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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: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Joomla: Website Creation for Beginners

December 22, 2009 By Jon Leave a Comment

The benefit of using a content management system (such as Joomla!) to set up a website is the ease it introduces to a process that, ordinarily, takes a lot of hard work and knowledge of a process that involves specialist information when done the “hard way”. If you use Joomla, you may not have the absolute freedom that a web designer enjoys, but you will be able to create quality websites which are easy to use and navigate.

To set up a website using Joomla – if you want to get the best out of it – it is best to start by setting up web hosting. It is possible to get free hosting, however this is not the best way to do things. Yes, it is free. But it isn’t very good, unfortunately. Free web hosting does have the benefit of being free, but you get what you pay for. Free web hosting tends to be less reliable, and may result in a lot of downtime, as well as poor functionality if you receive a lot of visitors to your site. A good, cheap web hosting provider will give you more reliability for a price you can afford.

Once you have organized web hosting, it is then a matter of installing Joomla on the hosting account. This is a simple process and involves downloading the Joomla software from their website and following the simple instructions that come with it. This is a step-by-step process and allows you to concentrate on bringing your specialist knowledge to the process. Your part in this is content provision – you write or create the content, and Joomla will manage it. Your web host will ensure its place on the Internet.

In addition, you will want to ensure that the content is displayed in a way which is going to attract the right kind of attention – so you want it to look good. This means finding a Joomla template that you are happy with. There are several sites which provide free templates. When you look at templates, what you will see is a general idea of how it will look – obviously the banners and finer details will change when you update the content and make other changes. What the template shows you is how the colors, fonts and other elements of your site will look like on screen.

There is plenty of support on the Joomla website itself – in the form of forums and FAQs, as well as a lot of partner sites which provide specialist advice and information so that novices can create a usable, high quality website without having to go from the beginning and learning how to write code. For someone looking to create a good website from scratch, Joomla is an option which allows you to concentrate on what you are good at and leave the technicalities to the experts.

Once the software and template are downloaded, they are highly customizable and can be edited without fuss so that you achieve exactly the right look.

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