We have finally completed the Joomla advanced course and will be running the first course on the 30th of June 2010. We are also running another popular Introduction to Joomla on the 29th of June, so you can choose to do both these courses back to back for the full Joomla experience.

We also offer a discount if you sign up for both courses at the same time (the discount will be reflected on your invoice).

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A month or two ago Google published on their official blog that they have implemented customised search for everyone doing search even when you are not logged into your Google account.

For the past couple of months or even longer Google has started to keep track of your browser habits when you were logged into your Google account. The would then tailor the search results to an extent on those browser habits. So this means that if you were looking for specific products and services and visited specific sites, and a week or two later you looked for the same type of services, Google would keep track of that and show the sites that you visited previously in the SERPS (Search Engine Result Pages).

But this was only if you were logged in. Then, early in January this year (2010) they implemented this for everyone browsing, not just if you were logged in. Making use of cookies, they would track the sites that you visited often and if your search is related to that site, your favourites sites would be given preference in the search results.

What does this mean for SEO practitioners and website owners?

A couple of things. Firstly, it is becoming more and more important to make your site ‘clickable’ in the search engine results so that you get more visitors and click throughs. Suddenly the old semi-abandoned workhorse of SEO, the Meta Description tag, gets hauled out and dusted off. Remember that in a huge percentage of cases Google will show the Meta Description tag in the search engine results, even though it is not formally used for ranking. If your Description meta tag is written well enough, you could well get more click-throughs when people see your result in the search engine results. Remember, even if you are on the first page of Google you are still competing for attention with 9 other results as well as a lot of sponsored ads, and these sponsored ads have often been honed to perfection to get the maximum click-through rate. It is becoming time for people focused on natural results to start thinking like PPC gurus - how can I structure the title and description of my site to get the most click-throughs to my site?

But that is not all. On Friday 9 April, Google published in their blog in Webmaster central that they will now be taking site load speed into consideration when looking at site rankings. Information about site loading speed is collected through browsers using the Google toolbar and your site’s loading speed is compared to other sites in the same geographic area.

You can view Google’s perspective of your site’s loading speed in your webmaster area under the ‘Labs’ tab, and then you can also download and install a ‘Page Speed’ Firefox plugin that will analyze your site’s loading speed and make suggestions as to where you can improve it.

The SEO landscape is changing and we’d better keep up!

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Tailormade4you will be running its next Joomla Training course on 20 February 2010 in Johannesburg.

The cost of the course is R1750 and if you bring your own notebook, a discount of R250 will apply.

This is a hands-on course for people interested in learning how to use Joomla to build and maintain their own websites. It is meant for people with no web design experience, up to designers who are interested in making the move to Joomla.

Read more about our Joomla Training Course here!

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We will be holding a free seminar on the importance of an SEO strategy for a website on 27 August 2009 between 2:00 and 4:00 in the afternoon.

We have just sent out a press release regarding the seminar through Bizcommunity (http://www.bizcommunity.com/PressOffice/PressRelease.aspx?i=123334&ai=38934)

Read more about the importance of doing SEO for a website here and make a booking for the free seminar:
http://www.tm4y.co.za/free-seo-seminar.html

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At the end of June I presented a paper at the ‘Intranets and Webs’ conference organised by Joshua West and held at Gallager Estates.

The topic was about Online Reputation Management. Here is the slideshow presentation, but I also included a PDF writeup which I am making available as a free download.

Click here to download the PDF Report

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Web 2.0..

Frankly, I do think that some of the ‘words’ tracked by the Language Monitor group (or website) only loosely fits the definition of the word ‘word’ (if you follow my meaning through this convoluted linguistic minefield…)

Ok, let’s start at the beginning.

In the beginning was the Word.. Sorry couldn’t resist that. My aplogies.

Let’s try again.

The The Global Language Monitor (an incorporated company operating out of Austin, Texas) has been tracking new words in English since 2003.

Last week Wednesday, the 10th of June 2009, the English language passed the 1 000 000th word mark, with the millionth word being ‘Web 2.0′.

It beats other contenders such as ’slumdog’ and ‘jai ho’.

The GLM makes use of software to track word usage not only online but in global media. For a word to ‘make it’ into the English language, it needs to have 25,000 citations with the necessary breadth of geographic distribution, and depth of citations.

That may all be very well, but I just can’t help feeling that some of the words are not really WORDS as such, but rather amalgamations of existing words which then take on a new meaning.

For example, the question was raised why ‘twitter’ was not part of the race to be the millionth word, and the answer was that ‘twitter’ is already a word, it has just acquired a new meaning today. Well, sorry, but ‘web’ is also already a word…. It is only through its use in conjuction with the number 2.0 (also already existing, not so?) that it acquires a different meaning.

So I am not fully convinced.

Be that as it may, SOME words I do agree are new, such as the word n00b (commonly used by games and other technical geeks to describe those annoying new people who ask stupid questions on forums and other websites without bothering to try and find out the answers first by reading through existing threads and sites).

N00b is apparently the only word with two numbers in the English Language (yes, it is spelt EN-ZERO-ZERO-BEE and not EN-OH-OH-BEE), but what about L33T (leet)? After all, n00b is a word from leet speak, not so?

