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Keeping Your Small Business Website Updated

June 18, 2010 By Jon Leave a Comment

I know I’ve said this before but I thought it would important to emphasize the importance of updating your small business website to make sure that your content is up to date with your business. Updating makes sure your site doesn’t seem neglected, as the whole “build- a-website-then-forget-about-it” mentality doesn’t work anymore. Building a website just for the sake of having one is obviously a waste of the time and resources you invested in its creation. Instead, you should remember that your site is an important part of your business and demands your attention and proactive participation.

First of all, you should remember that updating your site helps to keep you on the good site of search engines like Google and Yahoo!. This shows that there’s always something going on in your site and activity is always a good thing.

Try to update daily if you can, add links or new images or something to keep your site up to date with your new products or services or any new content that you think should be on it. Don’t wait for the start of a new week or month especially if you think the content will capture the interest and attention of clients and boost your business.

Conduct regular site maintenance at least once a month. Be sure to check if your images and video are loading properly, read through the content for grammatical errors, and if your articles and write ups are still talking about things that say “recent” but are actually years or months old. If you still have these, remove from your NEWS section and put them in your archives section.

A little checking never hurts as you can’t have people visiting your site, wanting to see something that you say is there but it really isn’t. This can have a negative effect on your reliability for prospective clients and unless your product of service is unique, on the internet, it’s so much easier for visitors to just look for another site for similar products or services.

Similarly, you should also check the links on your site if you’ve got any. Whether it’s a video, picture, social networking site, or new article of our latest accomplishment, you should be sure that these links are up and running all the time. You can use sites like RankChecker.com to check the responsiveness of your existing links for you. Also, if you signed up for Google Webmaster Tools, they regularly send you updates on the condition of your links so it’s a good way to stay abreast with your links. You can also check if the sites which you put your links on are actually linked back to your site via Yahoo Site Explorer, it’s free.

Don’t be afraid to look for new sites which you can link to your own if you think it’ll help boost the number of visitors, just be sure to keep these links organized and not have them cluttering up the place.

Be sure to keep updated on your copyrights, licenses and security certifications, to ensure that these aren’t expired. The renewal of said documentation will make it easier for you in the long run as lack of certification can often lead to search engines notifying users that your site isn’t certified as secure and convincingly scare them away.

If you regularly put in designs for holidays and important dates like Valentine’s Day, Halloween or Christmas, be sure to take these down once the said date or season is done. Its fine to be festive and get into the spirit of the season but its altogether different when people expect you to be working instead of celebrating.

Remember that whether it’s a new year or a new season, monitoring and updating your site is something that you have to do if you want your site to prosper. Your small business website isn’t merely an investment, it is often a commitment so be sure to take the time to work on it so that the site, in turn, can work for you as well.

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WordPress Widgets: What’s On Offer?

May 22, 2010 By Jon Leave a Comment

If you want to get the most out of a WordPress site, it is pretty much essential to have at least a few widgets installed. The benefit of widgets is that they are an optional extra for your site. They won’t really fit the needs of every site, but they are enough of a game-changer to make them a real point of note for WordPress users.

A quick look at the most popular WordPress widgets is instructive in showing how beneficial they are, and the possibilities that they create for someone with enough web savvy.

Last Tweets Widget

The Latest Tweets widget is in many ways the Big Kahuna of the WordPress widget. Using this, you can show your readers the latest posts in your Twitter feed.

This is handy for many reasons – firstly, it alerts people to the fact that you have a Twitter account, and encourages them to visit your page, potentially adding your tweets to their timeline and giving you the marketing opportunities that that entails among other things. Secondly it demonstrates that you have an interactive web presence. If you don’t feel like blogging something, you can tweet it and your blog readers will still see it.

Blogroll Widget

The Blogroll widget is one which many bloggers like to use. Whatever your views on the “blogosphere” and whether bloggers are real writers, what cannot be denied is that there is a real community aspect to many of the best blogs. Chances are that if you write a blog, you will also read blogs. That being the case you can show some love for the bloggers you enjoy reading by including them in your blogroll.

People who like your blog may check them out, giving that blog more hits and making it more likely that the other bloggers will return the favor. Everyone gets more hits, and everybody’s happy.

Tag Cloud Widget

Adding a Tag Cloud widget is another blog-specific move you can make to give your blog that bit more user-friendliness. We would all like to think that our readers look at every blog post with the same degree of fascination, but the usual truth is that some readers find that a particular blogger will write merely well about some subjects, but brilliantly on others.

