Author Archive
CMS and SEO
Thursday, April 5th, 2012
CMS makes life easier
It is true that a CMS can make life easier for the web designer who can hand over the deliverable to the customer in the knowledge that the customer has got everything they need to update the website themselves. A CMS is a tool that allows the non-technical website owner to update his or her own website using a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor. A CMS works by allowing the end user to alter text, images, hyperlinks, etc. in a way that is familiar to them because they are used to using Microsoft Word for example. Though CMS’s do exist that can be search engine friendly, many CMS users fail to use them properly. For example, missing out a TITLE tag when a description has already been added is common with non-technical users. This is because they do not see the point of or do not like to add the same information twice even though it is being added in different places. This, however, can adversely affect search engine optimisation (SEO).
Training makes life easier
If the CMS is capable of creating search engine friendly webpages then the user should be trained properly. This will decrease the need for support calls and ultimately make the customer happy and more likely to provide you with repeat business. CMS training is usually best provided over a couple of sessions so long as the client’s budget permits it. It training cannot be catered for in the budget then a detailed and thorough userguide should be provided to the customer at the very least. The customer will then go on to learn by trial and error. You might still get the odd support call but, as long as the website CMS works properly, the customer should be able to add content to webpages using the CMS in a SEO friendly way.
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Content Management Systems Limit Online Visibility
Monday, April 2nd, 2012
Content management systems and automated web page builders provide simple interfaces which allow everyday individuals to develop full scale websites. These applications seemingly eliminate the need to hire a web developer to create a professional online presence.
These applications usually do a decent job formatting the overall look and feel of each web page, however, they do typically produce very poorly structured code. The overall HTML, Javascript, and CSS produced by these programs does not come close to following W3C standards (W3C is the organization which develops and specifies web standards and guidelines – w3.org). This fault is easily overlooked since the audience which utilizes these applications is not exposed to the web page coding and would never be able to make any sense of the script.
A website with poorly produced script cannot develop into a successful online identity. While most web surfers are concerned only with the appearance and content of web pages, search engines are concerned only with the code and content relevance. Search engines are tripped up by ill-written code and are likely to ignore the web page or website as a whole.
I am currently working on a 4 page website previously developed by a Yahoo content management system. The client is interested in Search Engine Optimizing their Web pages. As a result, I will begin by cleaning up the code. Each page seems to require several hours simply to dissect its original diluted script. A great deal of time and money could have been saved if an experienced web developer was consulted before website construction began.
Content Management Systems do allow everyday individuals to produce presentable websites, however they greatly reduce the websites visibility to the online community.
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Joomla: there are modules, but no parameters ?
Wednesday, March 28th, 2012
I can’t install modules because of my host, so I must put the folders into the directories. That way I installed a template, and now I’m trying to use modules. So, after doing that, I can see the modules, but there are no parameters for them so I can’t edit them and it’s driving me nuts! After all the time I spent installing Joomla and searching for a theme this thing can’t stop me! What am I doing wrong? Also, is there a spacing picture, I can get the ‘footer,banner etc’ stuff !
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joomla help with stuff showing?
Sunday, March 25th, 2012
Okay; I made a site with joomla; www.wrestlinglove.co.cc… and do this for me so you know what i’m talking about: click here:http://wrestlinglove.co.cc/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&id=1:wwe&Itemid=66&layout=default
okay now look between each article, every other one is a white box and the text is white, how do i get that off of there.? Anyone please help me! its been bothering me for 2 days now! thanks in advance.
under whhat?
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5 Informative Measures of Your Website’s Performance
Sunday, March 25th, 2012
If you’re still tracking hits as your indicator of choice for your small business’s website performance, then your website probably isn’t performing.
Gone are the days of the online brochure. A good website is a lead capturing system. The bottom line is that visitors give you their contact details so you can begin a relationship with them, and ultimately help them via your products and services.
How your website captures leads (that is, what your call to action is) might be to sign up to your newsletter, or to purchase a product, or to call you to book a coaching session, or even to participate in your online forum.
Website performance then, is about how well your website attracts your ideal leads, engages them and gets them to answer your call to action. And that’s why hits is not a useful measure.
Here are 5 measures that do a much better job of tracking your website performance:
1. Visitors
This is the number of unique people that visit your website in the given time period (usually it’s a week or a month). It tells you how many potential leads you have far more accurately that hits ever can. With some web analytics packages, you can also track New Visitors, people who have never before visited your site – or new potential leads. You want to grow your Visitors and your New Visitors!
2. Pageviews
When you track website hits, you’re counting every file that is requested when someone views a page of your website. One page might require several graphics, and other files, so a single page view can be many hits. It’s not an accurate measure of anything, really. But pageviews, that’s a different story. Particularly when you compare it to the number of Visits (or Sessions), you get a sense of how much people are using your website. You want to grow your Pageviews!
