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Website Designs LLC

Joomla Expert Shares: Best Joomla Extensions

 

Joomla is one of the most popular open source content management systems (CMS) over the internet.

If you've worked with Joomla before, you may know that your Joomla site is only as functional as the Joomla extensions you use. Any Joomla Expert will tell you that there are certain extentions you simply can not go without when designing a website in Joomla.

 

Here is a list of the best Joomla extensions:

1. Akeeba Backup

In the many years that I have been actively involved in developing Joomla websites, there have been several backup utilities out there. Some focus on data backups, some focus on file backups. It is my personal belief that your average Joomla site should be backed up regularly, however with more focus on the data (since Joomla is data driven).
The great news is that Akeeba Backup easily handles both at any specified interval you choose. Hand down, the best backup solution for Joomla!

2. XMAP

Xmap is a simple sitemap component for Joomla. While there are many out there (each with their own benefits), Xmap seems to do what's important best.
One thing work mentioning, Xmap isn't the most polished component out there. The backend features are dated and somewhat of a challenge to use, and the front end HTML site maps may as well have no design, but these are minor complaints. The component still does what it's intended to do.

3. EXtplorer

eXtplorer is sort of a successor to JoomXplorer, which is basically a web based (back-end accessible) FTP utility that runs natively within Joomla. It's somewhat of a staple for non-technical site operators, and does an all around great job of providing the ability to manipulate files on your server without an external program.

4. BIGSHOT Google Analytics

This simple Joomla 1.5 native plugin allows you to add in your Google Analytics tracking code without modifying your template. There's not a whole lot to say about it - its a simple plugin. If you don't use Google Analytics, get it and download this plugin to add Google Analytics to your Joomla website, it's as simple as that.

5. SEO Simple

This extension is really great for sites with a lot of content, with not a lot of focus on SEO. What it basically does is generate meta information  and page titles based on content. Very useful for Joomla sites which integrate with social media.

While other components MANAGE meta data, this extension automates it. Its very plug and play, but note that it's not a replacement for great on-page SEO - but definitely better than nothing!

6. Mass Content

Mass Content is one of those little gems you wish you had time to time. A lot of people don't know about this lesser known Joomla component, but it does one thing EXTREMELY WELL, and that is save time. So what exactly does it do you ask? Well, it simply allows you to generate multiple content sections, categories, and content with a few clicks. This is an excellent tool for Joomla website conversions and migrations. It's also great for Joomla website builds (crank out those demo pages in seconds). An overall excellent, simple to use FREE joomla extension.

7. Lyften Bloggie

Ah, one of my more cherished free Joomla components. Not used on every site, but its a shining example of what Joomla needs more of; high quality GPL components. Lyften Bloggie runs a Joomla blog very well. It come's with many built in blog features, and compares well with wordpress. I certainly wouldn't use it as a primary component on your website (for that matter I'd recommend WordPress), but if you want a simply blog on your site with integrated chat, tags, trackbacks, etc - go ahead and check this one out. One if its strongest points is its quality. The guys who built this one really took their time. Again, such a great component that easily surpasses some of the commercial Joomla components out there.

8. AllVideos Reloaded

AllVideos Reloaded is a fork of the famous AllVideos plugin, natively developed for Joomla! 1.5 and vastly enhanced with lots of individually tunable parameters. This handy extension simply allows you to embed videos on your website. It's not a video management system, but a plugin which simplifies embedding video content into your standard content. It handles external video (youtube, etc), as well as local video (videos uploaded to your Joomla site).

9. ReReplacer

Here at Joomlaport, we're all about sharing those little known extensions that make a world of difference when you need them.
Lets assume for a second you have a website with 1000 content items. Your company name is Widgets LLC. A recent decision to incorporate was made, so now you have 1000 pages to update. Lucky for us, ReReplacer exists. With a few clicks, you'll change that "Widgets LLC" to "Widgets INC" on any page of your site, without editing a single content item. In a nutshell, this extension is a component and a plugin. The component portion allows for management of your replacements, the plugin actually does the heavy lifting and replaces text or code on your pages on-the-fly.

10. Sexy Bookmarks

Most likely, you've seen a version of this extensions core script somewhere on the net (typically on a blog). It basically displays common bookmark links to popular social media sites, allowing your visitors to easily share your extremely useful, and entirely entertaining content.

 

Please contact us if you're looking for a Joomla Expert to design your Joomla website. We've design countless Joomla websites for customer in Portland Oregon and also clients around the country.

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FrontPage Expert: Pros and Cons of FrontPage

 

 

FrontPage is a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) web page editor for basic web page development. Many people are asking whether FrontPage is still a good options. Here are a few simply pros and cons of FrontPage as conveyed by a FrontPage Expert.