By adding tags to your blog posts, and including a tag cloud, you allow people to search for and read all your posts on a certain subject. The most used tags will end up larger and bolder, too, so people can see at a glance what to expect from your blog.

Book and Album Cover Widgets

There is also a range of Book and Album Cover widgets which allow you to link up with music and bookshop sites to display artwork on your site. This way if you are a music or literature buff, you can show people a little bit about what you’ve been reading or listening to recently.

This adds a personal touch and also gives people a bit of background to you as a person. Whether you are a blogger or just hosting a personal site, these widgets add depth to it.

Filed Under: WordPress Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Why WordPress Has Become the Most Popular Blogging Platform

May 17, 2010 By Jon 1 Comment

Web design in its purest form is not unlike a foreign language. There is a large bank of people who are fully conversant in it, and others who know enough to get by. Then there are people who have no grounding at all in it, and others who have a grasp of the basics, which will nevertheless not be enough to get them where they want to be.

It is mostly for this last group of people that the WordPress revolution has been such a major benefit – it acts, in a way, as a translator to give them an opportunity to make themselves understood without having to put in the time and effort to become fluent.

Creating a website is hard to do if your expertise lies elsewhere. However, not everyone can afford to outsource their web design, and there are several people, too, who feel that by giving the job of creating a website to someone outside the business they will lose something of the message they are trying to convey. WordPress has succeeded because it makes it possible for just about anyone to set up their own website. it would not have been so successful, however, if it were simply a one-size-fits-all entity that created a standard website from a little bit of original data. WordPress rewards effort.

If you create a website using WordPress, there are several applications you can use to make your website more interactive, more streamlined or more business-friendly. It may have an identity in most people’s minds as a blogging platform – and it is true that this is how WordPress really began – but it is a lot more than that. WordPress is innovative and user-driven. If you don’t want a blog, your site doesn’t need to be a blog. If you want to include a blog among many other things, you can also do that. Really, WordPress is simply a creation that makes it easier to have a quality website.

Another reason that WordPress has become so popular is that it is free. Although the free WordPress themes that are available to those who use it in its most basic form are not particularly diverse, and you may find that paying for a more niche theme suits you better, the software is free at the point of delivery. Considering the expense that is involved in setting up a website from scratch using specialist software – or handing the process over to an expert – this is something that makes WordPress a tantalizing option for the beginner.

Although there is an increasing field of competitors for WordPress’ crown as the site to head for if you want to create a good website, there is definitely an advantage in its position as one of the groundbreakers in this capacity. The name is well-known and associated with quality for free, something that is very much in vogue in a world that is still getting over a period of major financial uncertainty. Though there will be challengers to the position, WordPress remains a market leader.

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WordPress Themes: Making Your Website Stand Out

May 8, 2010 By Jon Leave a Comment

Creating a website may take a lot of hard work – no matter what content management system you use to facilitate the process. But when you know the shortcuts available to you, there is a lot you can do to make the process pain-free.

An increasing number of people are using WordPress to build their websites, and as this continues, there will be more people who know that by making it easier to create a good WordPress site, there is money to be made. The most obvious example of this is in the responses you will get if you type WordPress themes into a search engine.

A basic WordPress site will be functional. If you wish to create a blog that will be easy to read and simple to navigate, then you really need do no more than register on WordPress and start writing. However, if you wish to define a specific identity, WordPress on its own will only take you so far. There are a few themes you can choose from, and these can be selected as simply as making a few clicks of a mouse. However, these are designed for non-specific mass appeal and by that logic they are limited in terms of real identity. If you want to be more innovative and stand out more, you may need to look elsewhere.

There are many people who create WordPress themes specifically to give wider options to users who have a specific need. Some of these people make their creations available for free, hosting them on their own sites which, due to their popularity, can then be hives for advertisement space. Others will design WordPress themes to a specific brief. So if, for example, you want to run a site which deals with a particular sports team, you can define the look you want to a person who will then design a WordPress theme that is identifiably influenced by that sports team.

You yourself can create WordPress themes, if you have enough knowledge of CSS and HTML coding. Because of WordPress’ ease of customization, you need only make a few changes to the coding it provides and tailor the look of your new site to a specific need. This is one of the major selling points of the software. It does a job for those who would not be able to operate without it, but also supports the more defined needs of those with a little more knowledge. Those who cannot write code at all will enjoy the fact that they are free to concentrate on content, while those who can are grateful for the framework.

