Legacy Marketing Services

Today Google users had a little shock to their system with a new look and new name on Google’s home page.  Rather than the familiar “Google,” the name “Topeka” was prominently displayed.

A little confusing without the back story.  At first, I didn’t make the connection to April Fool’s day.  I was thinking, “Is this supposed to be a cool spelling for Topica?  As in search for topics?”

The official Google blog had an explanation:

Early last month the mayor of Topeka, Kansas stunned the world by announcing that his city was changing its name to Google. We’ve been wondering ever since how best to honor that moving gesture. Today we are pleased to announce that as of 1AM (Central Daylight Time) April 1st, Google has officially changed our name to Topeka.

Topeka’s name change is Mayor Bill Bunten’s attempt to spotlight the city of Topeka as a contender for Google’s “Fiber for Communities” project.   Google plans to install ultra fast broadband networks in up to 50,000 communities in an experimental project that will deliver connections at up to 1 gigabit per second.

Bunten is not a huge techie himself; however, he does realize the vital role the internet plays in business and commerce.   He sees the project as a way to ensure the continued growth and economic vitality of Topeka for the upcoming generations.

The submission period has ended.  The project page displays a map of communities that applied.  The response was overwhelming and staff at Google noted:

If one message has come through loud and clear, it’s this: people across the country are hungry for better and faster Internet access.

No kidding!  I wish someone would tell Suddenlink that.  For the past month, I have been battling dropped connections and dial-up level speeds even though I pay through the nose for the highest internet package available.  Do you know how long it takes to upload graphic files for print at that level?  It’s a nightmare. Since Hurricane Ike, the internet connection has been horrible and our electricity goes out every time a squirrel sneezes.

That 1 gigabit transfer per second would almost be enough reason alone to relocate.

It will be interesting to see if Bunten’s stunt pays off.  Personally, I think it would be a shame not to reward that creativity.

Today we had our first “Blogger’s Breakfast” here in Kingwood.  I planned on pictures, but I walked out of the house without my camera.

Since working with quite a few online publishers and bloggers locally, I thought it would be fun to have a monthly get together to exchange tips and ideas.   Before planning the event, I asked a friend of mine, Sahnya Shulterbrant, if she would be willing to cohost the event with me.  I met Sahnya when she called needing some updates and modifications to her Joomla based site. As we have a lot of similar interests, that project led to a friendship.  She and her husband, Gene, publish TexasontheGo.com which provide information and opportunities for doing business in Texas.  They were recently recognized by the City of Austin for their efforts.

Besides Sahnya and Gene, Matt Russell with MTR Financial and Ellen Delap, a professional organizer, also attended.  Both Matt and Ellen have written articles for me for the Kingwood Connection so I was familiar with their writing.  I knew that Matt had a blog, but I didn’t know that Ellen had added one to her site as well until today.

Blogging Platforms and SEO

It was interesting that we had people using each of the three main blogging platforms.  Sahnya and Gene use Joomla, Matt is on Blogger/Blogspot, and Ellen uses WordPress.  I have sites on both Joomla and WordPress.

One of the things we touched on is SEO optimization for blogs and/or database driven sites.  There is a widespread belief that if you use a content management system (CMS) or blogging platform that you don’t have as much control over SEO elements and are at a disadvantage.  This is just not the case.  Think about what those key SEO elements are: a unique page title, a title meta tag, a meta description, and meta keywords.    There is no reason that a database driven web site can’t populate that data, it is just that most of the time a stock install doesn’t.

The easy answer to this issue is to make sure that your platform is set up to allow you to enter that information.  Most people are familiar with the All-in-One SEO pack for WordPress that allows you to specify the title, description and keywords on a page or post basis.  It is one of my stock plugins that I install on every single WordPress site I develop.

Not as many people are familiar with how to do the same for Joomla.  I’m going to tell you my secret for developing search engine friendly Joomla sites . . . SEF Patch from Joomla-at-Work.com.

This component is even better than the All-in-One SEO pack for WordPress.  Not only does it allow you to set the article title, description and keywords, but it also let’s you set the author meta tag and the robots index/follow setting for the page (you can do this with WordPress as well, but it’s a separate plugin.)  It also adds the option in the site global configuration for the default description and keywords.