An interesting point about the word ‘LEET’ is raised on Wikipedia, where it says that:

“a common characteristic of Leet is changing its grammatical usage to be deliberately incorrect”

So sometimes it is spelt l33t, sometimes 1337, and even in binary, 10100111001, to avoid ‘detection’. So even though the usage of the word ‘leet’ might actually be more than n00b, in terms of its MEANING, in terms of actual references it therefore slides way under the rader of 25 000 mentions…

Predictably, most ‘formal’ linguists are making up their own sets of words (most of which unprintable) as comment on the GLM’s results. They say that there is just no way to accurately measure these words and that Paul JJ Payack is just running the race for the ‘millionth word’ as a publicity stunt for his new book.

Be that as it may, my favourite ‘new’ word just has to be ‘misunderstimate’ - a bushism of note (and isn’t ‘bushism’ a new word too)?

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Without doubt the search engine release that has generated the most excitement in the past couple of days has been that of Bing.com

Bing has actually released a bit ahead of time, unexpectedly making its premature arrival on Monday.

For a very short period both Live.com and Bing.com were running as separate entities and then Live.com started to redirect to Bing.com.

On the face of it, Bing offers lots of cool features although the interface and features differ whether you use a local version or a US version (you can set your location manually in the upper left hand corner). The US version, for example, brings up sub categories for a high level search that you might do, for example, as well as links directly to videos and images. In the South African version this just does not happen, which might make the South African user have a bit of a ‘huh?’ moment with regards to the hype surrounding the new version.

What we can see on our results that are quite cool is that a new hover window opens on the left with some summary text from the site as well as additional links that you can click to directly.

Apart from that, there are very strong indications that the actual results returned are still the same underlying results that were offered by Live.com. It does not look as if the basic underlying algorithm that brings back the search results has changed much since during the short period of time that live.com and bing.com were running in parallel one could see that the results were exactly the same.

This is actually a pity, since I am not sure that a cool and slick interface would be enough to give Google a run for its money. Flashy effects and cool graphics only go so far until you want the actual results to fit your requirements. Look how far Google managed to come with a plain white, minimalistic interface. It is not about the graphics, it is about the content. (A fact is often forgotten in web design as well….)

But given that Bing is still in Beta, there is still hope that the situation might change on the actual results set as well.

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I tried out the new search engine Wolfram Alpha today. It launched on Monday and would supposedly be able to answer questions that are more ‘knowledge based’ than Google would normally be able to answer.

I say ‘normally’ since I know someone with such an amount of unshakeable trust in getting answers back from Google that they type in full sentence queries, for example: “what is the difference between tone and pulse phones”.

This exactly the question that came up recently in a conversation in the office (the alpha males who normally would know these sort of questions without having to resort to Google just being out of reach at that point).

Before she could start typing the question into Google, I had the brilliant idea of trying it out on Wolfram Alpha. Strangely enough, it didn’t know what we were talking about….

“Wolfram|Alpha isn’t sure what to do with your input.” is the answer that came back.

Mhhmmm… let’s see what google makes of it: Yup, the answer to the question is there within the first three results.

I wouldn’t have thought that this is such a difficult question to answer for Wolfram Alpha, after all, it can tell you the height of Everest and the current temperature in Johannesburg, but yeah, it reminds me a bit of the Rain Man….

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Josey from Visualrepublic recently introduced me to Ning. It is the first time I’ve heard about this service to I decided to check it out.

Apparently it started in 2005 already but it evolved quite a bit over the past couple of years into what it is today - an all-in-one solution to build your own social network a-la Facebook or MySpace style. Quite cool.

When you go to the site you are met with a rather forbidding Google-like interface - quite minimalistic with just a big ‘Discover Social Networks’ box in the middle of the screen. It is only by scouting around and clicking on the rather unobtrusive links at the bottom of the page that you can get more information about what it is and how it works. Even that information is rather coy, since at some point you discover that there is a free version and a premium version and that they are allowed to serve their own ads on the free version. In the premium version you can remove their ads and run your own and even ‘white label’ the social network by pointing your own domain at your social network site on Ning.

This is an ideal type of setup of any type of organisation that wants to foster communication and collaboration between its members.

It is not without its controversy though since like all social networking sites (including Facebook) it needs to deal with issues of content and member ownership and privacy and some of its latest decisions regarding this was not met with equal equanimity by all members….

Overall though, it is a brilliant solution if you are feeling megalomaniac and want to take over the world with your own social networking group!

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Since my Joomla journey started on the 14th April 2009, many mixed feelings and varied judgments have been running through my mind. Some of these thoughts clashing with judgment and others not. There are a two main topics pertaining to Joomla that have really jumped out at me, and I will talk about these in this article.

Joomla as I understand it, is a Content Management System that gives the user full control over the content of their website whether the website is a straightforward brochure website, or a complex and involved e-commerce website.

In terms of my previous experience as a web-developer, I always used to build my websites in Dreamweaver using various technologies such as PHP/ MySQL,AS2/AS3, HTML(CSS) and XML to suit a clients needs. I used to be very skeptical of this ‘Joomla System’, even though I heard more and more people talking about it everyday. The reason I chose to stay away from Joomla was because I firmly believed that Joomla constrained you to their structure, and one had to work within the bounds of the JoomlaCMS.

I have to admit that since I have started getting more involved with Joomla, I can now see why people use it, and why it has become the ‘buzzword’ in this industry, and has been for a while amongst web-developers. Joomla is very user friendly, thus easily navigable and has functionality to suit and satisfy every need.

Joomlas functionality is of such a high level that it would take one at least 5 years to code functionality of such high caliber. For example, one can hard code a login form that puts user values into a database, but in Joomla that is already built in with much more.

In conclusion, my Dreamweaver and all accompanying skills will never be lost, however now I am going to start using Joomla more and more as a tool to achieve goals faster without going the long way round.

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