 

 

 

Pros of FrontPage:

  • Very low-cost -- free on-campus and only $5 for off-campus use via Campus Microsoft Agreement
  • Available in labs across campuses
  • Supported by SOE Technical Support Services
  • Easy to learn because of the familiar Microsoft menus and toolbars
  • Comes equipped with many pre-designed web page templates
  • Very easy to edit on SOE servers
  • Easy to add some features, such as some forms, to web pages

 

Cons of FrontPage:

  • Doesn't produce code as cleanly as Dreamweaver
  • Current edition is available for Windows only; Macintosh version is outdated and no longer being updated
  • Some features are specific to the Microsoft platform only
  • Lacks  interactive development tools found in other platforms such as WordPress or Dreamweaver

 

We offer professional FrontPage solutions for local companies as well as customers around the country. We have various satisfied customers in the Portland/Vancouver area who regular employ our fast and friendly service. Contact us if  you need a FrontPage Expert to help you make changes to your current website. We can also help you out if you want to change the platform of your website to something else such as WordPress of Dreamweaver.

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Dreamweaver Expert: Pros and Cons of Dreamweaver

Is Dreamweaver a good development tool? Find out what a Dreamweaver Expert has to say about the pros and cons of Dreamweaver.

Dreamweaver Pros:

1. Code Highlighting helps you quickly scan your code as well as spot any errors

2. Code Suggestion is a really helpful feature especially when writing CSS

3. Code and Design View - you can see what your code is crafting

4. Code Validation and Accessibility Checks

5. Properties Bar & Insert Images

6. Site Wide Find and Replace can save you hours of time

7. File Manager turns the programmer into much more than just a code editor

8. Dreamweaver Templates to create sites without having to learn a language such as php.

9. Tabs and Connected Files

10. New Exciting Things with CS5 - No more browser headaches with Browser Lab

Dreamweaver Cons:

Here are the pros and cons of Dreamweaver

1. Confusing Interface

2. Steep Learning Curve - Learning Dreamweaver for the first time can be really difficult

3. The WYSIWIG lies - you can not trust what you see in the WYSIWIG, it is not a browser

4. Bulky Dynamic Code - the code that it creates are overly complicated.

5. Badly Written Code Snippets

6. Undefined CSS Styling (pre CS4)

7. Not in Full Control of your Code - By only using the Design view people often end up with messy bloated code

8.  Only 10% of the full functionality is actually useful

9. Dreamweaver can make you a lazy designer if you are not careful

10. Dreamweaver is expensive

Are you looking for a Dreamweaver Expert to help you make changes to your current website? We offer professional Dreamweaver solutions for local companies as well as customers around the country.We have various satisfied customers in the Portland/Vancouver area who regular employ our fast and friendly service. Please contact us if you need help making changes to your Dreamweaver site.

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Hire a WordPress Expert in Portland Oregon

Maybe you're looking for a brand new installation and you need a WordPress Expert to make it happen. Maybe you have an existing site on Dreamweaver, Frontpage, Joomla, or Expression Web and you need an expert to transfer it to WordPress. Maybe you just need a website that you can easily make changes to yourself and you've heard (rightly so) that WordPress is the way to go.

Website Designs LLC can help you.

We offer professional WordPress solutions based on custom developed plugins and themes for local companies as well as companies around the country.We have various satisfied customers in the Portland/Vacouver area who regular employ our fast and friendly service.

We specialize in CMS WordPress themes as well as  eCommerce Themes.

Have a look at some of our unique WordPress Websites:

 

View our complete website portfolio here

Click here to read more about hiring a WordPress Expert in the Portland/Vacouver area or be sure to contact us from anywhere in the country - we can help you.

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On-page Optimization Tips

Title and Header Tags

When it comes to your title and header, you want to include your keyword, but you can't always just use your keyword. In this case you may want to put your keyword first then add more text. Also, with stemming in mind, you can use different tenses or plurality for your keyword. There is also another clever strategy you can use to rank for your keyword without even using it!

Ranking with Synonyms

People don't talk about this too often, but Google actually considers synonyms when choosing results for queries. What does this mean? It means that you can rank for the word "manual" with the word "instructions". Do a Google search right now, seriously right now! Pick a word (manual if you'd like) and put a ~ in-front of it. Example search: ~manual. Every bolded word in the results page is considered to be a synonym. This means that using these words more often is going to help you rank for your keyword as well. They are like super-related LSI keywords.

Text Formatting

There are ways to optimize your text besides keyword density. Text formatting is using bold, italics, font-size, and word placement to improve the relevance of your page to your keyword. Making your keyword bold and/or increasing its font-size will add importance to it in the eyes of the Search Engines. Also, where you put your keyword has an effect as well. Placing your keyword in the first and last sentence of a body of text will increase the relevance of your page as well. With this in mind, here's how you can make a super-optimized blog-post or article:

1) Place your keyword in the title
2) Include your keyword in the first and last sentences
3) Bold your keyword both times
4) Wrap your keyword in the first and last sentences with h1
and h2 tags respectively

and here's the final tip for internal linking or back linking

5) Use your keyword as anchor text AND bold it

This last trick gets ignored a lot. It's a great way to add even more influence to the importance of your keyword and get more out of your anchor text. These are the little steps that people who say on-page optimization doesn't really matter either forget or don't know about.

