Steve’s Blog

January 25, 2007

How Long Should a Website Take to Build?

I met with a client a couple of weeks ago who admitted that his knowledge of the internet was more or less zero, yet he managed to make me rethink the way we handle a lot of our website projects.

Now this guy is a Baby Boomer and has spent most of his life dealing with patients in his health practice and very, very little on the computer. He asked me to come in for a meeting and after a while I agreed that we’d build a website for his company.

We started to discuss the specifics of the agreement and had no problems fixing on a price and a design. He asked me how long it would take to complete the project.

"About a month", I answered.

His simple answer was "Why?". He went on, "If I can see a patient whose case is new to me, treat them and get them out of the door inside of an hour, why do webdesigners need a month to get their job done?"

Now, granted, he didn’t have the best view of webdesigners (the last one he’d contracted with had promised delivery in two months and hadn’t provided it within four months, which is why he came to us), but he had a point. Back when I started building websites, it really did take a month or more to build the design, copy the HTML template over to each new page and then to go back and forth with the client until the design was fixed. After all, once the website was complete, it would be a pain in the rear to make any changes. But now with Joomla, should I really be using a month as the default timeframe for a relatively straightforward site?

Simply – no. Theres no reason why Alledia can’t turn around a Joomla website inside of two weeks. And thats what we agreed on with the guy. We worked a little overtime and put off some in-house projects for a week or two, but we got the site done in ten days and found a new way of working.

We’ve done two more projects in the same way since and will probably keep doing it. Turning around projects in two weeks rather than one or two months means that:

The client is more focused. Documents needed for the site materialise rapidly when the deadline is only a day or two away.
We’re more focused. Like it or not, a deadline atmosphere is productive.
We’re more profitable. We turn over more projects
Our prices are cheaper. With a loose or far-away deadline, past clients often wanted to "try things out" and then put them back the way they were, or spend hours on a small issue, increasing the cost of the site. That can still happen, but now clients often prefer to launch and then wait for feedback from the clients and business partners who offer more practical ways to improve the site.

Has the quality of our sites suffered by working faster? I don’t believe so. After only three sites its not easy to tell, but we’ve spent the same number of hours on 2-week sites as we did on 2-month sites and we went through the same number of mock-up and revision phases. Simply, I’m now less inclined to believe that the umming and aaahing that goes on during the webdesign process helps more than does increasing a company’s speed-to-market.

Obviously there will still be plenty of large and complex projects that will need many weeks, and sometimes our schedule may not allow for such rapid completion, but in general projects that come to us requiring a template and off-the-shelf Joomla components will be complete within fourteen days, if thats what the client wants.

January 24, 2007

10 Easy Ways to Professionalise Your Joomla Site

We’ll begin with 5 ways to make your Joomla site as professional as possible:

Create a new favicon.ico. Yes, the default black Joomla logo is cute, but people bookmarking your site they need to see something that identifies your site rather than Joomla. If you don’t want to design on a 16×16 pixels scale, there are sites that will generate a favicon for you. Then upload it to your images folder.
Make sure you backup your database everyday. We recommend the JomBackup Daily MySQL backup plugin.
Don’t cut and paste from Microsoft Word. It may be easy but Word produces some of the worst HTML ever seen by the eyes of man. Cut and paste into a text editor such as Notepad before adding that content to your site.
Make sure you put the Search button in an obvious place. A search of the latest 20 sites on the Joomla forums showcase reveals that more than half don’t have a clearly visible search button. Low on the left or right hand column are not great places. Try and put it close to the menu so that people’s eyes are naturally drawn to it.
Utilize "Read More". Lots of visitors will never get past your frontpage. Make sure that your homepage is not a long text area and start creating some "tease" text. Articles should not be longer than 3 or 4 sentences, followed by a "Read More…" link.

