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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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: …

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…

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…

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…

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.…