Archive for the ‘CMS and Admin Systems and SEO’ Category

The Future of WordPress 2010

As Iâ€™m sure you know, WordPress is the most dominant self-hosted blogging platform available on the internet to date and is so for a variety of reasons. The sheer amount of community spirit backing the platform, providing users with thousands of free themes, tutorials and plugins is one major factor for this aswell as it being opensource and completely free. There are many other platforms such as Blogger, TypePad and LiveJournal etc but WordPress continues to lead strongly ahead.

WordPress is currently on version 2.9.2 with 3.0 around the corner; it has come a very long way since it was first released on version 0.7.1 back in 2003. Being such an advanced script presently leaves one main question in many minds, whatâ€™s the future of WordPress? Will it ever reach the point to where there is nothing else to add to WordPress? Will plugin authors run out of ideas? What sort of direction will WordPress take in the future?

In the very near future, I can see WordPress moving away even further than it is already from being looked at as just a traditional blogging system and moving more towards the CMS side of things. Movements for WordPress to be looked at as a fully functional content management system instead of just a blogging platform have already started. When WordPress came out, it wasnâ€™t even thought of to create a complete site other than a blog using WordPress to power the site and now, many developers use WordPress as their main CMS.

The bar for creating quality WordPress themes is and will continue to increase for both free and paid themes with many sites set-up purely to offer WordPress themes for download. Such sites include WooThemes.com and ElegantThemes.com More functionality and great, unique designs will be released and frameworks such as ThemeShaper will continue to grow. The default theme provided with every installation will also change, itâ€™s due to change in the next realease, version 3.0.

As WordPress continues to grow, new tutorials will be created, written by itâ€™s large community and more options for the admin panel will become available such as WordPressâ€™s Menu Management that is due to be released in WordPress version 3.0, using the custom Woo navigation.

I think itâ€™s an exciting time right now for WordPress and I really do look forward to seeing how and what WordPress develops into in the future. I sure have found watching it grow into what it is today, exciting.

Tags: blogging platform, community spirit, free themes, typepad, wordpress
Posted in CMS and Admin Systems and SEO on March 24th, 2010 by Peter | 1 Comment »

To Joomla, Or Not To Joomla

Joomla is not always the most popular package with developers for search engine optimisation (SEO), but this out-of-the-box open source content management system can be very handy when trying to optimise your site. Next to next to X-cart and OS commerce, Joomla is one of the best bets when searching for a content management system with flexible features.

Why use Joomla? Well, Joomla has many very handy features that make preparing your site with SEO much easier than with other content management systems. When used in the right way, Joomla can be an incredibly powerful tool in helping you achieve a high ranking in the search engines.

Of course, Joomla does have some down-sides. This content management system can be quite complex and can seem overwhelming to the casual user. One of the easiest mistakes to make is choosing the wrong template within the system for your website. This can result in a clunky-looking website with lots of visible errors. The key when choosing a template is to spend some time and thoroughly review your options. There are plenty of free Joomla Templates out there that can be modified to your requirements with just a few changes, minimising the risk of errors when you validate the page.

When creating inner pages, it is important in Joomla to dictate separate meta descriptions for each page. This is something it can be easy to overlook, but really counts when optimising your page. Joomla can then use these descriptions to ensure each page is viewed.

Joomla has a bad tendency to create chunky-looking URLs, which we all know search engines hate. It’s incredibly annoying to see your newly perfected page given a URL with an excess of ‘&’ and ‘=’, with lots of little subcategories. Handily, the program has a tool to change these into something more manageable. Just turn on the ‘SEF support’ function and you can change the URL to something more suitable.

Similarly, by downloading the sh404SEF component, you can tweak your URLs even further. There are other options for this, but most Joomla users recommend this component. The component also allows you to tailor your SEO through your meta, title, and keyword tags, which Joomla sets by default (not always for the best optimisation).

The good thing about Joomla is that it has many handy extras that can really help your internet marketing and to increase your page ranking. Plugins like WikiBot (which allows you to embed wikitags) and downloadable components allow webmasters to expand their sites and add community features. Joomla has over 4,000 extensions, which can be found in the extensions directory.

One of the downsides of Joomla is it is a fairly complex program that takes quite a bit of time to figure out. The Joomla web forum is a great resource when you’re just beginning. It can also help to get some advice from people like SEO Consult to help pick up speed as you begin. Joomla is a very handy system, and although it is built with experts in mind, having some on your side will ensure you can persist and use this powerful tool to best effect.

Tags: content management systems, search engine optimisation advice
Posted in CMS and Admin Systems and SEO on September 14th, 2009 by Nick | No Comments »