5 ways to improve your site via your Global Configuration file:

Content >> Unpublish the PDF and Print options. These create duplicate content problems in Google and may hinder your SEO succcess.
Server >> Use Server Defaults. Setting this to 777 or 775 leaves big security holes in your site.
Metadata. Don’t overload here. Keep it to a maximum of 5 description words and 5 keywords. These will appear on every page and you want to allow each page to have its own keywords.
Cache. Turn it on! Your site will run faster. The cache function saves copies of the web page so that users don’t have to load your whole page every time they visit.
Statistics. Turn them off! They’ll slow your site down. Go and get Google Analytics instead.

January 23, 2007

Open Source Projects Not Really Open?

(After reading this post, please scroll down to the comments section where there is a response to these issues from the founder of Moodle.)

Over the last few weeks a debate has been running over at the Joomla forum about how to license the Joomla name and logo for websites supporting the Joomla project. The discussion wound up with the following point from Johan Janssens, the lead developer:

If you wish to use the logo on any commercial product then your usage of the logo must be approved. In general permission will be given providing that your usage of the logo is not done in such a way as to imply any form of approval of the product by Joomla!

We’ve had an interesting insight into the licensing of Open Source names and logos.

During 2006 we had a lot of fun creating and running JoomlaYellowPages.com and DrupalYellowPages.com, and more recently, OSCYellowPages.com for OS Commerce developers. We believe that all three sites are positive for their different open source communities and we had no problem at all using the names and logos of the three projects in our branding and design work.

After successfully completing three launches, we moved on to Moodle. MoodleYellowPages.com was greated with a series of stern warnings. Despite being branded as an Open Source project, it is in fact illegal for an company to offer Moodle services unless they have been approved by a man named Martin Dougiamas in Perth, Australia. He alone controls trademarks over both the Moodle name and logo. The official position is that:

“The word Moodle is a legally registered trade mark, and can not be used to promote Moodle services without permission.

If you are not offering Moodle services (such as hosting, consulting, installation etc) then, yes, you can use the logo (we encourage it!).

However if you are promoting commercial Moodle services then you need to seek permission from us, via this Moodle Helpdesk, as the Moodle logo contains the Moodle trademark.”

Basically, you cannot run a Moodle business without Martin’s on-going approval.

Within a few days of opening, MoodleYellowPages.com we started to receive emails from developers interested in learning more about Joomla and its LMS systems, because they had been shut out of the commercial Moodle world.

Reluctantly, we shut down that site and started to consider alternatives. The next on our list was OpenCms. It turns out that:

The OpenCms logo is a registered trademark of Alkacon Software GmbH in Germany, the USA and many other countries.

Like Moodle, they also have an officially approved list of developers and if you want to use the logo:

Permission is granted to use the OpenCms logo in unmodified form on your website for promoting the official OpenCms software available form the opencms.org website only.

We emailed Alkacon, but they never responded.

To be on the safe side, I decided not to include any of their logos in this article. Come to that, maybe I should replace OpenCMS and Moodle with XXXXXXX and XXXXXX.

Basically these projects are suffering from the same, serious problem that caused Joomla to break away from Mambo. An Open Source project can meet the technical definitions of “Open Source” while remaining, in reality, the fiefdom of one small company or even one person. Joomla and Drupal are not perfect, but we’re certainly not moving to Moodle or OpenCms anytime soon.

January 21, 2007

Interview with Andy Milller from RocketTheme

This week we’re delighted to welcome Andy Miller from RocketTheme.com to the interview chair.

Andy founded and runs Joomla’s largest template club with over 13,000 members. Oh, and in his spare time he has found time to be the creator of:

The templates on Joomla.org and OpenSourceMatters.com
“Solarflare” which is the default theme for the current version of Joomla!
MilkyWay which will be new default for Joomla! 1.5

1) Hi Andy. Could you tell us a little about yourself? How did you come to Joomla? What’s your background?

Well, I’ve been involved in web development since my days in University back in the early 90s when hypertext was a new concept and gopher was the most common method of sharing information across networks. I was a computer engineering major and quickly got caught up in the excitement around the internet. Anyway long story short, I’ve been doing web development ever since.

