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.