Steve’s Blog

February 8, 2007

The Verdict on New Joomla Template Clubs

Note: What follows contains no affiliate links, just my honest opinion: I recently stumbled across an affiliate site that had tracked down all the available Joomla template clubs and all the commercial Joomla template providers. By their reckoning there are now 14 clubs and 29 template providers. We have a membership to precisely three of these clubs: Rockettheme.com and Joomlart.com because they produce quality work that we use for in-house projects and one other because we wanted to learn more about a particular designer before working with them. Browsing throught the other 11 clubs, it really didn’t…

February 7, 2007

The 5 Best Joomla Tutorials Ever!

Yesterday, I read a tutorial by Copyblogger, explaining how to write attention-grabbing blog headlines. So excuse today’s exclamation mark and over enthusiasm in the headline – I’m still practising the secret of better blogging (#2)! Before your patience runs out, here’s a list of our favorite Joomla tutorials showing how you can get rid of frustration once and for all (#5) and how you can build a Joomla website you can be proud of (#9): Joomlart.com’s Understanding Joomla / Mambo CSS in 5 minutes. This is good enough to be part of the official documentation. I often give this…

February 6, 2007

Joomla SEO – Why Less is Often More

Today’s post could really be called Duplicate Content in Joomla Part 2. Yesterday, I blogged about duplicate content in Joomla and the damage it can do to your SEO efforts. Well, soon afterwards I realised that a follow-up was needed after reading a post on Aaron Wall’s blog about how he helped another blogger increase his Google traffic by 1400% in a month by reducing the number of pages he had indexed. Whats the Problem? As can be seen by this post on the Joomla forums, some components can produce thousands of pages that are useless but still get indexed…

February 2, 2007

MosTree and Search Engine Optimization Part 2

A while ago, we talked about how to make MosTree more Search Engine Friendly. Well, we have a Part 2 to that article, this time dealing with the way the word “Root” appears in the directory homepage and the titles for the inside page are simply the name of the category. Looking for something more descriptive and full of keywords? We have a small hack that may help. This will give you the ability to changes the page titles to something more Search Engine Friendly. A word of caution – you will need to open the mtree.php and make the…

February 2, 2007

Review of Picnet.net Calendar

January 31, 2007

GroupJive.org – Joomla’s Vital Social Networking Component

Am the only one who failed to notice the rebirth of a potentially very, very important Joomla component? GroupJive.org is a Community Builder add-on that gives: registered users the capability to create and moderate their own groups. There are currently three types of groups which can be created: Open, Private, and Invite only. After GroupJive.com slowly faded away last year, the project looked dormant. However, GroupJive.org launched very quietly on December 30th, 2006, and it has the potential to make a huge splash in the Joomla world. Why is this component so useful? It allows users to form and moderate…

January 29, 2007

VirtueMart Sometimes Causes SEO Problems

Be careful with Virtuemart and your efforts at Search Engine Optimization. We had an SEO client during January who suffered from an odd problem that has overtaken 2,800 pages according to a Google search. It seems that VirtueMart sometimes appends a random set of characters to the end of URLs in other parts of the site. It might be a content page, another component or a static content item, but it can happen to all of them and then end up looking like this: mydomain.com The problem is easy to miss because the normal URLs work without any problems. The…

January 29, 2007

Interview with Phil Braddock from SalsaInternet.com.au

For the fourth interview of our series, we’re delighted to welcome Phil Braddock, the Internet Marketing specialist from Salsa Internet in Brunswick, Australia. Phil took our questionss and ran with them producing a wealth of useful SEO tips and tricks for Joomla! 1. Hi Phil. Could you tell us a little about yourself? How did you come to Joomla? What’s your background? Hi Steve. Firstly, thanks for the opportunity to be interviewed! My background is in IT Web Systems design, and architecture, and also a bunch of IT Management roles. I started my career in online Directories working for Sensis,…

January 29, 2007

Get a new password with just your email

Two posts today, because I wanted some good news to counteract the problems with Virtuemart mentioned in the post below. Early this week we found a great little hack, built by benneh over at the Joomla.org forum. It allows people to get a new password without having to remember their username. People nearly always forget their username and so this makes it much more likely that people will return to your site if they no longer have their details. You can see it in action by clicking here: You can download it by clicking here.

January 26, 2007

Don’t be Afraid of PayPal with Joomla

A few weeks back, we blogged companies that had bad image problems and how they responded to those results appearing in the search engines. Some such as Hewlett Packard were able to shake off the bad press, but for others such as Registerfly.com and PayPal.com negative news was only a click away. Search for PayPal in Google, or Yahoo and you’ll find the following sites in the top-10 search results: Paypalsucks.com Paypalwarning.com Outofthedark.com/CorporateWars/PayPal/ If you haven’t seen these sites before, go and have a look around. I want you to realise that I’m saying the following with my…