These days, people are aware that there is a lot of competition for attention, and therefore it is valuable to be able to stand out from the crowd. Using the right WordPress theme will make this a whole lot easier, and finding the right theme is only going to get easier as skilled designers realize the potential to showcase their work and make money that WordPress provides.

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WordPress or Joomla: Which CMS Should You Use?

May 3, 2010 By Jon 2 Comments

The end of the first decade of the 20th century was a time of real breakthrough online. Perhaps more than any other respect, the way in which this breakthrough was most obvious was the increase of user-generated content. As the decade ticked on, more and more people were moving from becoming internet users to putting their own sites up. In many cases, this was achieved by the huge increase in choice and availability of blogging platforms – of which WordPress was one of the firsts. It could be said that Joomla has taken the WordPress model one step further.

While the people running both companies, and the users who align themselves specifically to one or the other, will argue that their site has its own specific identity and is very much a stand-alone entity, there can be no doubt that

WordPress and Joomla have many similarities. Both can do a lot of the same things. If you want to create a blog, you can do it with WordPress or with Joomla. If you want to make your site more general, then both platforms make it possible. However, there are many Joomla users who will not use WordPress, and as many vice versa – so what is the dividing line?

Many of Joomla’s supporters will indicate that it is “more than just a blogging platform”, either stating or implying that that is all WordPress is. And although this is not exactly true, there is enough of a grain of truth in it to make it an issue for some. WordPress gained most of its early adopters by being a very user-friendly site for bloggers, and has since diversified. On the other hand, Joomla was created after the development of WordPress and has to its advantage the fact that it was developed to be more right from the start.

There is some truth to the suggestion that the sites are similar enough to be used almost interchangeably while being different enough to have their own specific identities and attract people who will use one, and only one of the two for all of their site-creation needs.

For what it is worth, the two sites do specialize enough to give them their own defined position:

  • If you wish to create a blog, or a specific “user generated” site, then WordPress is better, and is conceived with your needs in mind.
  • If you wish to create something more individual, then it is better to use Joomla.

It would also be entirely fair to point out that if you have been using WordPress all this time and have found it to meet all your needs perfectly well, then a switch to Joomla will be more hassle than it really is worth. And, of course, vice versa.

One thing that might help you make up your mind is by looking through sites created using each application and deciding based on the ones which you find most applicable to your needs. Both are certainly good, user-friendly sites and won’t let you down.

Filed Under: Joomla Basics, WordPress Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Will Joomla Mean The End Of WordPress?

April 29, 2010 By Jon Leave a Comment

Joomla or WordPress? Which one is better?

The Internet is an arena of innovation, and is constantly seeing changes which make the experience more interactive, more diverse and more user-centered. The trick in the world of the Internet is to keep moving because you can be relevant one day and obsolete the next.

There has been no shortage of people claiming that because of Joomla’s greater range of applications, it will supersede WordPress and make the older system unnecessary, but is that true? While no-one could deny that Joomla is more versatile and powerful, surely WordPress has enough to hold its own?

What Joomla has in its favor is that it is certainly more adaptable for the dedicated user. If you want to put together a website for business purposes, the wide range of components and modules allow you to take it in pretty much any direction you want. However, there is a certain danger to this for a user who is not as technically-minded as others. If you found yourself at the seat of a rocket ship with a dashboard full of flashing lights and buttons, you would have to ask yourself if you could get it off the ground without causing a lot of damage – and this is similar to a novice using Joomla.

One might say that the benefit Joomla has over WordPress is that you can do more with it, while the disadvantage to Joomla is that, well, you can do more with it. The more you can do with something, the more you can do wrong – and that is more responsibility than a lot of people want. When things go wrong with Joomla, they are harder to fix. WordPress, for its part, is staggeringly user-friendly. Joomla is more adaptable, but WordPress is certainly more of a sensible option for plug-and-play purposes.

WordPress is fantastically easy to maintain. If you just want to blog, then you can be set up and working in a matter of moments – as long as it takes to register, create a title for your blog and start writing. With the huge range of widgets available – which are almost uniformly simple to install – you can add to your blog and make it easy to find online, as well as being easy to navigate. Joomla may be more adaptable, but it is one thing to say that and quite another to say that WordPress is rigid and fixed.

This is not any kind of attack on Joomla. It is a fantastic content management system – and that’s the point. Joomla and WordPress can easily co-exist because they have enough things making them different to appeal to separate markets, as well as being beneficial for different things in the same market.

