Recent Satisfied Clients

Joomla, clearly stated, is the most popular Web site development platform available. Many aspects, including its simple administrative interface and extensibility, allow Joomla, an award-winning content management system (CMS), to enable you to build Web sites and powerful online applications.

What's a content management system (CMS)?

A content management system is software that organizes every item of content on your Web site within a relational database. Content items can be simple text, photos, music, video, documents, or anything else your imagination can conjure up. A major advantage of using a CMS is that it promotes creative and flexible web design while handling the technical aspects in the background. The CMS manages all your content so that you can concentrate on your site’s objectives.

What are some real world examples of what Joomla! can do?

Joomla is used all over the world to power Web sites of all shapes and sizes. For example:
•   Corporate Web sites or portals
•   Corporate intranets and extranets
•   Online magazines, newspapers, and publications
•   E-commerce and online reservations
•   Government applications
•   Small business Web sites
•   Non-profit and organizational Web sites
•   Community-based portals
•   School and church Web sites
•   Personal or family homepages

Who uses Joomla?

Here are just a few examples of Web sites that use Joomla:
•   United Nations (Governmental organization) - http://www.unric.org
•   MTV Networks Quizilla (Social networking) - http://www.quizilla.com
•   L.A. Weekly (Online publication) - http://www.laweekly.com
•   IHOP (Restaurant chain) - http://www.ihop.com
•   Harvard University (Educational) - http://gsas.harvard.edu
•   Citibank (Financial institution intranet) - Not publicly accessible
•   The Green Maven (Eco-resources) - http://www.greenmaven.com
•   Outdoor Photographer (Magazine) - http://www.outdoorphotographer.com
•   PlayShakespeare.com (Cultural) - http://www.playshakespeare.com
•   Senso Interiors (Furniture design) - http://www.sensointeriors.co.za

SEO - Myths and Mine Fields

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SEO – Search Engine Optimization, Myths and Mine Fields

“It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma…” Winston Churchill 1939

What Winston Churchill had to say about the former Soviet Union seventy years ago, is equally descriptive of Search Engine Optimization. Start with a boiling cauldron of black magic; add one part art, one part science and blend in a five pound bag of exaggerated claims and promises and you have the recipe for the SEO soup du jour offered by many practitioners.

This is not to say that web designers, as a group, are dishonest or intentionally misleading. In fact, while there are a handful of truly unscrupulous scoundrels in our industry, I believe the vast majority of web designers to be honest, well intentioned individuals, who possess varying levels of SEO competence and understanding. Of course some possess varying degrees of SEO incompetence and misunderstanding.

What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

According to the online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, “Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural" ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results.” It further goes on to say, “As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimizing a website primarily involves editing its content and HTML coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines.”

SEO: Moving Target or Holy Grail?

Of course the 800 lb. gorilla in this room is Google, who along with its 500 lb. cousins, Yahoo and MSN dominates the search engine industry with an iron fist. This unholy troika, with ill-defined and often unquantifiable guidelines cloaked behind a curtain of “algorithmic trade secrets,” has become a mine field to be traversed with great care, instead of being a helpful resource to gain exposure for your business. Instead of being a proactive endeavor to increase traffic to one’s website, SEO has become an exercise in risk management designed more to not offend the internet Gods.

What worked in years past, such as meta tags for keywords, may have marginal value with Yahoo, but no longer is a criterion used by Google to determine page rank, unless, of course, you misuse them in some manner unknown to anyone but Google engineers, then you can be left with no indexing at all.

Capricious and arbitrary, the major search engines have become much more than an indexer of web pages. They have positioned themselves as the sole arbiters of worthy content. This not only applies to the proper format and structure, but also to the political correctness of your site should you wish to use Google Adsense or Yahoo Publisher Network. So what do you do?

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