Rediscover Content: Vision for Next Year’s Release
The Joomla Leadership Team recently got together to discuss the future for Joomla Development. The vision for the next Joomla release is “Rediscover Content” and is outlined below.
Rediscover Content
The next release of Joomla, codenamed Bowerbird, is focused on making the content you already have more connected and accessible. With Bowerbird, your website becomes a “content powerhouse” of valuable information in any language. The following features are the primary focus of Bowerbird:
1. Super Search: Experience the power of high-performance searching, term indexing, filters, language stemming, alternative phrasing, and an extensible plug-in API for third-party developers.
2. Tag, You’re It: Break through the limitations of categories by tagging content with relevant keywords. Too many articles? Use the built-in batch tagger to create hundreds—even thousands—of tags in just a few minutes.
3. Lost and Found: Help search engines find and classify your content in the most optimum way by managing metadata, titles, and content descriptions. Boost your overall search ranking and you’ll never be lost in search results.
If you want to be discovered by new users or rediscover your own content, the next version of Joomla is exactly what you’re looking for.
Note: The bowerbird is known for its instinctual behavior to collect/organize as many blue items as possible, meticulously organizing them in its nest, in order to attract a mate. It’s native to Australia.
WordPress 3.0.1 Released
This maintenance release addresses about 50 minor issues.
* Fixed 54 tickets total. A break down of ticket status by component can be found in Trac.
* Added unregister_nav_menu(), for child themes.
To update your WordPress website please go to the following:
Poorly Designed Websites Are Bad For Business
When I go searching for businesses around Canberra I always come across, the old poorly designed DIY business website, and think to myself…Why didn’t you just hire a professional? The reason why is because many business owners believe that by designing their own website they will save themselves hundreds of dollars, but they need to realise it ends up costing a lot more in the long run.
Research has show that a visitor to your site has to be hooked within the first 15 seconds or else they will leave. If a website loads slowly or not display correctly due to large unnecessary photos, they will leave. If the navigation of your website is not easy to find or confusing, they will leave. If your web pages are so full of text that it becomes hard to read, they will leave. The information with in a website is what the visitor wants to read, so its like a present, the contents inside are much better is it wrapping looks good too.
Now don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of people out there who have built some great DIY websites, which is great, those people have have dedicated the time to learning about web design and it has paid off, but the problem is that most people don’t and just slap a site together and think great now I have a website.
So if you are thinking about building your own website, please either hire a professional like us Rhino Web Design Canberra or do some research on good website design. All you have to do is keep the layout easy to read by paying extra care to to the text on the website, remember too much text is not a good thing break it up with some pictures. The font should be easy to read, if you have trouble reading it then your users will too. Keep your image file sizes small, most photo editing programs have an option to optimise your images for the web. Keep your colour scheme simple, too many different contrasting colours looks bad.
Most importantly, remember to build your site for your visitor and not for you.
Ryan Carmody
Rhino Web Design Canberra
How to read a Google Analytics Report
Previously, a websites success was measured by the number of hits it received. However, thanks to Google Analytics, we now have many ways to measure the success of a website.
So what is Google Analytics? It is a free service offered by Google that generates detailed statistics about the visitors to a website. Google Analytics gives you a rich insight into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness. Its powerful, flexible and easy-to-use features let you see and analyse your traffic data in an entirely new way.
At RhinoWeb we setup Google Analytics as part of our web design services and send you a monthly report so you can analyse it and tell just how well your website is doing.
There is a lot of information in a Google Analytics report and this article is designed to give you a basic understanding and help you make sense of the data.
The google report is divided up into sections and the first page contains an overview of these sections. Here are some definitions for each these components:
The Graph: Shows the number of visitors per day for the date range listed. With this graph you can take a look at daily traffic patterns over the month. Take a look at the high peaks and try to remember if you did anything that day to help increase the traffic, for example you might have recommended your site to a large number of people.
