Future Searches

Joomla 1.6.0 Released

It’s been a long wait and finally Joomla has released version 1.6.0! Thanks to everyone who contributed, new version delivers many new features pleasing the site users and administrators like nested categories, ACL, improved language support & SEO, built-in redirects, template styles, & much more.  From my point of view, the most important improvement is the nested categories feature which means there is no more need to use 3rd party components to create a tree category structure.

Joomla created a launch page for the new version and decided giving the new improvements under 4 categories. Here is the official Joomla 1.6.0 features:

Designer Features

• Core layout files are tableless: New for Joomla! 1.6, all core output files are written in XHTML 1.0 Strict. HTML 5 is also supported in Joomla! 1.6.
• New core templates: Joomla! 1.6 ships with new core templates. On the administrator side, Bluestork is the default template, and Hathor is a fully accessible template to support those with various types of disabilities. On the site side, Joomla! 1.6 ships with Atomic and Beez2 (yes, the bees are gone!), plus the legacy Milkyway template.

Joomla URL Optimization Techniques

Joomla can be tricky when it comes to search engine optimization. You need to purchase extentions, modules etc. to achieve the desired results in terms of SEO.

Optimizing URL of a Joomla site should be the first step while setting up a Joomla website. The good news is you can have SEF URL structure while keeping your money in the pocket. Here is how it’s done:

First, go to the global configuration page at your Joomla website. There you will see SEO settings section. You need to configure Search Engine Friendly URLs and Use Apache mod_rewrite as yes. Before you click on the save or apply button, do the following changes in your htaccess.txt file:

Connect to your server and download htaccess.txt file to your computer. Open it using a  text editor then check for  “Options +FollowSymLinks”  and put a # before it. At the end  it should look like this:
# Options +FollowSymLinks

Save the file and upload it again to your web space.  Then rename the file as .htaccess (Dot should come before htaccess and nothing else )

Now you are ready to save your global configuration. Check out your website and enjoy your SEF URLs. Works like a charm isn’t it?

The Pros and Cons of Joomla

Joomla is one of the most popular open source content management systems (CMS) over the internet. Many website designers and owners use it once they understand how it works as it might need a little knowledge about website structure and maybe some HTML.
I have been using Joomla for a short period of time. In the beginning, I found it time consuming to chase after all those modules, extensions and plugins but once I got used to it, I am satisfied and confident to bring any Joomla website to the next level.
I need to say Joomla has drawbacks in terms of SEO but there are solutions for that issue so let’s create a pros and cons list for Joomla.

Joomla Pros:

- Fast and easy to use once you understand how it works.
- There are hundreds of support extentions, plugins and modules.
- It is very easy to create and operate a multilingual website with Joomla.
- It is an open-source platform and the website can be extended easily.
- It is free.

Make Money Online via E-business

Economic downturn is leading every organization in to cost-cuts and find new revenue channels. As long as companies set up a clever e-strategy, e-business is an effective business model since it is cost-effective and brings many opportunities together. This is why many companies are transforming in to e-business, exploring and taking advantages of revenues generated online while succesfully integrating in to social media for brand reputation and recognition.

Internet integration also brings search engine marketing opportunities, which is strongly accountable and flexible compared to other mediums of advertising. Spending on online ads is expected to overtake expenditure on TV ads by the end of this year and even in these economic climate, internet-based advertising will grow by 10.1 per cent during 2009 according to a new study. That is so promising for SEO’s and search marketers while pointing the success of online business.

What ever business you are involved in to,  get yourselves in the water and start benefiting from online world. Do you need help? Give me a shout now!

Make Your Own Social Bookmarking Website: Pligg

I don’t know if you already know this or not but you can set up your own social bookmarking website for free by using Pligg CMS Solutions!
About a year ago, I started a Turkish website called Linkopedi where I was intending to give links for social bookmarking websites and easing link building process for my visitors. After some time, I saw my users were eager to send their website data and asking me to publish them on this website. As a very curious person, I really love experimenting new things so I said why not and added a directory folder under my website and started building links for my visitors; it was very risky I accept but at the end of the day my visitors were happy and it was increasing my traffic as well.

Turkish Social Bookmarking Website Linkopedi

Recently, I came across to Pligg and I am so happy to announce that my Linkopedi finally became a social bookmarking website where people can submit their stories, save their favourite websites, vote on other’s stories, create groups, discuss anything they want and communicate with each other by the help of this free CMS. I am still in process of translating the CMS but the main features are working in Turkish so the website is alive!

Yahoo Image Search Filter

This week, Yahoo has announced a very helpful image search filter called Creative Commons license filter.
Users are able to filter their image search results from Flickr according to availability for reuse commercially or that can be modified (remixed, tweaked, or built upon) with restrictions set by the image’s creator.
Yahoo is the first image search engine to offer this capability. Let’s wait and see what Google will do about it

Alt vs Title for SEO

I am always confused on whether to use <alt> attribute or <title> tag when adding images to my content. I made a research on this issue and here is what I come up with at the end.

Effects of <alt> attribute for SEO

The main purpose of using <alt> is making your content accessible. It enhance your website’s accessibility such as if some one is using a screen reader, can’t load the image for some reason, the browser will show the alternative text giving them a better user experience. The more accessible a website is the more likely it will rank in SERP’s. Using <alt> attribute for images will help search engines to understand what your images are all about and rank your images in the image search result pages such  as Google image and blended search result pages. It is said that Google even use alt attributes as descriptions of images in Google Image so this is a proof <alt> attribute’s success at Google’s end.

Using <alt> tag is simple. Normally, when you add the above image  in to your content, the HTML code looks like this:

<img  src=”http://www.futuresearches.com/wp-content/uploads/SEO.jpg”>

How to Make a Favicon

Favicons are small images shown next to your website’s URL in the address bar of your browser. They not only make URLs  look nice but also increase brand awareness for users. When a user add a website to his favorites, websites with favicons will stand out amongst others which would improve your number of visitors.

How can you make a favicon in Photoshop?

You will make an .ico image with 16 pixels by 16 pixels. First of all, you need to download the ICO plugin for Adobe Photoshop. You can download it from Telegraphics website. When the installation finishes, execute the zip file in to the photoshop/plugins.fileformat folder in your computer.

Open photoshop and select File>New and make a new file with 64 x 64 dimentions. Remember it is best to work with multiples of 16. We will resize our image once it is finished. Create your favicon image as you like. Go to Image>Image Size and change image dimentions to 16 x 16. After  resizing the image, go to File> Save As and save the file as favicon.ico