I spent many years doing custom development in Java and eventually found PHP and Postnuke. It was a huge step forward from having to write your own administrative back-end, and I fell in love with the whole CMS concept. I quickly tired of Postnuke however, and went in search of something better. That’s when I found Mambo and really found the consistent look and feel and intuitive features really refreshing. The thing that sold me though was the templates. It was so easy to create great looking templates for mambo, much easier than in Postnuke and a myriad of other systems I had tried.

I started doing some templates and submitted a template “Planetfall” for the new mambo 4.5.2 template competition. About the same time I joined the mambo core team and began working on a new front-end template called “SolarFlare” and also a refreshed back-end template. I’ve been with the core team ever since and moved over with the rest of the developers when we started Joomla!

2) Have you worked or designed with other systems apart from Joomla? If so, how do they compare?

I’ve worked on many systems, in all kinds of languages including ASP, Java, Python, and PHP. I created several templates for Postnuke before I found Joomla! Nothing I’ve worked on really compares to Joomla! templating though, it’s just so easy to create sites that break the standard CMS mold. Some nice features for designers that were missing, have been added for Joomla! 1.5 such as xml parameters and template overrides so now the sky is really the limit!

3) What are the origins of RocketTheme? Has your sites growth to its current size been relatively smooth or have their been particular moments and templates that have really give your site a huge boost?

Well RocketTheme is the 3rd name change of the same club and template business that I’ve been running for nearly 3 years. I started off doing custom templates but I got a lot of requests from folks for a version of a custom design I had done, but I was unable to really reuse any of this custom work due to the agreements I had with my clients. I started the RocketTheme Template Club with a whopping 3 templates in the inventory. Membership has steadily grown since that time probably due to the increase in number of available templates. It’s been a relatively consistent ride and I think a huge part of that is just due to how great Joomla! is and how it’s popularity has risen. Sure, some templates are more popular than others, that’s just the way these things work. I try to ensure that we provide a very well-rounded selection of designs, not just the same old ‘business’ templates every month.

4) You were probably only the second or third Joomla template club around when you were MamboDev.com. Now there seem to be thousands. Aside from the designs themselves, what strategies do you use to try and distinguish yourselves from the competition? SEO? Community?

Yes, RocketTheme was the second club I think, and what sets RocketTheme apart is two-fold. First we continually push the Joomla! template envelope. We do things that have not been done before, and integrate new features while providing the best designs and the most flexibility. The second and perhaps this should of been first is our community. We have a fantastic community based around our forums and they really love to help everyone out. It’s a fun place to hang out as much as it a great resource for template developers. Also we pay very close attention to our members wants and needs, and we try to provide the designs they are asking for rather than just spitting out designs we think are cool. The last several templates have been a direct result of community requests. I think this only helps to build our community and makes everyone that much happier.

5) What design resources would you recommend for someone working on improving their design skills? Are there blogs and sites that you read often to pick up tips

There are so many great places to hone your web design skills, some of my personal favorites are:

http://alistapart.com
http://www.456bereastreet.com
http://www.andybudd.com
http://meyerweb.com
http://www.stylegala.com
http://www.unmatchedstyle.com
http://www.simplebits.com
http://9rules.com

My biggest tip, however is to use Firefox and run the Web Developer Tools. Learn how to use these as they are a great way to debug your code but also discover techniques and generally learn XHTML/CSS. The biggest thing to understand about being a template designer, is that you have to be a really good XHTML/CSS developer, it’s not just about good looking designs, the code underneath has to be solid.

6) Are there any features or scripts you see on non-Joomla designs that you would like to implement on your templates but can’t currently because of the way Joomla works?

Actually there is very little that can’t be done in a Joomla! template today. To be honest, due to the popularity of Joomla! and the huge template community based around it, Joomla! has the most advanced template’s available. Compare the current crop of Joomla! templates to any other CMS and you will be shocked at how many features and capabilities you get and probably take for granted, but just are not available for other platforms.

7) As someone highly involved in design, what benefits are you looking forward to with Joomla 1.5?