Site Usage: This section shows you some quick statistics on whats happening with your site.
- Visits – How many unique visitors have come to your site.
- Pageviews – The amount of pages that have been viewed by these visitors
- Pages/Visit – The averages amount of different pages viewed by these visitors.
- Bounce Rate – A “Bounce” means the visitor went to your home page and left. Usually indicates they didn’t find what they were looking for either 1) not at all; or 2) not quick enough.
- Avg time on Site – This is the average amount of time your users spend at your site
- New Visits – The percentage of visitors that were new to your site.
Visitors Overview: This sections shows you the total number of visits to your site. More details can be found further down in the report.
Map Overlay: This sections shows you the countries in which your users are originating from. More details can be found further down in the report.
Traffic Sources: This sections shows you where most of your traffic is coming from from.
- Referring Sites – This means that visitors are getting to your site via another persons link. That can be either via Facebook, Twitter, another persons website, or even an email.
- Direct Traffic – This means that visitors are getting to your site by typing in the URL into the browsers address bar.
- Search engines – This is from visitors searching for your business or industry via search engine like Google and Yahoo.
More details can be found further down in the report, which also states the websites that referred your site as well as the keywords used in the search engines.
Content Overview: This sections shows you the most popular sections or articles that your visitors are looking at. More information can be found further down the report.
Well now you should have a basic understanding of how to read your Google Analytics report. If you have any further questions please feel free to send me an email.
Rhino Web Design Canberra
Why your business needs a website
Many business owners are asking themselves whether or not they really need a website, well the simple answer is Yes. Absolutely. Even if you think your business is too small, or too obscure then think again.
I have compiled a small list of some of the top reason why you should be considering getting a new website:
- A website can help you generate a professional image
- Business Information is available 24/7
- Expand your advertising
- Create a 24 Hour Service
- Provide Research information
- Feed Back from the Customer
- Existence is Everything
- Inexpensive and Almost Risk Free
A professionally designed website is one of the best ways to instill confidence in your new customers who are not familiar with your company already or even increase the confidence of your existing customer base. It gives the customer the impression that they are dealing with a firm they can trust and will generate a sense of respectability with your service and/or product
With a website you are able to communicate your address, phone numbers, fax numbers, and hours of operation. How much time do you spend on the phone giving out all of this information? Directions, what you do and don’t carry, what hours you are open, the price of some service, how one of your services “works”, directions once again, and yes you are open on Sundays too. What if you could hire someone for just a few hundred dollars a year to take an increasing number of those calls for you? You would do it in a heartbeat wouldn’t you? You’d be surprised how much a website will take off your shoulders while simultaneously driving business to you.
People are not using the Yellow pages as much as they used to because information is easier to find using the internet. We don’t recommend you drop your Yellow pages ads all together but instead look at combining the both to really capture the market. Having a website helps support your yellow pages ad by offer more information and examples of your products and services. A yellow pages ad will help you capture their attention whilst convincing them that you are who they want to deal with.
By 24 hours service I don’t mean that you will now be working 24 hours, I mean your website will work for you for 24 hours. Web pages serve the client / customers 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Consumers are increasingly becoming busier and busier every day and by providing information and services online you are able to attract the people who are simply just too busy to handle all their needs during their 9-5. With the use of things like F.A.Q’s you can answer all those common questions that your clients have easily without them having to call you every time.
Consumers spend hours of time researching potential businesses, products and services prior to making an educated purchase. Don’t miss out on the opportunity to give your customers and potential customers the information they want and need to make an educated purchase decision by foregoing a company website.
With a good web presence you are able to ask for feedback in a non-confrontational way and receive information instantly without extra cost. This could be something as simple as a dynamic contact and feedback form or individual product and service rating systems that give the customer the anonymity they desire and the information and feedback crucial to your businesses success.