So far, all this is pretty similar to the WordPress plugin, but here is where it starts to pull away.  If you have used a Joomla site before, you know that everything hinges around the menus.  What is displayed is determined by the menu item’s settings.  The SEF Patch ads the ability to set the meta information for any menu item, excluding an individual article link.  So if you link to a category page, normally this would have the default meta information (WordPress does this as well,) but this component allows you to specify unique meta information including the page title.  This has a huge impact on your site’s search engine rankings.

Trust me on this.  There is quite a bit of competition for my Kingwood site, but if someone submits an article or press release to my site as well as the two other online community sites and newspaper sites, my site will rank #1 in Google for searches related to that article 75% of the time.  Most of the time with a double listing.  It just takes a site that is properly configured and some basic SEO tactics.

How much is this component?  It is ridiculously inexpensive.  There is even a free version, although you have to hack the core files to install it.   The paid version is an actual component that you install through the standard Joomla installer.  It is only € 14, so around $20 to $21 depending on what the U.S. dollar is doing.  Compare that to what you would spend on a pay per click campaign if you can’t get your sites to rank organically.

We are going to hold the Bloggers’  Breakfast the first Wednesday of each month.  So if you are in the Kingwood area, check the Facebook page for the next date.  If you’re in the Greater Houston area, we would love for you to come.  I promise we don’t bite. 

If you don’t have a blog yet and aren’t sure where to start, contact me to start your blogging journey.

One thing that I frequently spend quite a bit of time on with new clients is issues with their domain name .  If someone needs a domain name , I refer them to GoDaddy .  Sometimes if they absolutely don’t want to mess with domain registration or if I know that they won’t keep the registration current, I will manage it for them and just bill them later.

While many web developmentcompanies resell domain registration along with hosting and web design, that is just not something that I have wanted to delve into for two main reasons.  First, we are just talking about a margin of a couple of dollars a year and unless you are doing a high volume, it’s just not worth it.

The second reason, and the most important one, is that when someone buys a service through me, they expect me to be able to fix it if they have a problem.  If there is an issue with their web site, I can handle it.  If it is a problem with their hosting or email, I can make sure that it is fixed.

However if I resold domain registrations and someone let their domain name expire or had their domain unlocked and the nameservers were transferred, there is literally nothing I can do about it.  The last thing I want to do is put my company in a situation where a client has an expectation that I can fix their problem and my hands are tied.  Those couple of dollars a year (see above) just aren’t worth it.

I have written post after post about this, but I can’t say strongly enough how important it is for you to protect your business domain name .  If you had a phone number for years and it had been in all your advertising and your clients had it in their phone directories, what do you think would happen if suddenly one day that phone number started directing calls to a competitor?  What do you think that would do to your business?

That is exactly what can happen if you let your domain name expire or lose control of your domain.

Here again are a few tips for protecting your domain name :

Keep Your Contact Information Current

The registrant information on file at your registrar should ALWAYS be kept current and make sure emails from your registrar don’t get sent to your SPAM filter.  Every registrar will send you reminder emails 60 to 90 days before the domain expires.

Keep Your Domain Locked

Your domain registrar should have a feature to “lock” your domain name to prevent transfers.  If it is unlocked and someone submits a transfer request, you will have to deny that request or it will automatically be transferred.  If you aren’t paying attention to emails related to your domain name or if your email isn’t current, you will have a big problem on your hands.

This should be a standard feature, you shouldn’t have to pay extra for it.

Keep your Domain Registration Independent from Your Hosting

You should never get into a situation where your domain registration is tied into your hosting.  Some registrars, like GoDaddy and Network Solutions, do also offer hosting; however, one isn’t conditional on the other.  For example with GoDaddy , you can register a domain, add hosting to it, and then if you later wanted to cancel the hosting you would still have the domain and be able to use it on another hosting account. (This article explains the basics of a web site and how domains, hosting, and web pages work together.)

You should be able to direct your domain name to point to any hosting service, and if you can’t then run.