As I stated earlier, there are a number of key features available in 1.5 that I’ve been working with the other core developers on getting implemented. The first one that has long been overlooked is the ability for a designer to implement xml configuration parameters right in the templateDetails.xml. Up to this point, to configure custom elements in a template, developers have been forced to put variables in the php, but now in 1.5 we can define parameters and then these are configurable by the Joomla! administrator. For example, in the “Milkyway” template I designed for 1.5, I’ve included the ability to change the color styles, and also change the width of the template using these parameters. Current RocketTheme templates use variables extensively to configure design elements, so I’m really looking forward to having this feature moved to this new, more user-friendly format.

The overrides and custom chrome features are also fantastic. The overrides allows you to implement custom HTML for a module or component and include it right with your template. For example, I can create a custom login module html file so the layout of the login is completely changed and styled from the template. When you install the template, this new layout is automatically used without the need to do anything manually.

Custom chrome allows a developer to create a new module output style to produce a very custom looking module. These two features alone allow a template designer to create a Joomla! site that looks nothing like the standard Joomla! install, and really you no longer have any boundaries. It’s very exciting, I just can’t wait!

9) Do you have any new projects or plans in 2007 we should be looking out for?

Laugh, I’ve always got projects going, and yes there are quite a few things you can expect from RocketTheme this year. First we are expanding! I hope that we’ll be able to produce more template variations for specific vertical markets, and perhaps expand the designs to some other platforms that we commonly get requests for. Stay tuned!

January 19, 2007

Using Firefox to Help Clients

One of the first things we do when working with new clients is ask them to install Firefox. Originally this we did this because we wanted them to get into the habit of viewing their site in both IE and Firefox when making changes, because those are the most popular browsers.

Recently, Firefox has been the beneficiary of so many great extensions that we’re now starting to use the browser to help interested clients learn more about Search Engine Optimization and even make CSS changes to their sites.

Once Firefox is in place, we also help them to install the Developer Toolbar and the SEO Toolbar.

How can these toolbars help clients learn more about managing and updating their website?

1) The Firefox Developer Toolbar

If clients want to make small css changes to their site, they can use the developer toolbar to find the exact file and line number to edit. For example, some visitors to their website might have been complaining that some text was hard to read. So they decide to change the color used to show the date.

In the bad old days, they’d call us up, explain what needed to be done and then wait for us to find a few minutes in a busy schedule to make the change. Now, using the developers toolbar, they can go to CSS >> View Style Information and click on the text. The toolbar shows them exactly which file and which line number they need to change.

There are so many other goodies buried in the toolbar that I won’t list them all but here are a few more that we recommend for people wanting to get more hands on with their site:

Resize >> 800 x 600. Lots of people get complacent when browsing the internet on a large monitor. This way, clients can make sure that their news articles don’t break the site, for example with images that are too large.
Information >> Check Meta Tag Information. A simple way for clients to check all aspects of a page’s metadata.
Images >> View Image Information. Quite often, people get confused about whether images are in the images folder, the image/stories folder, in the template folder or somewhere else entirely. This tool allows them to easily find images they want to use.

2) The Firefox SEO Toolbar

We provide a lot of data to our SEO clients but it always helps when they are also able to spend some time looking around and researching their own site and rivals.

The SEO Toolbar makes it really easy. Once installed and activated, it adds large amounts of SEO data to every Google or Yahoo search you make. A search for "Joomla" reveals the following information about Joomla.org

Age (registered September 2005)
Incoming links (2,680,000 at Yahoo!)
Alexa Popularity (#344)
Google Cache Date (Yesterday. The more regularly this happens, the more Google trusts the site)

Not all clients have the time or inclination to get so hands on with their site, but for those that do, Firefox and Joomla are a great combination.

January 17, 2007

A Very Happy 6th Birthday and Version 5.0 to Drupal

There’s been a very gratifying exchange of support and kinds words between the Drupal and Joomla communities during the last few days.

It started with the announcement of the release of Drupal 5.0 on Drupal’s 6th birthday. That news made a big splash, reaching the frontpage of Digg and several other technology news sites.