3. Bounce Rate
You want people to interact with your website, and that usually means they visit a few pages. It could be that they land on your ezine sign up page, they sign up and then go to your thanks page, which gives them a link to look at a product or service, and they then go look at that. You don’t want people landing on a page of your website and then clicking away altogether. That’s why Bounce Rate is valuable: it tells you want proportion of visits to your website were single-page visits. You want to reduce your Bounce Rate!
4. Average Time on Site
If you have boring or irrelevant website content to your visitors, they’ll likely click away very quickly and never answer your call to action. The more engaging your website content is, the longer people will stay there, the more connected they will feel with you and your offerings, and the more likely they will be to answer your call to action. Average Time on Site is a great measure of how engaging your website is to visitors. You want to grow your Average Time on Site!
5. Goals Achieved
This final indicator measures the proportion of visitors to your site who answered your call to action, the thing you want your visitors to do on your website. They may have purchased a product or signed up to your ezine or contributed to an online discussion. As long as you can define that call to action (and you may have more than one), you can track it. It’s an indicator of how well your website is capturing your ideal leads. You want to grow your Goals Achieved!
TAKE ACTION:
What’s the purpose of your website? What is your call to action for visitors to your website? Are you measuring and tracking your website’s success adequately?
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The Days of Just Having a Web Presence Are Long Gone
Monday, March 5th, 2012
The internet is a busy marketplace. Selling products and services from within a shopping centre this big is a challenge, and with the shoppers in this shopping centre being evermore critical and fussy over what they are given, selling online has become an arduous task. Successful online companies listen to their customers. They understand what they want and deliver a website that enthuses them and entices them to want what their business has.
Visitors to a business website are expecting more. Disappoint them at your peril. These visitors are now more experienced and have higher expectations when they are browsing the web. They’re expecting to see an up to date, informative and engaging website that will fuel their imaginations, encourage them to explore and ultimately convince them that your product or service is worth their time and money.
Sourcing a web design agency that has the knowledge and expertise to create a tailored website solution that meets both a companies and this companies customers needs and requirements is essential. A well designed website will become an effective online sales force for a business, its brand image, its products and its services.
This website will be an integral part of a companies team. It’s a team member that works 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. It regularly needs feeding with the very latest health foods: up to date company news, product and services information, news on forthcoming events, etc. A visitor will recognise a website that has been fed with junk food and as quickly as they will recognise a site that has been fueled with healthy food and regular exercise.
With internet users becoming ever more fussy about what they are shown it is important that a business delivers a website that excites, invigorates and creates a positive reaction. These are the ingredients that will help create sales, site revisits and positive referrals.
A Content Management System (CMS) website solution will give a business the tools it needs to administer and nurture a its online presence. It gives a business the tools to continually maintain and nurture their company website. It allows company’s to assign an overall site administrator who can then assign editors throughout the company to assist them in updating the website and keeping fresh, current news and information on the website. Spreading the workload like this is essential especially on websites with lots of content.
One of the best Open Source content management systems around today is Drupal. Drupal is an established and well known open source platform that gives web designers the tools and systems to develop exceptional websites for their clients.
A website is a businesses sales person. Dress them poorly, feed them with out of date news and information and they will find it very difficult to sell for you. However, dress them in a slick suit, feed them with the very latest news on all a companies products and services and they’ll do the job.
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What is Aliro?
Thursday, February 16th, 2012
Aliro is a state of the art content management system that has been gaining popularity over the past little while. Many say that it is designed as a tool to deliver cutting-edge, modern CMS solutions in a time when we, as website builders, need them the most. Aliro makes full use of PHP 5 and requires MySQL 5 as well for utilization. The builders of Aliro, who have recently teamed up with those who are also working on the popular miaCMS project, have several key goals in mind for this product. Does it meet these goals? Well, let’s take a closer look.
First of all, Aliro is meant to be a framework for creating CMS that can be used as a platform to which add-ons can be built and attached. This would not only require a range of sufficiency regarding services, but also a healthy selection of add-ons at the user’s disposal. Of course, this framework includes an interface for the administrator, but add-ons are required to make the user interface truly easy to use.
Second, Aliro needs add-ons that will provide sufficient services in regards to CMS. Of course, no user would be obligated to use these add-ons, and they would be encouraged, in fact, to attempt to build better ones. Either they could perform these functions as they take part in the development as a part of the team, or they could build them in independent projects.
Aliro truly attempts to make a futuristic system out of an old idea. It is sort of funny to think of CMS as an old idea, but the truth is that the Internet, and the way we use it, is changing. Gone are the days of old CMS systems like many of us are used to. Rising instead are systems like Aliro.
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Maintain Your Website the Easy Way – Why a Content Management System Makes Sense
Wednesday, February 1st, 2012
If you’re in the market for a website, and you haven’t heard about blog engines and Content Management Systems (CMS), you haven’t been in the market for long. The main issue people have with websites in general is maintaining them. People feel intimidated by learning “HTML” or “programming.”