I have spent hours over the past week trying to help someone who had signed up for a new hosting service with another company.  That new company not only transferred the web site files, but also their domain names to a new registrar.  Normally that wouldn’t be an issue, except for that the registrar it was transferred to is a wholesaler and the only way the site owner can manage the domain name is through the hosting AND the hosting company only allows the domain to be pointed to their own hosting service . . . essentially locking the site owner into their hosting unless they switch registrars once again.  Which brings me to the next point . . .

Plan Any Domain Registrar Changes Carefully

If you plan to switch registrars, (say for example, from DirectNic to GoDaddy ), make sure that transfer is absolutely what you want to do.  If you switch registrars or change the registrant information, you can’t switch again for 60 days.  When I bought a domain from an auction on SnapNames, I couldn’t transfer it over to my GoDaddy account for 60 days.  In the situation I mentioned above, the site owner is literally stuck on hosting where his site won’t function because the hosting service that the domain management is tied into won’t allow a change of nameservers and he can’t change to a registrar that would allow him that capability for another 60 days.

Never EVER Let Your Domain Expire

Let me repeat that.

Never, EVER let your domain expire.

This is a big, BIG deal.  Some people think that if you let your domain expire that you can just go back and reregister it.  NO.  That is not the case . . .  as in a great big NO.

If you let your domain expire, this is what happens.  Most registrars will give you a grace period, it’s different for each one, maybe 5 days to a week.  During the grace period, you may experience an interruption in your domain direction but you can renew as you normally would.However, there have been a couple of times that I have had an eye on a domain name and the registrar put it into expired status immediately.

After that grace period, it will go into a redemption period.  This time frame varies by registrar.  During the redemption period, you can still renew or “redeem” your domain name ; however, it will cost you a redemption fee in addition to your renewal fee to do so.  The amount varies by registrar, I’ve heard between $75 to $150.

After the redemption period, the domain goes into “pending delete” status.  At that point, you can’t get it back prior to the domain dropping and it will sit there until the domain is deleted from the registry record.

Once the domain registration “drops,” it will become available and there is an entire industry around picking up dropped domains.  Trust me, it is highly unlikely that you as an individual will be able to beat a domainer in reregistering a dropped domain that has any search engine credibility at all.

What will most likely happen is that the domain will be picked up by one of these companies and held.  They will either make their money back by putting up Adsense sites on the domain and getting money from the click throughs from visitors coming to find you, or they will sell the domain back to you at a premium.  At the point, you will have to pay whatever they ask to get it back.

So again . . . don’t let your domain expire.

Yes, they are cheap and because of that many people don’t place much importance on them.  However, your business’s domain name has much greater value than the $10 a year it takes to keep the registration current.  The longer you have that domain and the more prominence you build in the search engines, the greater that value becomes.

Don’t lose that value in one fell swoop over carelessness.

Many people use Microsoft Word to create content and articles, after all, it is a word processing program.

However, problems arise when they want to import that content into a web page.  If you’ve never looked at HTML source code for a site, you may not know the difference . . . but trust me . . . anything that comes out of Word is a mess when it gets to the web.

Not only does it clutter up and slow down your site with unnecessary code, but the garbage code can also break your site’s design layout.  I recently received a support request for a client because a section on her site was messed up.  The client had posted a new article, pasting the content from Word, and a mangled site was the result.  I had to go into the article itself and strip out all the Microsoft tags to get it to work.

Pasting from Word

You should never copy and paste content from Word directly into your content management system.  The WYSIWYG editors for WordPress and most of them for Joomla have a “Paste from Word” icon feature.

1. Copy your content from Word.
2. Click the “Paste from Word” icon and a dialog box will appear.
3. Paste your content into the dialog box and hit save.

This will normally strip all the Microsoft junk code from your content.  However, some editors have configuration settings for what gets stripped and what doesn’t.  If that is the case (such as with the JCE editor for Joomla),  you may need to test the settings until you get just the right combination.

With any content management system (CMS), you platform theme is going to contain a stylesheet that specifies what each element of your site should look like, resulting in a cohesive look.  You do not want font and style tags in your content, because that will override the theme settings.

Fast and Easy with Dreamweaver

If you have a copy of Dreamweaver, my favorite way to prepare content for the web is by pasting the Word content into a blank HTML file in design view.  It usually does a pretty good job of converting the format to properly structured paragraphs.  Then I copy that and paste it directly into the WYSIWYG content editor in the CMS.