The Joomla developers responded with a big "Congratulations!", a response that was greated warmly at the Drupal forums.

In that same spirit, we offer a brief comparison, showing that Drupal and Joomla have a lot more in common than may people realise:

{moschart id=9}

Theres an even a website online dedicated to teaching kids about the special relationship between the Netherlands and Australia.

In all serious, we wish to add our congratulations to those already received by the Drupal community. We hope Drupal and Joomla communities will continue to learn from each other and grow. Its clear to see that this is happening in the latest versions of both:

With 5.0, Drupal goes along way to emulating Joomla’s sucess in being user-friendly. It now has a web-based installer and an administration panel clearly separate from the site’s menus. This release of 5.0 alone has generated almost twice as much traffic as Drupal.org has ever had before.
With 1.5, Joomla goes along way to improving its framework and catching up with Drupal in terms of producing compliant, developer-friendly code.

January 16, 2007

January Search Engine Optimization Test Update

After just a month, our Search Engine Optimization test is already producing some really interesting results.

Our WordPress test site already has a sizeable lead with Drupal in second place and Joomla quite a way behind. On the most important ranking (top ten rankings in Google), the WordPress site is twice as successful as Drupal and three times more so than Joomla.

The overall score is calculated using WebCEO, and is based upon a website’s top-5, top-10, top-20, top-30 rankings.

{moschart id=8}

So, is this a fluke so far?

Yes – Jabalpur has fewer results in Google than either of the other two cities which means it may be easier for it to rank more highly. This may help explain Jabalpur’s low number of visits despite it’s high rankings.

Yes – As these sites only have 8 pages each, the success or failure of just one page can make a big difference.

Yes – Its too early to produce real results. MSN and Yahoo have not begun to rank the sites yet.

No – We ran WordPress and Drupal out-of-the-box but added an extra search engine-friendly URL component to Joomla. The results for Joomla might have been even lower had we truly used it out-of-the-box or with the default search engine-friendly URLs.

No – We ran two more sites, one in WordPress and another in Joomla. The results were very similar.

No – Jabalpur actually had a much larger lead early on. After two weeks the results were even further apart than they were after four weeks. Does Google perhaps realise the difference between software designed for a blog and software designed for a CMS, and then punish the blog if it is not regularly update? We shall see in the coming months…

As promised we will shortly be adding a Drupal 5.0 site and also a Joomla 1.5 site when it is released.
We hope these test results will prove to be interesting and are open to suggestions for improving the study.

While these initial results seem to sugges that Joomla and Drupal are not as well optimized for SEO as they might be, I certainly don’t believe they mean that a Joomla or Drupal website is doomed to rank lowly in the search engines. As has been often said, content is what will bring you good rankings. A good Drupal or Joomla site will provide a much better long-term platform for large amounts of content than will WordPress. However, those considering moving to Drupal or Joomla need to bear in mind that you may need to focus on closely on your new sites’s SEO.

January 16, 2007

10 Reasons to Love .info Domains

info is a keyword which makes it great for SEO. If you consider people searching for golf, you have a good number of people searching for "golf info" but no-one would ever consider looking for "golf net", "golf org" or "golf biz".

Its still possible to pick up great domains. While .com, .net and .org and covered by the large firms who make it impossible for small fry to pick up valuable dropping domains, there are still .info gems that can still be caught by people like you and me. In the last month, we’ve picked up major cities and lakes in the state of Georgia including lakelanier.info and johnscreek.info.

They cost about 80 cents! What else can you buy now thats of any value for less than a dollar? You can get 8 .infos for the price of 1 .com.

There are major info domains in use, often in the area of tourism, for which its perfectly suited. Try Spain.info, Peru.info, Norway.info, Germany.info, Austria.info, Amsterdam.info, Cancun.info, Bratislava.info and many, many more.

The extension is perfect for history and education sites. Whereas .com, .net, .org, .biz and the others have been shoehorned into use for general information sites, nothing fits as perfectly as .info. See webhosting.info, chomsky.info, pinyin.info and watergate.info for starters.