These days, there are hundreds of solutions to that problem, but in the interest of time I’m only going to talk about my favorites.
WordPress started out as a blog engine some years ago. The idea was simple. Make it so that non-coders could run a decent blog without doing a ton of work keeping things uniform. It has evolved onto a full fledged content management system with e-commerce capability and so many free plugins (software to perform a specific function) you’d be hard pressed to find that what you need doesn’t already exist.
So how does that translate to helping the aspiring website owner? Well, these days, WordPress has gotten so easy to use, it’s on par with figuring out how to send an e-mail. If you can do that, you can use WordPress effectively.
It can update itself, it can let you know when it needs something and it can take the guesswork out of owning a site. So what’s the catch? Well, quite frankly, there isn’t one. It can be got for the bargain price of $0.00 and comes as an option on every Linux hosting plan under the sun. There are so many themes (essentially templates) available for free that the enterprising individual can get himself up and running with a cool look in minutes. Setting it up is so easy I taught a 60 year old client to do it in about two minutes. Did I mention, it’s free?
The next great CMS that I recommend is Joomla. It has come a long way from the old days, and can do some amazing things out of the box. It is not quite as easy to learn or manage as WordPress, but it’s still pretty easy. I recommend Joomla to clients who have complex requirements and want to grow beyond just a commerce or marketing site, or that have a team of people who will be managing the site. Like WordPress, it tells you when it needs updating, and won’t let you do the wrong thing when editing files.
Joomla is also completely free, though more of the premium plugins that you may want you’ll have to pay for. There are hundreds of them, and for most of the things you want to do there is a plugin readily available.
Next is a CMS that might just replace Joomla as a favorite. It’s called Drupal, and it has also matured quite nicely. It’s so good, in fact ,that several sites you probably visit on a regular basis are powered by it. It gets easier to use on a daily basis, and once again, it’s free. There are a host of free themes and plugins for this as well.
With so many great CMS systems, there is no excuse not to use one and in the process, make your life as a website owner easier.
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Import Current Plone Site Into Joomla?
Sunday, January 22nd, 2012
I recently got handed a project that will require a new CMS. Currently the site that I need to update is running on Plone. I’ve been researching other CMS’s and found Joomla to be a good match for what this company wants.
I was wondering if there was some way of importing the current sites SQL into Joomla? I’m more of a front end programmer and have little working knowledge of SQL or Apache or the like and was curious if there is an Ap or an extension I can use to perform something like this.
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Building Great Websites With Joomla and Free Joomla Templates
Saturday, January 14th, 2012
Joomla is a content management system that is free to use. It is open source software licensed under General Public Licence (GPL); anyone can use it as they choose. Joomla is a professional and robust system and building websites with Joomla is a choice that an increasing number of people are making the decision to do.
There is a vibrant community that has built up around Joomla. Developers build templates to suit any project. Some are offered for sale, but many are available free. Free Joomla templates are not necessarily inferior in quality. In fact, some of the best templates you will find are free, and that is the great thing about Joomla community; they share freely with each other.
Joomla has a birth date. It is August 17th 2005, though it was not until September 1st that the name Joomla was actually announced. Joomla 1.0.0, the first release of the software, was on September 16th and it was actually Mambo 4.5.2.3 in a re-branded package. However, it went on to win the Packt Publishing Open Source Content Management System Award the following year in 2006, and again in 2007.
Building great websites with Joomla using free Joomla templates is really very easy, even though the software does have a reputation of being difficult to learn. There are plenty of tutorials around to help anyone who wants to discover how to plug into the power of Joomla, and the official Joomla forum has close to one and a half million posts on it. There’s plenty of free information available on just about everything to do with Joomla.
The Joomla content management system works by having the ability to increase the basic power of the software through adding modules that extend its reach. These modules, known as plugins, integrate fully with the basic software. They can add usefulness to a website in the form of a calendar, a forum, a user poll, a blog, and many other features commonly found on today’s increasingly interactive websites.
While making websites with Joomla usually means creating the larger portal type of web site, small personal web sites can easily be built too. Joomla has considerable power and the software is extremely robust. This makes it ideally suitable for the serious professional website, but as already mentioned, any size of website can be built with Joomla.
Although the same basic software makes every Joomla website, it is the template that makes each one look distinctive. There are many, many thousands of Joomla templates available from thousands of websites. While you can purchase a template specially coded, and therefore unique to you, you don’t have to.
A recent search on a major search engine returned almost a million results for the phrase, “free Joomla templates”. Consider that each website in the results is likely to have dozens of templates and you can see that there is one somewhere out there that is ideal for you without costing you a penny.
Making websites with Joomla is not only easy, but low cost too. The software is extremely robust and as good as it gets. Finding a template is not only easy, but hard to avoid. There really is no reason why anyone should not be creating websites with Joomla.
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