WordPress is not going to shrivel up and die because Joomla is here and more adaptable. All that is going to happen is that the content management market will expand. Bloggers will still need a tool that lets them plug and play – if they want more features, they will go to Joomla, but there is still a need for WordPress.

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Editing an Existing Joomla Template

April 20, 2010 By Jon Leave a Comment

One of the joys of using Joomla is that it can be all things to all people. For someone who has a firm understanding of CSS and HTML, Joomla is a system that allows you to keep all of the information in one place and manage everything from a central location. For someone who knows as much about CSS and HTML as the average person, Joomla is a way of creating websites that look impressive in order to display their original content in a way which viewers will find pleasant to look at and easy to navigate. This is due in no small part to the ready availability of Joomla modules.

For people who have some knowledge of CSS and HTML, there may be some concern over an existing Joomla template – the ones which are packaged with the basic Joomla software and the ones which are downloadable from the Internet. Possibly, the modules will be lacking a little something – the images that are included may not be appropriate for their site, or the text irrelevant. If this is the case, editing the Joomla template should be easy.

Editing the Joomla template further is possible if you have more knowledge of CSS and HTML. You may find, for example, that the template you have seen looks all but perfect, but is the wrong color or is imperfect in some other way. Although you want to keep the majority of the coding, you would need to change some of it to achieve the overall look you want. If you are going to do this, you should start by making a copy of the original template. Many people have made the mistake of starting to modify and then losing their place, and end up destroying one good template without creating anything usable.

Joomla templates are different from many others in that the templates feature separate content and design files. This means that depending on how much you want to change, you can usually do what you need to without an excessive amount of disruption.

If you just want to change the images in a Joomla template, then it really is simple. When you open the .zip file that the template came in, you will see a folder titled “images”. Literally all you have to do to change these images to others is overwrite them with your own. You then save the template under a different name (as a .zip file) and install the “new” template.

To change more fundamental elements will require some more knowledge. If you want to make content changes – and this includes displaying information on the right side of the screen or the left – then the index.php file will need to be changed. If you want to make stylistic changes, the file you are looking for is the CSS file. If you go into the index file and entirely remove the references in that file to the CSS one and then display the website, you will see that it is “text-only”. This is why it is important to be careful with the CSS of your site – changes to this dictate how your site looks.

A handy tip when editing an existing Joomla template is to have two or more tabs open – one showing the template itself and the other showing the changes you are making. Refer between these screens to see if your changes are having the desired effect.

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Helpful Joomla Tips And Tricks

April 17, 2010 By Jon Leave a Comment

A content management system like Joomla is as beneficial for what you can do on an ongoing basis as it is for the original creation of a website. When it comes to troubleshooting your website “in progress”, there is an array of tips and tricks that will make the process a lot easier, and this is just one of the reasons why Joomla has become such a popular site for people who would otherwise find the maintenance of a website to be a headache they could do without.

The following are some of those tips and tricks.

  • For sites where you have a registered list of users, Joomla allows you to block problem users rather than delete their account. This means that you can “suspend” users rather than simply banning them.
  • Joomla separates the HTML for content and design. This allows you to make smaller specific changes without having to change the whole coding of your website.
  • If you are using Joomla for sales purposes, then you can install a PayPal module into an article, allowing you to streamline your sales process by keeping the sales content and the payment screen on the same page.
  • During the spells when downtime is unavoidable, you can display your own “Site Offline” page which is relevant to your site. This allows you to make the experience more personal, and to include updates on when the site will be back up and why it is down.
  • Joomla allows you to edit your “favicon”. This is the little icon that shows up on the corner of a tab in your web browser. Therefore, instead of having the default Joomla favicon showing, you can have your own personalized one, making for a more distinct site identity.
  • When writing articles on Joomla it is possible to include an alternative title. This title will not be seen by your readers but is used for SEO purposes – so if you want to have a specific title showing to interest or amuse your readers, and another one to attract search engine “crawlers”, you can.
  • Although it might be tempting to load a “splash” entry page as the first thing people will see when they come to your site, forget about it. You can have one of those on a set-piece secondary page if you really must, but these pages have no text on them and that means that search engines will wander on by – ruining your traffic numbers.
  • Always fill out the Meta Description and Meta Keyword fields when you are updating a page on your site. As a default, these are loaded with Joomla-specific information and it means that when people search for the terms which apply to your site, they will find … sites that are not yours. Even if your site does show up, there is a chance that the description underneath will read “Joomla – the dynamic portal engine and content management system”. Which won’t make them visit, most of the time.
Filed Under: Joomla Maintenance, Miscellaneous Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

How To Embed Things in Joomla Content

April 6, 2010 By Jon Leave a Comment

One of the biggest selling points of open-source content management software like Joomla is the endlessly customizable nature of the software. One way in which this can help you as a content creator is that it is possible to “embed” a range of different online content in your articles or on your Joomla page. There are so many reasons you might want to do this. Someone using Joomla for a business page might find that embedding a PayPal client on their page is a wise move, because it will make it much easier to begin and complete a sale on the one page.