It works in multiple languages. Every major Western European language has a word beginning with "info…" that mean "information".

Its a global extension. Unlike a .us, .co.uk or .de, a .info domain can brand your site worldwide.

It can complement a company’s main site. Quite a lot of companies are now using their .com to serve as their main selling platform and .info as the main resource for stock market and investor information.

.info led the way in International Domain Names. Long before .com and .net allowed people to register domains in more than just the Roman Alphabet, .infos could be registered in multiple Scandanavian, East European and Asian languages.

Did I mention they cost 80 cents? Ok … reason #10 is that .info is actually used more than the other TLDs that were introduced at the same time in 2001. Where as .biz, .aero, .coop and other disasters have fallen by the wayside, info is still going strong with 1.6 million domains in use according to Wikipedia. Thats pretty good when you consider that 70% of .com domains registered every year never get used.

Ok – we’ll have a #11 as a bonus. They are starting to sell well too! 2007 saw sales such as NewYork.info for $46,392, Credit.info for $36,000, Casino.info for $35,127 and Camping.info for $28,100.

January 13, 2007

Interview with Barrie North of Joomlashack.com

In Week 2 of our series of interviews with people in the Joomla world, we’re delighted to welcome Barrie North from JoomlaShack.com and CompassDesigns.net.

Barrie was kind enough to take a while out of his busy schedule to talk about template design, SEO and where he and Joomla are headed in 2007.

1) Hi Barrie. Could you tell us a little about yourself? How did you come to Joomla? What’s your background?

My background is pretty mixed. I started out as a rocket scientist. No – really! I have a Masters in Physics and spent a while at England’s Atomic Energy facility researching nuclear waste leakage. After starting to glow in the dark a bit (joke) I took a sideways step and taught High School math and science for a good five years in the US. I ended up helping start two schools, one for students that didn’t fit in the traditional mold that was very hands on in the classrooms. Most recently I decided to strike out myself into the business world. I think that I probably relate to some of the students that the school was for, someone who doesn’t fit into a traditional path! Who knows what I will do next…

2) Have you worked or designed with other systems apart from Joomla? If so, how do they compare?

I actually have not. I started a plain old vanilla web design business in 2005 and stumbled across Joomla. I quickly came to the conclusion that there was no real point in static web design. I would give my clients a CMS even if they hadn’t asked for one.

3) What are the origins of Joomlashack and what’s your role there? What can we expect to see from the site in 2007?

I joined Casey Lee as a partner at Joomlashack at the end of 2005. I rate Casey as one of the top designers around right now and I am honored to be working with him. We have grown as a team and have been joined by Waseem Sadiq and Dean Marshall in the UK and Cory Webb and Tom Elliott from the US. In 2007 we aim to push the envelope with Joomla template design. I am pretty sure that we were the first guys to come up with width/fontswitchers etc. which was has been a catalyst for other template shops to really innovate.

We are excited about 1.5 and hope to provide as much help and guidance for people with tutorials and examples that we pass on to the Joomla project. We just released a big one for 1.5 templating that Johan has up on the dev site now. I think the potential is very big for Joomla and more prominent sites/companies will be considering Joomla as a serious option. I think that the Shack is unique in the Joomlasphere in that we have a very strong commercial template identity and a strong custom development program. The University of Delaware, Yale Law Journal, Rochen and Tito Ortiz (!) will be sporting designs from the Shack this year.

4) In addition to running on of the largest Joomla companies around, you also have CompassDesigns.net. One of the remarkable things about this site is its SEO success. It ranks high in Google for almost every major Joomla-related keyword. Could you tell us a little about how you became so interested in SEO?

I think its my hard science background. I find SEO a really fascinating concept. Its an entire interdependent system governed by rules that we don’t really know. Its really like science, you can come up with theories, but all you can really do is set up experiments and test them, you can never know for sure. I have been pretty happy with the performance of www.compassdesigns.net , especially as its often the only site you will see in the top ten that doesn’t have the word Joomla in the URL! I should really put some ads on it or something 😉

5) What SEO resources would you recommend for someone working on improving the rankings of their Joomla site?

