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Keeping Your Small Business Website Updated

by Jon on June 18, 2010 in Miscellaneous · 0 Comments

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.

Tagged as: anymore, building, business, computing, content, emphasize, forgotten, google, human-computer interaction, hypertext, internet, keeping, mentality, neglected, search engines, small business website, the links, updated, website, world wide web, yahoo!, your small business

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Editing an Existing Joomla Template

by Jon on April 20, 2010 in Joomla Templates · 0 Comments

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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How To Embed Things in Joomla Content

by Jon on April 6, 2010 in Joomla Content · 0 Comments

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.

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Creating a Basic Template for Joomla

by Jon on March 3, 2010 in Joomla Templates · 0 Comments

One of the reasons that using Joomla makes it easy to create a website is the availability of templates that take care of all of the background stuff, so you can concentrate on the content. There is undoubtedly a consideration here, that any template you use will be someone else’s – and may not be quite what you are looking for when it comes to making your website yours. If you are fairly confident with coding, you can create your own templates and use Joomla the same way you do for content – as a management system which keeps everything in one place.

To create a (very) basic template for Joomla, you simply need to have an FTP client – or know how to use the File Manager of your cPanel – and the basic template files that make up every Joomla template. These files are:

  • Index.php – this creates the main body of your template, positions and a path to your stylesheet.
  • TemplateDetails.xml – this is the file that the Joomla software needs to read the information in your template
  • Css/template.css – this is the stylesheet itself. That means it carries all of the information that decides what your website looks like.

There are three basic templates that come with the Joomla application, and to see what the above files look like you can open any of the template files and familiarize yourself with the content of the files. There is a lot of detail in each of these and to list it all here would take up too much space, but if you are familiar with HTML code it will be recognizable to you.

In the index.php file, you will include any code which specifies the position of content – whether that be page titles, meta descriptions and tags, and so forth. It is this file that will govern the layout of your website.

In the templateDetails.xml file, a lot of information is required so that Joomla knows what to show. You can write this code yourself, or base it around the already-existing code for the templates that came with the software. The information in this file will tell Joomla which version of the software the template has been written for, what it is called, who created it and when, as well as a great deal of other information. This is where the licensing information is kept.

The final file that you need to edit is the CSS file. CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheet and is responsible for the colors, fonts and graphics used on your site. When you are editing the index file you will need to place a line of text pointing to the CSS file, so that your website knows where to load the stylesheet file from.

There are many guides on the Internet which will inform you on how to edit the specific information in the three separate files, and it is worth familiarizing yourself with these guides before you attempt to create any intricate template for Joomla. To begin with, it is worth simply playing with the code to see what kind of changes are possible.

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