Archive for July, 2008
Last week I spoke at the SEMforSMB conference in Austin, Texas. The conference was primarily focussed on search engine optimization and marketing for small and mid size businesses.
I did two talks, one about ‘Building a business website in 3 minutes‘. I showed how easy it is to setup a Joomla! 1.5 site, install a template and a component. All in I think it even took less then three minutes.
The second presentation was about how to search engine optimize your Joomla! 1.5 site. I co-presented this session together with Jay Moreno from redflamemedia. Jay specialises in Joomla! SEO and it was great to have an expert like him at my side to answers all the though questions.
While talking with people we learned that there still exist a lot of misconceptions about the fact that Joomla! has insufficent SEO features. At the conference I talked with many experts on issues like duplicate content, SEF URL’s etc. All of them agreed that Joomla! 1.5 is a very SEO friendly CMS.
Don’t believe me ? Well, let’s take the Nooku.org site as an example. Nooku.org is getting a SEO score of 97% at domaintools.com and a an nice 84% on websitegrader.com Nooku.org isn’t using any SEF or SEO plugins. Just a plain Joomla! 1.5 installation with Nooku installed. That’s it.
For those of you interested in reading up on our SEO talk, here are the slides :
In recent months, the offical joomla.org site has undergone some major changes. Unfortunately, two extremely valuable resources have disappeared, and there aren’t many signs that they’re coming back in some way.
The new community.joomla.org was opened a little while ago, as a resource where all contributors of the Joomla project (documentors, moderators, developers, …) have a blog to share information. That’s a great initiative, but unfortunately the old news.joomla.org had to make way (it’s available, but there are no links to it and it hasn’t been updated for two months). This site was a place where anybody could post Joomla! related news. I always felt this was a great way of keeping an eye on what’s going on in the community. Joomla! is not only about the people who contribute directly to the project itself, but also about everybody else, be it (commercial or other) extension developers, template developers, professional integrators, book or tutorial authors, users, … Certainly a place can be provided at community.joomla.org where everybody can post, making it a true community resource.
More importantly, the old dev.joomla.org was replaced by docs.joomla.org and developer.joomla.org. Unfortunately a lot of valuable information is gone:
I removed the poll. The result was 90 votes in favor of bringing the sites back versus 9 votes against.
In the meantime, JoomlaConnect was released as a replacement for news.joomla.org. A lot of confusion could have been avoided by communicating about this in the open early on. The issues with the developer documentation is still unresolved as far as I’m aware.
It’s been eight months since Johan posted the very first entry on the blog, and this one is already number 65. We noticed that every now and then, someone mentions one of our posts, reuses information, or translates an item for a local community site. Of course, we love that! To further encourage this, we decided to relicense all our posts under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license (unless stated otherwise).
What does it mean? This license gives you a couple of freedoms:
There are of course a couple of conditions, to make sure everybody plays fair:
You can read the full license or the short version at the Creative Commons site.
If you adapt, reuse or translate one of our posts, we’d love to hear about it! Just post a link in the comments of the original post. Not only will this help us to know what’s happening with our posts, it will also point people who are interested to your site. I’ve collected some links below:
German:
Italian:
Dutch:
Hungarian:
Below are some myths and misconceptions about Joomla! you often read while browsing forums.
There are a lot of large Joomla! sites out there. In fact, some of the customers we do consultancy for, are building Joomla! sites for some well known multinational brands. Often these sites are customized beyond recognition, so there’s no way of telling from the outside which software was used. There’s also a good reason for keeping it that way: the less a potential hacker knows about your system, the better. So for critical sites, the developers go out of their way to hide the underlying technologies from their visitors. Finally, these developers are usually to busy to hang around in the forums.
The legacy plugin is just a thin layer. It fools legacy extensions into thinking that they are running on Joomla! 1.0.x. Apart from that, it doesn’t affect you system or other extensions, and hardly decreases memory use or performance at all. Some third party extension developers however use the fact that their extensions are 1.5 native as a marketing feature, creating the image that legacy mode is bad. This in turn has led some 3PD’s to make fake-native extensions: these are in fact 1.0 extensions that don’t require legacy mode, but include a copy of the legacy library in their own packages.
That being said, there are definitely benefits to using native extensions. But I’ll use a mature, performant and secure legacy extension over a shabby native one any day of the week.
A site’s SEO is what you make it, and no tool will do it for you. Search engine optimization is not black magic. Google and others try to find pages like a human would, so they also try to look at a site the way a human does. When you look at web page quickly, you will notice things like page titles, the URL, headings, … When these contains words that describe the text, you’ll already have a good idea of what it’s about, without actually reading it. So well structured content will give you better page ranks than any tool ever will.
Again there’s marketing involved: companies trying to sell you tools or services that will magically boost your ranking. For instance, the SEF URL’s that Joomla! generates are more than adequate, as long as you pick your aliases sensibly (though admitted, they are less pretty than the ones some other tools generate).
When you’re a web developer building a site for a customer, you’ll be working on the project for a couple of months max. After that, end users will be maintaining the content for years to come. So a CMS’s user friendliness should be your first concern. Just think of all the phone calls you’ll get when your customer has trouble working with the system.
It’s a history thing: Joomla 1.0 had a lot of messy code and often required hacks to get something done. And Joomla! has always had an active end user community, whereas projects like Drupal have attracted more developers early on, which has helped shape the whole notion of Drupal being more developer friendly.
In Joomla! 1.5 however, a lot — everything! — has changed for developers. Anyone who claims different clearly hasn’t looked under the hood, ar at least not long enough to realize it’s full potential. The new framework is very powerful and flexible, and allows you to build proper object oriented applications.