SEO resources, mmmmm. Well, there is the flawlessly written guide by those guys at Compass at http://www.compassdesigns.net (lol)

OK, seriously. I think I use all of these tools on a semi-daily basis:

http://www.pixelfast.com/overture/
http://www.webuildpages.com/cool-seo-tool/
http://www.webuildpages.com/neat-o/
http://www.webuildpages.com/seo-tools/top-competitor-tool.php
http://www.pr-prowler.com
http://www.wordtrackerkeywords.com (must have)
http://www.yourseobook.com

More recently I have been getting into Google Adwords:

http://www.perry-marshall.info

I used to use keyword density tools, but that strategy is becoming more diluted now.

6) What SEO strategies would you recommend for someone working on improving the rankings of their Joomla site?

OK, so here is the thing with “SEO”… its dead. What I mean here is that SEO used to be about stuffing some keywords onto your site and buying links and trying to game Google. It won’t work anymore. The point of Google is simple, it wants to match search terms with relevant content, and trust me, those Google guys and girls are smart, much smarter than we are. So trying to trick your way around the algorithm is fruitless. So a much better strategy is to embrace Google. Build high quality relevant content and THEN you will see traffic coming to it, for all the right reasons. This is where Joomla has the edge, its a CONTENT management system. Its DESIGNED to add lots of content quickly and efficiently, so use it. This is my advice again and again when I see people in the Joomla forums spending hours trying to get SEFXXXXX to work. Just ditch it and spend the time writing content instead. I honestly think that has been the success of compassdesigns.net, lots of (I try!) high quality content.

7) As someone highly involved in design and SEO, what benefits are you looking forward to with Joomla 1.5?

Hands down has to be the work Louis and Johan have done re-engineering the template system. There is now the potential to completely override the core content output in your template. If you are a University you can create an accessible and tableless site. It you are an SEO nut job like me, you can create a template that is a lean SEO machine. Looking into my crystal ball, I think you will see 3rd party providers creating these “template override packs” for various applications.

8) Do you have any new projects in 2007 we should be looking out for?

Well, I would have to do the obligatory shameless plug about my book. If I didn’t my publisher (Addisen) will send me mean emails! Its almost finished and due for publication Q2 of 2007. Its going to be an end users guide to help you go through building your site from scratch. I (hope) I have leaned heavily on my teacher background to write something thats highly readable and really teaches you some of the key concepts. Don’t worry, there are no homework assignments! Oh yeah, its also completely about 1.5, the new release of Joomla.

I plan to build the Compass blog more, really start digging into both Joomla and the world of a web business. Of course at Joomlashack we plan to continue to push the template envelope to show people what can be done with Joomla.

We have a couple of other things brewing, a component called IntelliJoomla to integrate Joomla into Intellicontact for example. Watch this space 🙂

January 12, 2007

Europe has Wide Lead in Joomla Development

JoomlaYellowPages.com has been going for 4 months now and in that time we’ve found Joomla developers in 42 countries.

It seems like a good time to run down where the commercial Joomla world is today. Which areas of the world have the Joomla bug?

Which continent has the most developers? Europe with 68 companies. There’s even a Joomla development company in tiny Andorra. That’s more than twice as many as the Americas which have 32 in North and South combined.

Which country has the most developers? France with 20 companies.

Which city has the most developers? Toronto with 3 companies.

An assortment of other interesting statistics:

In America, interest in Joomla is mainly along the East and West coasts. We’ve yet to find a developer in the vast majority of Mid-Western states.
The pattern of companies springing up along the coasts is also true in South America, Africa and (not surprisingly) Australia.
Joomla is very popular in west Asia, particularly Vietnam and India, but seems to have generated little interest in East Asia, in Korea, China and Japan.
The most northerly developer is up in Iceland. They have the wonderful domain name: io.is
The most southerly developer is down in Chile.