Without a website, you simply do not exist to the average consumer. Before you look back at all your success and totally disregard what I am saying just hear me out on this. It’s 5:00pm, Friday evening and I have to get my dog groomed this weekend. I type in my favorite search engine at work: “Dog Groomer Columbia, Missouri”. The first two links all look great. I look at their hours, their location, read a little about the company and they’ve been in business for over 20 years, experience is great, so I pick up the phone and make an appointment.
What I didn’t know though is that you run a Pet Groomer just a few blocks from where I’ll be having lunch tomorrow. I didn’t know that because your website either didn’t come up in the search engine or perhaps you do not have a website at all. For me and many other consumers, you didn’t even exist when I was making a decision on whom to do business with.
All the above benefits to having a website for your small business are great. When people first began to adopt the internet these benefits would have been very costly and out of reach of the average small business owner. However, while every other advertising medium has increased in price over the past decade, website development and hosting has decreased significantly.
For just a few hundred dollars a year, you can get all the benefits above and much more. There is virtually “no risk” in website marketing. You don’t have to spend thousands of dollars and wonder if you should have bought a bigger yellow pages ad but can’t change it until the next year rolls around. You can easily customize your website and make changes at your convenience. You can do as much or as little as your business goals and budget allow.
WordPress no longer supports PHP 4 and MySQL 4
With the release of version 3.1, WordPress will no longer support PHP 4 and MySQL 4.
For WordPress 3.2, due in the first half of 2011, we will be raising the minimum required PHP version to 5.2. Why 5.2? Because that’s what the vast majority of WordPress users are using, and it offers substantial improvements over earlier PHP 5 releases. It is also the minimum PHP version that the Drupal and Joomla projects will be supporting in their next versions, both due out this year.
Our approach with WordPress has always been to make it run on common server configurations. We want users to have flexibility when choosing a host for their precious content. Because of this strategy, WordPress runs pretty much anywhere. Web hosting platforms, however, change over time, and we occasionally are able to reevaluate some of the requirements for running WordPress. Now is one of those times. You probably guessed it from the title — we’re finally ready to announce the end of support for PHP 4 and MySQL 4!
For WordPress 3.2, due in the first half of 2011, we will be raising the minimum required PHP version to 5.2. Why 5.2? Because that’s what the vast majority of WordPress users are using, and it offers substantial improvements over earlier PHP 5 releases. It is also the minimum PHP version that the Drupal and Joomla projects will be supporting in their next versions, both due out this year.
WordPress Wins Overall Best Open Source CMS for 2009
It is great to see the WordPress team getting some well deserved recognition for their fantastic product. It ease of use and ability to be customised has made this CMS one of the most popular in the world.
Here are some snippets from a recent WordPress.org blog post
“WordPress has been awarded the Overall Best Open Source CMS Award in the 2009 Open Source CMS Awards. This is a landmark for us, as it is the first time we’ve won this award, and it marks a shift in the public perception of WordPress, from blog software to full-featured CMS. No small contest, the Open Source CMS Awards received over 12,000 nominations and more than 23,000 votes across five categories…
Every day thousands of new people are embracing WordPress to power not just their blogs but entire sites and communities without compromising on usability or scalability (as would be the case with a legacy CMS). Every member of the WordPress community, from core developer to beginning user, should be proud to be part of this momentum: congratulations to us all!”
WordPress 2.9 Released
WordPress 2.9 has now been released! Some of the new features include:
* Global undo/”trash” feature;
* Built-in image editor;
* Batch plugin update and compatibility checking;
* Easier video embeds; and
* Lots of new hooks and filters for the techies out there.
Head on over to WordPress.org to download your copy now. And remember…do a backup before upgrading!
Word Press 2.8 Released
WordPress 2.8 has now been released! The major improvements include:
* Version 2.8 is now faster.
* You can now browse the entire theme directory and install a theme with one click.
* CodePress editor which gives syntax highlighting to the previously-plain editor.
* Completely redesigned widgets interface
* New Screen Options on every page
Wordpress Version 2.8 also contains over 180 new features.
