Practical web design, development and online marketing

11 Methods of Online Marketing

buipy001@gmail.com (Peter) — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 14:30:00 +0000

Search Engines Aren't Everything!

Well there are many different ways to market your web site online and drive that traffic to your site. Most people know about search engine optimisation or at least have heard about search engine optimisation and have a general idea of what it is and what it is all about. So what about the other methods of marketing a website.

We can't all just search engine optimise a website and then just wait for the search engines like Google to come by and pick it up. That just takes too long and there are many other sources of traffic that ever site should tap into to become a popular and successful site.

So lets have a look in to the other parts of online marketing.

Benefits of Search Engine Friendly URLs

buipy001@gmail.com (Peter) — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 06:38:00 +0000

If you're using a content management system such as Joomla or any other database CMS you might have a problem with non search engine friendly URLs.

They cause two major problems. One being that fact that no one can remember the addresses for pages, e.g. "index.php?options=com_content?id=21?menu=1". You might be able to remember something like that but seriously, can you imagine trying to screen that across the office to a co-worker.

Top 8 AJAX Addons for Joomla

buipy001@gmail.com (Peter) — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 02:23:01 +0000

There are so many different plug-ins, modules and components for Joomla it's not funny. A HUGE selection of them are on the main Joomla Extensions site but even more of them hide somewhere on the internet yet to be found and discovered.

Here is just a selection of my favourite Joomla add-ons that make my sites stand out a little more.

Affiliate Marketing ClixGalore and Joomla

buipy001@gmail.com (Peter) — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 00:08:47 +0000

Affiliate marketing is a great way to increase the sales of your site and make extra money. This is both true for the advertisers and the affiliates that use the programs.

Being able to get extra sales with little effort is every shop owners dream. Why market your product when you can get someone else to do it for you. I know everyone has seen those penis enlargement emails and landing pages that have been float around cyber space.

Designing to Golden Ratios

buipy001@gmail.com (Peter) — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 01:36:58 +0000

If you're having troubles trying to determine your column sizes when you're designing a site, try putting together a site using the golden ratio.

The golden ratio is seen as having the most pleasing dimensions and is derived from observing nature.

Tagging and Tag Clouds

buipy001@gmail.com (Peter) — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 05:54:37 +0000

Tagging became popular with the growth of Web 2.0 sites over the last few years. You may see on some sites such as Technorati, Del.icio.us or Flickr having these tags implemented throughout their systems.

Tagging allows users within these networks to categories information with specific keywords. It makes it easier to find images, music or any type of information or media that is tagged with particular keywords.

Migrating Joomla Websites to a New Server

buipy001@gmail.com (Peter) — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 05:06:48 +0000

Migrating a Joomla website from one server to another is a very easy process. It shouldn't take very long but there are various occasions where migration might cause a head ache or two.

There are six important steps that you'll have to follow for your Joomla server migration.

Pinging Web Services in Joomla

buipy001@gmail.com (Peter) — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 22:44:07 +0000

A lot of people use Joomla as a blog. Now compared to other blogging applications out there it is very powerful, but it is missing a few key features here and there.

The key feature that I'd like to talk about is ping services for Joomla.

If you use Word Press, you'll know that you can set it up to ping these web services and let them know that there are new posts on your website as soon as your article is published. Now, Joomla doesn't have this built in to it. So, here is how you get around it quickly and easily.

Random Password Generator

buipy001@gmail.com (Peter) — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 04:44:06 +0000

A lot of people when generating a password usually use simple and obvious things such as their pet's name or just adding a number to the end of their name.

These sort of passwords really aren't that secure. The can easily be read from a screen and memorised or even guess by a hacker when they're trying to get in to your accounts.

Tips on Marketing Your Website

buipy001@gmail.com (Peter) — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 22:25:59 +0000

So, you just had a web site made but no one is calling and you're not making any sales. If you had in your mind that all you to do was make a web site to start getting all of those leads and sales then you might need a little bit of re-education. You know that old quote from the movie Field of Dreams, “If you build it and he will come,” well it’s not quite the case. In fact it very much is the opposite when it comes to web sites.

Building a website is just one step in the process of promoting your business online.

Once you have your website up and running you really want to be driving traffic to your website. More importantly, you will be wanting relevant traffic. Specific web surfers that are looking for your products or services from your business. With relevant traffic your site will join the millions of lifeless sites in cyber space.

Internal Linking

buipy001@gmail.com (Peter) — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 06:19:10 +0000

What is Internal Linking

Internal linking within a web site can mean a few things. Internal links play a crucial part in making sure that all the pages in a site are crawled and indexed by Google and providing lots of relevant content for the search engines and for your site visitors.

The new MailBuild editor is alive and kicking

buipy001@gmail.com (Peter) — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 13:51:20 +0000

I'm very pleased to announce that the new MailBuild editor has just been pushed live and is now available to all of your clients. We covered the list of new features here last week, but here's a quick summary if you missed it:

Multiple repeater support - Include as many repeaters in your templates as you'd like.
Inline CSS - We automatically move all your CSS inline when sending the campaign for the best results in all email clients.
Drag and drop - Move repeater items quickly and easily.
Live preview - See precisely how your content looks as you type.
Bigger, resizable WYSIWYG editor - Great for clients adding big chunks of content to their campaigns.
Huge performance increase - Rebuilt from the ground up, feels like you're editing a local document.

A Joomla plugin for MailBuild

buipy001@gmail.com (Peter) — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 12:19:59 +0000

It looks like Van Eldijk Studio's been busy making a slew of useful extensions for Joomla and low and behold, one of them is for MailBuild!

The extension makes it easy for anyone to add a subscribe form to your existing site without playing around with HTML. Add your MailBuild account details and you're good to go!

SEO Tip for Joomla

buipy001@gmail.com (Peter) — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 00:11:32 +0000

Joomla is a fantastic content management system (CMS). It is one of the most widely used CMS systems in the world.

With all the good, does come some bad. Joomla in its default state isn't the most search engine friendly CMS. The URLs that it creates from the system have variables and values passed through them. This is all well and good for the system but means nothing for a regular browser and in the lines of keywords for search engines.

Now, I can't be too harsh because Joomla does come with a search engine friendly feature where the variables are turned from

index.php?option=content&task=view&id=2097&Itemid=159

to some this like

/content/view/4682/1/

Template Designs

buipy001@gmail.com (Peter) — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 09:07:19 +0000

Nothing beats a uniquely designed website. A design that is visually appealing to the users as well as being user friendly in its interface.

So, when is it a good time to use a template? Should a template be used at all? This question comes up time and time again and I believe that there are certain situations where a template can help speed up the development of a website.

Why Use a Template

If you're lacking in the design skills or can't afford to contract a designer to design your web site then you might want to try and get a web site template. There are a few companies out there that make templates.

These include:

Joomla Shack has to be my favourite template developer. I've bought several templates from them and have used them across various sites.