Norm's Blog

Should you upgrade your browser?

Thursday, 23 June 2011 08:13

So I've been a web designer for sometime now.  Something I've always been very aware of is cross browser testing.

Making sure that your website performs properly in all browsers is a task that consumes a great deal of my time and I'm sure many developers time.  However it's very essential.

When making a decision about my own work environment it's often a question of "what I like best" versus "what I need".  As a matter of interest I use Google Chrome form the vast majority of my browsing and FireFox for web debugging etc.  I use a mac and hence I don't use Microsoft Internet Explorer, however I do use "Browser Shots" regularly in order to test for IE 7/8/9.

So when Firefox prompted my today to upgrade to V4 I thought... "no I won't bother, surely nobody is using it?".
As always when I'm looking for answers to "what are users doing with my sites", I don't ever guess, rather I just ask Google.

Therefore, I trotted off to my Google Analytics and checked on a few of my larger sites to see what version of Firefox was in use in the wild.  To my complete surprise I discovered the Firefox V4.X was by far the most dominant version of Firefox in use.  Interestingly on all three "larger" sites I checked, Safari was the number 2 (after IE) browser in use, which I'm sure is a change in recent times. So I guess I'll be upgrading my version of Firefox today.

Moral to the story is... don't guess, just ask Google.

Joomla 1.6 - Migrate or Rebuild?

Sunday, 02 January 2011 12:57

I must admit that I'm a touch nervous about the coming months.  Joomla 1.6 is about to be released and along with it will come the problems that we all faced when 1.5 was first released.

Back then I didn't change over to 1.5 straight away for numerous reasons. Not least of which that I wasn't convinced that the new platform provided much advantages and until the component producers started upgrading their own extensions, well I wouldn't be able to anyway.

So here we go again!  For the vast majority of people building bog standard sites that have content they can edit themselves (the bulk of sites world wide) there won't be much benefit.  Also for those of us with existing sites, the thought of migrating will be huge.

In fact some of my own personal sites were only migrated to 1.5 less than 12 months ago. This is mainly due to well... quite simply "couldn't be bothered".

For me there is some simple questions about if I'm to "upgrade" or not (more on the upgrade word later).  These are:

Is the site performing well right now?

Is there functional benefits to upgrading?

How many 3rd party extensions does my site use?

Will the 3rd party extensions be 1.6 compatible?

If the site is performing well... then really there isn't much benefit.  Many of my larger sites are happily going along and will do for some time.  There will be no reason for me to upgrade them... and in fact let's talk about that word.

To my way of thinking the word upgrade of migrate won't even be used when talking about moving from 1.5 to 1.6.  The only "migration" will be existing content, layout and maybe menu structure.  The rest (being the underlying code) will simply be a complete rebuild.

Therefore to me the only migration path will be can I manually (or via a script) import existing content items... to which the answer is a resounding YES.  Menu items I'm not yet sure and as for the template... well I'm sure it will be quite straight forward.

The question of 3rd party extensions is the hardest... if you site has extensive use of these, then I'm sorry to tell you that there probably won't be much of an upgrade/migration path.  With the exception of some of the larger players (JomSocial, Anything Digital etc), then I can't see many of the smaller players investing the time to create a migration script.  Which will mean that as happened with 1.5, we will probably have to wait for the market to catch up to 1.6

So with all the above, here's what I will be doing.  I deliberately haven't even looked at 1.6 till now because I know it's a waste of time for me.  Joomla l.5 does for me most of what I need.  As for the odd occasion where I need further ACL control I have used either K2 and or Andrew Eddie's excellent Content Manager for Joomla and both have taken up the shortfall in Joomla 1.5. In fact since starting to use Content Manager for Joomla, I really can't see any reason to move to J1.6 for sometime... but I'm happy to be wrong.

With all of this, I thought I would go through the exercise of migrating/upgrading a 1.5 site to 1.6.  I will choose a relatively simple site and document my findings.

Wish my luck!.

Long term visitor stats

Monday, 25 October 2010 08:07

Something I don't normally talk about here, is that my wife is an elite cyclist.  Specifically she is the current World 24 hour solo Mountain Bike Champion.  Her website can be seen here > Jessica Douglas

The reason I mention this here is NOT just for the Google Link Juice sharing, but also because I often use her site as what I consider reliable web stats.

World Wide Web Consortium (http://www.w3.org/) provides very detailed stats for public consumption.  Whilst these are invaluable to the web development community, even W3C will agree that their stats are somewhat tainted because most of the visitors are, well... NERDS. Therefore you will see a much higher incidence of FireFox and Safari, High screen resolutions and Flash NOT being installed.

What I'm always looking for is web stats from a "NORMAL" website.  My wife's site attracts on average 800 visitors per month and whilst that's nothing staggering, most of her visitors are average web users.  So this allows us to see a very AVERAGE example of what real web users are.

I've decided to publish the Google Web Stats from her site over a 22 month period.  This has been produced in PDF format so you can download it and study.