The biggest on-page optimization blunder of all is negligence of your link profile and how you link out. The links leading to your site aren't the only ones that affect how you rank!

We have a team of authors who can create unique landing pages or squeeze pages for your website. Just let us know what you need.

Do you need fresh and relevant content for your website and blog? We have authors standing by to write 10 unique articles for you so you don’t have to deal with it.

Need a New Website?
Need more Traffic to your Website?
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Traffic through Outbound, Internal, and Back Links

Outbound Links

How you link out to other sites affects how Google trusts and ranks your site. In the TrustRank white papers that included a
patent adopted by Google, they mention how good sites link to other good sites. They also say that "good sites seldom link
to bad ones".  Use this knowledge to enhance your own rankings. Link out to authoritative and trusted sites. If you
have a ton of links leading to spammy sites it's going to hurt how your site ranks. You can't control who links to you, but
you CAN control who you link to, so don't harm your own rankings by linking to bad sites.

As an example of this principle in effect, check out Huffington Post's homepage. Their articles rank very well in the search
results and they have a PR 8 homepage. If you scroll to the bottom of their site, you will see a massive amount of
"dofollow" links all leading to other major, authoritative sites. It's no coincidence that they rank well in the SERPs
(search engine results pages). This is a clear example of a site benefiting from linking out to other good sites and
gaining trust from Google.

We have complete control over our on-page SEO, and this means our content and our links. We just talked about outbound links
and that leaves us with only one other type of link.

Internal Links

Internal links are the links that lead from one page on our site to another. Now is a good time to state a quick fact about
search engines and how they index the web. Search engines do not index websites, they index web pages. This means that a
site doesn't have authority; rather a web page has authority. The reason all the pages rank well on an authoritative website
is because of internal links.

When a large authority site makes a new page, what does that page have? It has a ton of powerful links from other
authoritative pages already on the site. This all occurs because of internal linking. So what does it mean for us? It
means we need to have a solid internal link-structure to take advantage of our own link juice.

There's no exact science to how you link your pages. Just having a consistent nav-bar is a start, but there is a lot more
you can do. If you use Word Press, there are many different related posts plug-ins you can use that will automatically
create links to other related posts for you. I recommend having more internal links than external links. A 1 to 3 ratio is a
good reference for your outbound to internal links ratio.

There is a practice called PageRank sculpting that involves severely limiting the number of outbound links you have in order
to keep more link juice internally. It sounds like a decent idea, but it fails in practice. PageRank moves more cyclically
than recognized and a lot more will stay on your site naturally. Also, we just talked about how outbound links can help you rank
- don't be afraid to link to other great sites.

Back links

Search engines often use the number of back links, or sometimes called inbound links,  that a website has as one of the most important factors for determining that website's search engine ranking, popularity and importance. Google's description of their PageRank system, for instance, notes that Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. How does a webmaster go about getting high quality backlinks to his or her website? There are many ways this can be done. Some people advocate writing and submitting articles, posting on forums, making comments on blogs. Others talk about submitting their website to various Internet directories. Another way that many people build backlinks for their website is to use Social Bookmarking websites.

Please contact us to find out what it is and how we can drive traffic to your website by creating back links for you.

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Choosing your Domain Name: Important Tips

Your domain name has a powerful effect on how you rank. Having an EMD (exact match domain) for your keyword is going to do a
lot for your ranking. However, this is not crucial to your ranking success. Many people, such as myself, choose to have a
domain name that they can brand. It depends on what you're looking to do with your site. If you want to make a small niche
site targeting a single keyword, then clearly you will want to get an EMD.

But what if the EMD is not available?

This is a very common problem for internet marketers. From a SEO standpoint, you want to choose an EMD with a non-.com
extension first if available. If none are available, then tack another word onto the end of your domain name. You will still
have your keyword in your domain and receive SEO benefits from this. For the record, it is better to start your domain with
your keyword first. For example, it would be better to choose "dogtraineronline.com" rather than "mydogtrainer.com".

Another trick is making your domain name the plural or non-plural version of your keyword. Google now uses a process
called "stemming" that understands plurality and "ing" endings on words among other things. If you add plurality to
your domain name, you will rank almost as effectively as for the non-plural version. These same principles can be applied
to your title tags, header tags, and meta tags.

Private Domain Registration?

Did you know that when you register a domain, your name, address, email address and phone number are immediately made available to anyone who wants to see them? That’s right. Your personal information is exposed 24 hours a day, everyday, to anyone, anywhere.

You have the power to change this. With a private (“unlisted”) registration through Oregon Webhosting. Registering or Transferring a existing domain name to us will protect your identity and your privacy.

Please Contact us if you want to register a domain or if you're interested in private domain registration

Need a New Website?
Need more Traffic to your Website?
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