Joomla Tutorial Abstract

This lesson will cover installing a few extensions that will make your website work much easier, how to add all your content to the website and how to develop your navigation.

Website Tutorial Abstract

Organization is one of the most important aspects of designing your website.  This tutorial will walk you through steps that will help you get content from internal staff, keep it organized and how to define a solid navigation for your website.  It will also cover how to build successful forms and touch on adding squeeze pages to your website.

Joomla Tutorial Abstract

The look and feel of your website plays a critical role in how users interact with your website.  This lesson will teach you how to build a Joomla template and also how to make template modifications.

There are some really fun things you can do with your .htaccess file that doesn't require a lot of work, just a little know how.  If you design websites, you should know how to do these things.  They will come in handy for you.

So you know you need a website and you think you are ready to have it built.  This article will prepare you for a successful website helping you see the big picture.

1.  Your website should be designed to be seen.

Such a critical and almost always overlooked aspect of website design.  Almost always an internet marketing specialist is brought in AFTER a website is designed and are then asked to market it.  This process then proceeds with a large list of changes that need to be made to the brand new website.  Include an SEO consultant in the website  planning process so that you are assured that the site is properly designed.  There are many well meaning design agencies that think they know search engine optimization when they really don't.  At the very least, have the design firm present you with the full proposal and have an SEO consultant look it over and add suggestions  to it.

2.  Know your REAL Products

I mean, know what your customers search for.  You may refer to your product as one thing within company walls, but your users may  reffer to it as something completely different outside of your company.  Don't force the user to use your company jargon.  Call your product or services what everyone else does.  Differentiate yourself AFTER your visitor gets to your website.  This is where keyword research comes in.  Create a list of about one hundred terms and use these as you begin to develop content for your website.  Create a Document for each webpage.  Place a term at the top as the main topic for that page.  List five or so relevant terms that relate to that topic.  Add a list of ideas you want included on that particular page.  Now give these documents to your copyrighter and have them write the content for the website.  This will be changes a little or a lot later, but will be a great start.

Having all this content gathered before you even select a provider will go a long way in getting the site done in a reasonable time.  One of the biggest holdups in getting a website designed, built and launched deals with content bottlenecks.

3.  Choose your website platform

Know how you want your website developed.  Avoid proprietary content management systems that require you limiited access to your/their hosting account.  There are very powerful open source content management sytems like Joomla and WordPress will handle almost any type of website you are looking to create.  You can even use Adobe Contribute on static websites to have the fast load times and still maintain the ability to easily edit pages.

4.  Choose your website developer

ALWAYS make sure you have full rights to content and creative.  If you leave your website design company make sure that you will leave with a 100% functional website.  Do all this before hand.  There is no reason what-so-ever for you to be forced to rely on and be held hostage by a design company.  If you can do it inhouse, great. Do it.  Typically, I like to design a company's website and include them as much as possible.  This helps them maintain a solid sence of ownership and makes them not afaid to touch it.

5.  Trust but verify

At this point your developer will take the content you created above, likely present you with a few layout options, present you with a Functional Statement on the key elements and aspects of you website to be.  Carefully monitor the development process so there are no suprises.  The more involved you are during developemnt, the better the end product will be.  Create milestones with deadlines. 1. All content submitted 2. First layouts presented...  This will help keep everything on track.  The development team is now your partner and will play a critical role the process flow, quality assurance, training and perhaps ongoing maintenance.  Keeping an open line of communications will go a long way in maintaining a good working relationship.

You should have an SEO consultant by now also.  Make sure they review the Functional Statement and are included in all the design meetings.  This will ensure that there is nothing overlooked from an SEO perspective during the design process.

6.  Launch

Now your website is complete.  QA is complete.  You are ready for launch.  The last thing we need to do is add our tracking code to the website so we can measure progress.  Your SEO consultant can setup an account for you (or better yet, you should) and should be able to get it installed on your website too.  Analytics is a major piece of the launch process and is critical in marketing your webite.  Without Analytics, it is like flying blinkdfolded.  You will have no idea what works.

Now that your site is built and live, you can consider your next step.  Website marketing.

In a nutshell, a 301 redirect is used to push a link hitting an existing 404 page not found error or a page that will eventually be a 404 to a new page.  It is simple to implement if you are on Apache.  First, you need to create a file in notepad called .htaccess.  Then you write:

RewriteEngine On

redirect 301 /branding-marketing.php /design-services/graphic-design/

This will redirect the old URL : /branding-marketing.php to the new one : /design-services/graphic-design/

Doing this preserves the link popularity of the old URL.  If you want to see how many 404 pages you have, get a Google Webmaster Tools account. They are free and give you great info on your website.

Joomla Tutorial Abstract

This Joomla tutorial will walk you through the complete installation process from downloading and uploading the files to your hosting provider, to setting the database and guiding you step by step through the installation process.

If you  already have your website installed, then you can proceed to the next video.  If you have any issues during the setup, be sure to post your issue in the member's forum.

]]> robb@geekepic.com (Robb Luther) Joomla Tutorials Sun, 28 Feb 2010 16:59:10 +0000 http://clients.robbluther.com/General-Website-Tutorials/javascript-emails-to-reduce-spam.html http://clients.robbluther.com/General-Website-Tutorials/javascript-emails-to-reduce-spam.html Avoid Spam with JavaScript Email Construction

If you have an email link on your website, there are bots out there that will find it and add it to their viagra, cialis, (insert other drug / free offer here) email list and you will be forever plagued by spam.  It is much better to use an alternate email for such things, such as info@yourdomain.com.  It is even a good idea to cloak those links to make it more difficult to get the information.  Here is how we do it:

<script language="JavaScript"><!--

var name = "info";

var domain = "yourdomain.com";

document.write('<a href=\"mailto:' + name + '@' + domain + '\">');

document.write(name + '@' + domain + '</a>');

// --></script>

So this JavaScript will create a mailto: link to info@yourdomain.com.  I think it is pretty easy to configure, but if you have any issues, just post to the Email Cloaking forum thread.

If you are looking to monitize your Joomla site it would be useful to learn a little about the Joomla banner component. This will allow you to rotate banners through your Joomla website.

Joomla! Tutorial Description