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In order to keep your Joomla! website in top condition, you should keep an eye on a variety of factors ranging from security to browser updates, and from usability to SEO. Some factors require almost daily monitoring, while others are unlikely to change over a couple of weeks or months. Use the checklist below to review your … Read more

As a search engine specialist I spend a quite some time convincing people that the mythical PageRank isn't as important as it used to be. To make my own life easier (and perhaps yours as well) I've collected several articles on the internet that show why PageRank can be pretty much ignored from now on. Image credits: Felipe … Read more

The usage of a Virtual Private Server (VPS) is getting more popular every day. The price of a VPS is relatively low these days and the freedom of configuration and access to the server is a real blast. There are some things to keep in mind though. Photo credits: Jamison_Judd What is a VPS? A VPS (Virtual Private Server) is … Read more

On my way home a couple nights ago, I spotted a gas station with the worst name for a gas station I'd ever seen: Firezone. Seriously, who names their product after the worst possible disaster it could produce? I'd swear their logo actual has a reference to an explosion in it as well. This led me to think: What are the elements … Read more

Like many other Joomla template developers, I often have to think up new passwords for accounts. While services such as Lastpass allow you to generate a random password and save it linked to a user name, many people still use the good old human memory for their passwords. In most cases, this will create the weakest link in a … Read more

With the release of Joomla 1.6.0, two new SEO options are available in the Global Configuration of the Joomla Administrator. This blog will present a short overview of all the available Joomla 1.6 SEO settings, with recommended values for each of the settings. Photo credits: Creativity103 Search Engine Friendly … Read more

With more Joomla 1.6 templates coming out each day, some of the modules you are currently using with Joomla 1.5 might not work with them. Upgrading a module doesn't have to be a lot of work though. I'll explain the steps needed to get your module working with Joomla 1.6 in no time! Photo credits: kirtaph Language Files As … Read more

Once upon a time, the meta keywords tag was a great way to improve your ranking for the keywords you desired. You just entered you favorite keywords in it and the site started ranking better for that keyword. As you might have guessed, people soon started abusing the keywords tag. Because of this, most of the major search … Read more

Update: Joomla! 1.7 version of this blog post is now available! Check it out: here. Since the release of Joomla 1.5, developers can enable users to configure extensions using parameters. While the possibility of being able to do this is great, it is often a chore to keep track of the code needed to access one of these … Read more

Last week I've spent countless hours debugging a problem with a piece of Javascript code. The solution was ridiculously simple, but to my big surprise I couldn't find any sources on the internet documenting it: load your CSS files before your JS files. Let's discuss some details. Photo credits: Kaiban It looks … Read more

Some search queries simply generate too much results. If you are trying to find a solution to a bug in your Joomla template that is caused by Internet Explorer, searching for 'internet explorer bug joomla' will give you over 2 million results. Scanning the Google Analytics reports of ThemePartner the other day, I spotted a … Read more

With Joomla 1.6 having reached beta 14, the first release candidate (RC) shouldn't take long. In order to install Joomla templates on Joomla 1.6, several changes need to be made to the templateDetails.xml file that is packed with a template. Based on the information found in several sources (including the templates that are … Read more

Why would you buy premium Joomla! templates, when there are literally thousands of free Joomla! templates available on the Internet? While free Joomla! templates are great to try the strength of Joomla! or power a hobby website, my guess would be that many corporate Joomla! websites would achieve far greater conversion rates by … Read more

At some point in time, you'll take a look at the analytics package linked to your favorite Joomla website and notice a column named 'Bounce Rate'. While popular metrics include 'Visits', 'Page views' or even 'Pages/Visit', bounce rate is an often overlooked measure. Assuming you're not into measuring the bounce rate of a … Read more

Back in the old days of PHP (including business logic), and HTML were often mixed in source files. The opening and closing tag of PHP made this intermixing of code and markup possible. These days this mixing is far less common and even more open source projects are dropping the PHP closing tag. See the (awful) code below … Read more