Joomla! Community Magazine™

This article summarizes the first hour of my introductory course to Joomla. It's a bit "thick" as it’s about system architecture concepts for which the user does not normally have professional knowledge. So try to go slowly, be patient and don’t get discouraged. Draw the examples in the text, copy the pictures and you will see that in the end you had fun.

Google’s algorithm is constantly being modified to show “quality sites” in their search results. Many things like site speed, information architecture, and page design are all contributing factors to your SEO. Search Engine Optimization has many aspects; one of the most important is the integration all of your online marketing tactics and making them work together. If you have a Joomla! Website, your techniques need to be adjusted to work with this particular Content Management System (CMS).

According to W³Techs, as of the beginning of July 2013, 63% of all Joomla sites are running version 1.x. Of these, some 92% are running version 1.5. That works out to a rather large 58% of all Joomla sites running 1.5! The other 5% are mostly version 1.6 and 1.7. [Aside: if your site is one of those 5% please just upgrade now. It's not going to be that painful and you are a sitting duck for hackers. By "now" I mean stop reading this and go upgrade. Seriously.]

So why is the number so high? There are usually a long list of factors, and most of them are valid. Here are the ones I hear regularly:

The new characteristic of Google’s search results can be used with Joomla, helping us to improve the appearance of our site and to improve our position in Google.

We've been hearing for a while that SEO may be affected by the time your page takes to load - so recently we've started an intensive exercise of getting our websites to load in the absolute minimal time possible. Our belief is that the current load speed and rating in GTMetrix is relatively good: 85% for PageSpeed, and 95% for YSlow Grade and a load time of 1.29 seconds, so we thought we'd share how we did this. Some of these are Joomla! specific, but the general concepts apply to ANY content management system and any website.

Joomla's got a great thing going right now. There are currently 7.5 million + entrepreneurs using the CMS platform. This equates to about 2.8% of the internet. Surely it will continue to improve and carve out more market share. I wanted to ask you a serious question today: "Is your Joomla site optimized to receive the maximum amount of leads and sales?". What's your answer to that question? Every site needs to have a few things:

Ever wondered why pages load so fast on large sites? It's because they have good servers and use a Content Delivery Netowork (CDN). I use them on most of my sites and will explain what a CDN is, how it works, and how you can add one to your Joomla web site.

Since 2006, when I for the first time "saw the light" with Joomla! I have fortunately not been exposed to more than a few hacker attacks of my websites. In both cases there was only a so-called de-faceing, but still it was frustrating to be hacked and time consuming, in the first case, to get the website up and running again. Luckily, I had learned when the next attack was inevitable. I had a backup.

Choosing the URL to use for your business can be a difficult decision - so many factors to consider!  Will customers remember it?  Does it say what you do?  How well will it optimise in search engines?

Hackers enjoy the “low hanging fruit.” Sophisticated hackers know the benefit of pivoting off of compromised sites and servers to launch their attacks.