.

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