Another thing you might want to do, if you are a business with bricks-and-mortar premises, and would benefit from walk-up customers, is to embed a Google Map on your Joomla page. At a glance, people will be able to see how to reach you – and Google Maps is one of the most-used sources of such information on the Internet. Having a map embedded on your website will not just mean that people who are coming to see you will know how to get there. It will provide a very visual marker of where you are which may put the idea of visiting your premises into the mind of a customer.

Embedding content on a Joomla page is really easy – assuming it has been made available as embedded content. Google Maps is an example of a site that makes its content available for embedding, and another example is YouTube – if you have the capability to make and upload video content then YouTube is the premier hosting site for you. If, for example, your site is all about cooking, you can make a recording of you preparing a meal according to a recipe, and post the video on YouTube. You can then embed the video on your site – saving you the strain of hosting it personally.

To update your site, you will usually type the information into a text editor. Let’s say that you have a video that you want to embed from YouTube. Disable the WYSIWYG editor on the text editing page. You can write introductory text – in the example above, as it relates to a recipe, you might type the recipe itself into the text editor and then say “To see this recipe in action, watch me cook this dish in the explanatory video below”. Then, from the YouTube page for your video, take the text in the box after “Embed” (on the right hand side of the page, beneath the video description, and enter it into the test box in its entirety.

The HTML code will embed the content within the article you are writing, or on the page you are editing, and anyone reading your site will see the content in its intended form. Research has shown that people tend to stop following a chain of links on, at the latest, the third link – so if you provide the content on one page, as this method allows, you stand a much better chance of converting vague interest into specific interest.

Filed Under: Joomla Content Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Creating an Article in Joomla

March 25, 2010 By Jon Leave a Comment

Probably the most popular usage of Joomla is by content creators – particularly writers – who know what they are good at and know that it is not web design. There has for some time now been a wide range of blogging platforms which allow good writers to create content and display it in a way which makes it easier on the eye. However, up until now that has rather been the problem. There is a certain amount of (largely unjustified) snobbery directed at blogging which has had the effect of discouraging some people from reading and others from writing blogs.

Although some people view Joomla as a blogging platform – and it certainly can be if you want it to be – it does have the advantage over a wide range of other sites in that it is really a lot more than just a blogging platform. Although the stigma attached to blogging is an unfair one, if you are capable of writing informative and interesting articles, you may find that they are better displayed in another way. Joomla allows this kind of versatility and is, for that reason, very popular among content creation experts.

When creating an article in Joomla, the first place to go to is – unsurprisingly – the “Add Article” button. This will take you to the “article composition” screen, where you will be presented with a range of options for your article. On a step-by-step basis, you create your article as follows:

  • Enter The Title: This will be the heading for your article, and will show in bold at the top of it. Search engines give titles more prominence than the body of the article, so it should be a relevant title. You may also add an “alias”, which will not be seen by your readers but will be used by search engines.
  • Select A Category: You have the option here to choose a “section” and a “category” for your article. This is helpful for navigation (for your readers) and for categorization (important for search engines).
  • Type Your Introduction: When you look at articles written online, you will note that often, after a paragraph or two, there is a link saying “Read More”. This allows the display of your site to be tidier, while still making it easy to find and read longer articles. Your introduction is everything that is included before that point.
  • Write The Rest Of The Article: A major point in Joomla’s possibility is its ease of use. When you want to move from the introduction to the main article, you click the “Read More” button. In the text box this will be illustrated by a red line underneath the intro text, so you know what is in the open and what is under the link.
  • Say Who Wrote The Article: On the right-hand side of the screen there will be a section for information about the author. Into this you can type an author alias (which may be your real name, if you wish). If you leave this blank you will be identified as “Administrator”.
  • Update Metadata Information: This is not an obligatory step, but allows you to include keywords and a description which will get you a better search engine ranking.
  • Save Your Article: It won’t display unless it is saved.

That’s it! You have created your first article in Joomla.

Filed Under: Joomla Content Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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