2nd site & Joomla Experiment

[mdvaden]

Just started a brand new site. It's my 2nd now.

It's pretty low-key, so I decided to try out Joomla just to see what its like.

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www.wideanglesite.com (http://wideanglesite.com)

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It's sort of weird starting a site from scratch again. Takes me back to when my main site (now 140 web pages) was just 3 tiny pages with a couple of paragraphs and a clipart image.

This new site will take some time to build content, because its for something I'm learning, rather than the first, which dealt with my profession.

:)

[walker-talker]

So what do you think about it? I am considering it for my new site. I was wondering if it was very SEO friendly. I noticed on the joomla.org site that you have to pay $10 a month extra for google analytics to be placed on my site. I don't know, but I might be able to do it myself.

Any opinions?

[mdvaden]

So what do you think about it? I am considering it for my new site. I was wondering if it was very SEO friendly. I noticed on the joomla.org site that you have to pay $10 a month extra for google analytics to be placed on my site. I don't know, but I might be able to do it myself.

Any opinions?

Its still a learning curve.

I'm so used to the procedure of doing page by page in Dreamweaver.

But in the Joomla layout, the modules are pretty cool. The names and hierarchy of stuff takes a while to get used to. Its amazing how many modules are available, and for free too.

Our son got me started in the older version to understand how it works so I could help other older sites with editing and SEO. Expects the latest version to be better, but its still like in a beta phase, although available.

The Joomla site is really handy for someone to build and manage content and not deal with much code. It seems reasonably good from an SEO standpoint one someone pinpoints the description tags. Even the images have tags, so that's good.

If someone was just going to have like 3 to 5 webpages, I'd say that some CSS or HTML template might be more practical (if they won't make changes). But if they want to add and keep building content regularly, then the Joomla thing seems well worth keeping in mind as an option. Once someone learns the menu system, they could add articles similar to constructing a Wordpress type blog.

[walker-talker]

I sat and watched all the tutorials a couple days ago and it was the ease of adding content is what really sparked my interest. I have never written code before. I bought and messed with Frontpage 2003 a little, but didn't seem that easy to me. My wife has an IT degree and works with web applications, but doesn't seem to know anything about what I need done....lol. Seems like we just get into big arguments, so I am trying to do this alone. I think the toughest part is finding a well built template designed how I want. I have the 30 day trial version and messed around with it for a few hours today.

Yes, I really like the modules you can add. I added one today that was a newsletter signup. You can even go in and design the newsletter and have them emailed (automatically with the pay version).

I also like the fact you can make changes and see them instantly rather than upload them from a remote computer. I bounce back and forth between my desktop and laptop.

Are the sites you have linked with lawnsite on Joomla?

[mdvaden]

Are the sites you have linked with lawnsite on Joomla?

Maybe you could re-phrase that question, because I wasn't sure what you meant.

But if you mean the ones in my signature, those are not Joomla, but follow an older html table-based website style that has been it's theme for quite a few years. There's a tad bit of CSS in it here and there.

I have 6 separate pages on that site each with Google Pagerank 4 which is one more reason it gets up to 1800 page views a day in the summer.

But it's taken continual promotion to build the reputation to that point.

Those tutorials you mentioned are one more thing in favor of Joomla. I had not watched them yet, but our son has mentioned them several times saying they are pretty good.

Oh ... one idea ...

Images ---- if you use images within articles, sometimes its worth using a new one. Or for repetition of an image, to load a second copy with a new file name. That way you don't end up with a blank space someday if you ever decide to remove an image but lost track of how many spots its used. I have yet to see if the Joomla site has a function that shows how many places an image is being used. That may be this next week's investigation.