Some interesting stats I've discovered from it.

• Screen resolutions lower than 1024x768 are DEAD (less that 1%)
• Microsoft Internet Explorer is the dominant browser by a long shot (greater than 55%)
• IE 6 is NOT dead, sadly (Almost the same number as all safari users)
• iPhone's are already making up a measurable number of all web users (More than 3% of all traffic)

I hope you gain something from these stats and then start collecting your own.  Google Analytics provides this service for free.

NOTE:  Recently the website changed and therefore some links have been 301 redirected.

How long for Google to index a site?

Monday, 30 August 2010 11:38

So I created a very small site for my neighbour.  Nothing very fancy, but really wanted to assist them particularly with SEO.

I've followed all my normal procedure of creating a "Google Friendly Site", and so far, there is no pages indexed.

Therefore I"m going to see what a link from this site might effect on it? Theroretically we should be able to pass a little "page rank" onto the new site.  Let's see.

Here is the link to a new site I've just launched that is based on Apollo Bay Property Maintenance and Apollo Bay Holiday House Cleaning.

The site can be found at www.totalpropertymaintenancesolutions.com.au

The Greatest Joomla Template video EVER!

Monday, 23 August 2010 09:38

OK, so maybe I'm being a little over ambitious, but I'm sure you will agree that it's a very in depth Joomla Template video.

What I've tried to do is to create a conversational type video that allows you to "watch over my shoulder", as I build a real template from scratch including the PSD file.

There is over 3 hours of video broken up into 8 parts, and I'm exhausted.  Check it out.

My longest Joomla Video yet

Thursday, 12 August 2010 22:24

I'm more than half way through my biggest undertaking yet.  I'm completely redoing my popular "Build a Joomla template from scratch" video series.  This video will contain as much as 4 hours worth of watching over my shoulder as I create a Joomla Template from scratch.

This is what it will hopefully look like in the end.  I've already got about 2.5 hours worth of video "in the can" and I need a break.  Back to it tomorrow morning.

My Joomla Template Skeleton

Monday, 09 August 2010 17:06

Well here it is... many of you have asked for it, and I've created an updated one.

Just remember that all this will do for you, is to give you a starting point for your own Joomla Custom Template.

You are welcome to use this template base skeleton but please leave the copyright information at the top.
This template is now available free of charge.

Joomla Security - What you can do to help

Friday, 14 May 2010 07:31

If someone had the magic formulae that would prevent any hack attempt for the rest of time, then that someone would be a very popular person.  Sadly there are people sitting in dark dingy rooms, surrounded by empty coffee mugs, all over the world right now... who are just itching to get to your site.

Why?  Well, mostly they want to turn your site into a link farm (hidden links) that they can use to boost their online drug supermarket, or the like.  Many times victims of a successful site hack never actually know if they have been comprimised.

Tomorrow there will be a new video that decribes just some of the things I do to a Joomla site, in order to make it a little less "hacker" friendly.  This 30 minute video will show you what YOU can do to try to make you site a little safer.

Happy developing.

Melbourne Joomla Day 2010

Tuesday, 09 February 2010 05:41

This weekend coming, I have the honour of once again playing a small role in the Melbourne Joomla Day.  JDay's are a bit like a conference, but far more hands on.

There will be some of the best Joomla minds gathered including Andrew Eddie, Sam Moffat, Brad Baker and Azrul Rahim. I will be presenting a workshop on Templating and how to create them from scratch.

Should you be able to get to Melbourne Australia this weekend, it's not too late to register for Melbourne Joomla Day.

Cheers

Joomla SEO strategy - a Study

Saturday, 09 January 2010 09:05

Seems to me, that it's quite embarrassing for a so-called Joomla SEO expert, to not rank very highly in Google for their own targeted keywords.  Well I'm here to tell you that this is my predicament.

But I'm not shying away from the fact.  This particular keyword term/s is highly competitive, and in a bid to make my Teaching Joomla website a success and play with the big boys, I'm going to give it a crack!

Currently one of the most competitive keyword search terms is "Joomla How To Video".  However another very popular term, is "How to install Joomla".  As with any SEO strategy that I undertake, it's important to try and work on a search term that you have a chance at.  When I analyse the following terms, I find there is .

Search Term - Number of searches per month (USA)
how to install joomla - 49500
how to use joomla - 5400
joomla how to - 3600
joomla templates how to - 1000

Now initially, you might think that we should just target "how to install joomla", being that it is the most popular.  However what this also brings is vastly bigger competition.  Whereas something like "how to use Joomla" is a much smaller audience, and therefore we might have a chance at having a bigger impact quicker.

So that's what we will do.  To target this I will write a few articles based on this search term, and I will also make two new videos on this topic.

I see this type of transparency as vitally important in trying to teach you, my viewer, the finer points of SEO... and also to show that there are no secret hidden methods, but rather just simple facts.

Wish me luck!