Posted by John Sundberg in Business Wednesday, March 3 2010
If nothing else, this strip shows the importance of business systems and the challenge of keeping things, such as vendor contracts, organized and current. Beyond that, I thought it was pretty funny.
Posted by John Sundberg in WordPress Monday, March 1 2010
If you’re using a self-hosted version of WordPress you may have noticed that WordPress is keeping copies of every post revision you make. While this can be helpful in rolling a post back to an earlier version, the number of revisions can quickly get out of hand. These revisions are stored in your database, and once a post is published you probably don’t need them anymore. There are a few plugins that can help you manage these revisions, but in my opinion, if you can do this without adding another plugin, so much the better.
There’s a lot of information on the web about this topic, and I filtered through it recently and came up with this solution.
Posted by John Sundberg in Joomla Extensions Saturday, February 27 2010
After you’ve built one or more Joomla websites you will start to realize that there are a handful of Joomla extensions that, in your opinion, should have been included with the standard Joomla package. As it is, you’ll need to assemble your personal collection of tools and add them to your website. Everybody has their own list . . . here’s mine:
Posted by John Sundberg in Tutorials Saturday, February 20 2010
Let’s face it: the default Joomla 404 error page, while useful and perhaps necessary, is one of the uglier web pages in existence. The shock value of seeing one of these pages for the first time is memorable, and diminishes only slowly over time.
Creating a custom 404 error page for your Joomla website isn’t all that difficult, though there are several different approaches to making it work, and this blog post explains the process I’m using on this website and a few others I’ve built. I should also add that inspiration for this method came from this lengthy thread on the Joomla forums.
Creating a custom Joomla 404 error page – the process
The image to the left is a screenshot of the custom 404 error page I came up with, and you can see a full-size version of the page by clicking on the image.
For more ideas and to see what other web designers have come up with, Smashing Magazine has put together a collection of some of the best 404 pages on the web, with links to some other collections as well.
If you’re going to be making these changes to a ‘live’ site, then I recommend that you make them in roughly the following order. Also, as a general rule-of-thumb, make a backup of your website before making any significant changes.
Posted by John Sundberg in Resources Friday, February 19 2010
Two related events inspired me to take another look at my online backup strategy this week – building a new desktop computer to replace my aging Dell 690, and moving from XP Professional to Windows 7 Ultimate. The move to Windows 7 had a few small “bumps” along the way, mainly with some software and hardware that weren’t
compatible with the new OS, but overall it has been a very good move. However, this post is not about Windows 7, it’s about comparing two online backup services, so here we go.
As an afterthought, I should add that if you’re not backing up your data, why aren’t you? Speaking from experience, hard drives fail, computers stop working, and disasters happen. Online backup services are easier to use, more accessible, and cost less than ever before, so why wouldn’t you want to use one to protect your stuff (data)?
Posted by John Sundberg in Website Projects Thursday, February 18 2010
Our latest website/blog project is ‘A Heart for Justice.’ This website was built for an individual who is planning to use the site and the blog to spread awareness about modern-day slavery and human trafficking, and provide links to resources to help people and churches become better informed about and more involved in this great cause. Perhaps I should have said “individuals” — my wife is the blogger and I’ll be handling the website updates.
A little history
My wife started blogging on this topic in November of 2009, using a free blog hosted at WordPress.com. I had suggested building a website to go along with the blog, and she finally agreed to that last month, though it wasn’t until two weeks ago that she picked out a Joomla template and a WordPress theme to go along with it. As it turns out, her choice was the Affinity Joomla template and matching WordPress theme from RocketTheme, one of my personal favorites.
Joomla and WordPress combined
We originally planned on building both the website and blog from the same WordPress theme, but we finally concluded that WordPress was going to be too limiting for some of the features and layout options we wanted to have in the website, so we then brought Joomla into the project. Still, WordPress can’t be beat for blogging, and RocketTheme helped us out by having both the template and theme available. Combining the two platforms can get a little confusing sometimes when you’re customizing the design, but it’s certainly doable.
Posted by John Sundberg in Business, Marketing and Social Networking Friday, January 29 2010
The February online edition of Entrepreneur Magazine has an article titled “What You Don’t Know About SEO,” which you can find at this link. The subtitle for the article reads, “It’s essential to understand SEO before you spend thousands hiring consultants you may not even need,” and is a good summary of the substance of the article. SEO, an acronym for Search Engine Optimization, is the process of optimizing a website to be most visible to search engines like Google.
A Real Example
Included in the article is a “case study” of a marketing agency that, incredibly, “hired and fired roughly 20 SEO firms in the years after opening its doors in 2005.” Twenty different firms? That’s amazing and alarming, all at the same time. What’s more amazing is that they were paying as much as $12,000 per month for these SEO services. Sounds like SEO consulting is a lucrative business to be in, if perhaps not an especially honest business. According to Peter Kent, author of Search Engine Optimization for Dummies, “The SEO business is 80 percent scam.” Wow.
Posted by John Sundberg in Business, Free Stuff, Resources Friday, January 15 2010
Google announced this week that they will be adding file sharing and storage to the feature set of Google Docs, one of the applications that makes up Google Apps. That includes files of any kind, limited in size to 250 MB (limited??) per file and 1 GB of storage per user. Not enough storage space for your needs? The price to increase that quota is minimal.
Gone are the days of trying to email big files, send them through the mail on a CD, or paying a third-party service for the privilege of uploading and downloading files to and from a shared folder. I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m excited about this and looking forward to integrating this service into the daily routine of Black Hills Web Works.
This is probably a good time to make a plug for Google Apps. Custom Gmail with your organization’s domain name, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google Sites, and now file sharing and storage. Google Apps comes in different editions – Enterprise, Education, Nonprofit, and Standard, which is a free version.
With companies like Google offering services and products like Google Apps we no longer saw the need to offer email as part of our hosting service, but we can help you set up Google Apps for your organization, and we have already for Black Hills Web Works and several of our clients.
Back in December Brian Teeman wrote a blog post called Joomla Manual for Users, and in that post he highlighted a new service called Joomanuals. The idea behind Joomanuals is to provide end-user manuals that a website builder could give to the owner(s) of a new Joomla website so that they would know how to use their new website and manage its content.
It seemed to me like a good idea so I bought a subscription to the service, followed the directions, and downloaded a sample manual for a website I had recently completed. Considering that the service is fully automated (as far as I can tell) the manual that it produces isn’t too bad. I guess I was looking for a little more attention to detail and customization for my own clients though, so I spent a few days last week producing an administrator’s manual complete with relevant screenshots and then published it in a PDF format.
Clicking on the image to the right will open a PDF excerpt from that manual. There is admittedly some more refining to be done, but this is where it’s at for now.
For starters, our plan for these manuals is to include one with each website that leaves our “workshop,” customized as necessary for that website, to enable our clients who are so inclined to effectively use and manage the content in their new Content Management System website.