Final Tips

If you have a site with a layout that was fine but is suddenly out of whack, check first your most recently added content.  Look for any extraneous tags.  That will most likely be the culprit.

One of the web site solutions that Legacy Marketing Services offers is Business Builder web sites.  This is our option for business who want a web site, need it fast, and also want a web site that is search engine friendly.

We developed this option after working with many small businesses who went the DIY route with one of the many site builder options and were frustrated in their attempts to get the site looking the way they wanted as well as the poor search engine rankings for their keywords.

The Business Builder program is not a “DIY” route (we set it up for you), but it is a “manage it yourself” option.

Below is a video on how to edit and update a page using the system.

For our current clients, the video is also located in the Knowledge base for easy reference.

If you have a Joomla based web site, most likely you are using a WYSIWYG editor to compose and edit your articles.  My editor of choice for my own sites as well as Joomla web sites developed for clients is JCE (Joomla Content Editor.)

The two main features that I really like about it, particularly for clients editing their own sites, is the ability to upload images to the media gallery, as well as edit and rename them, right from the article screen, as well as that it allows an easy way to select articles within your site.  It really does make it that much easier for clients to manage their own sites.

One source of frustration for web masters creating pages on a content management system is that many types of code are stripped out of the article when saved to keep malicious scripts from corrupting the database. This is a necessity when multiple users are submitting content.

However, if you are the only one maintaining your site, that same protection can get really annoying depending on how stringent the editor is in restricting code.  There are workarounds with plugins, but again . . . it’s a pain.

Selective Permissions with JCE

JCE is not just a way to make your articles look pretty, it has the functionality to take your Joomla user levels to a whole different level.

A stock Joomla installation has the following users levels:

• Front End Access
  • Registered User: The first level of Joomla access.  Certain areas of the site can be restricted to registered users.
  • Author: Can submit and edit their own content.  Their submissions must be approved by a higher level user.
  • Editor: Can submit and edit their own content as well as content by other authors that has not yet been published.
  • Publisher: Can submit, edit and publish their own content as well as edit and publish any other user’s articles
• Back End Access
  • Manager: The basic level of back end administration access.  They can access the content menu of the Joomla back end and can edit, publish, and update sections and categories.
  • Administrator: In addition to the permission level that a manager has, an administrator has the ability to use most components; however, they cannot chang the site templates or the configuration of the site.
  • Super Administrator:  A Super Administrator can manage all aspects of a Joomla site

JCE ties in with the Joomla user groups by allowing you to specify which use groups can use the editor, which editor features are available to them, and what type of code can be included in the content.

Configuring JCE

There are two main locations where JCE can be configured.  The first is the configuration panel for the component.  It mainly controls how the editor is displayed and whether or not it will attempt to clean up sloppily formatted code.

In most editors, allowed tags are usually specified in the main configuration screen; however, this is not true of JCE and this is where most questions arise on how to get the editor to work the way you want it to.

The second step to configuring JCE is under the “Groups” menu option for the component.  This is where the real meat of the functionality comes into play.  Separate permission sets can be applied to different Joomla user groups.   For each user group, you can specify:

• Which components the editor is available on.
• The appearance of the editor to the user.
• Whether relative or absolute urls are used for images.
• Prohibited and allowed elements.
• Whether css, javascript, or php can be used.
• Allowed formatting elements.
• Where images are uploaded to (each group could upload to a different directory) and the file size limits.
• The composition of the editor toolbar and allowed plugins.
• What types of files can be uploaded.
• Whether they can upload files and/or create, rename and or delete files and directories.
• What type of media is supported.
• How paragraphs and line breaks are included.
• What is stripped in the “Paste from Word” option.
• The default alignment and margins for image insertion.
• Which content link types are allowed.
• Which spell check service is used.

By using group permissions for the editor, you can scale the functionality of the editor for different levels of users, as well as making life easier for your administrators and main publishers.

Legacy Marketing Services is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Joomla Project or Open Source Matters. The Joomla logo is used under a limited license granted by Open Source Matters the trademark holder in the United States and other countries.