Many of the websites hosted around the web look very polished and professionally designed in an effort to attract a deluge of daily traffic. While there are lots of software packages that make website creation easy, the most professional sites are done by designers and teams that go through all sorts of planning from the structure to the graphics itself. Covered here are the steps in planning the website structure so that it will be easier to code.

Plan your Navigation Bar

Just about all home pages have a set of links that take users to all of the other parts of a website. All that is needed in this step is to simply identify them by listing them down. You can list these down on a piece of paper and you do not have to draw any fancy diagrams just yet since that is reserved for the next step. The goal for this is to get the general scope of your structure in preparation for making a more detailed sitemap.

Illustrate a Sitemap

A sitemap is a diagram showing all of the pages that are included in the website. It also shows how each page is linked to other pages. This is necessary not only to know how many pages your website will be, but also help determine what your folder structure will be when you try to link the pages together through coding. There are no real rules in making a sitemap, but one general way to do it is by simply drawing a tree diagram representing each page as a box.

The first box will represent the homepage and the tree begins by branching out to the main pages listed in the navigational bar. Then those pages will branch out further if there are any subpages. This can be done using pen and paper or any graphics design software. There are some applications like Microsoft Visio and SmartDraw that make sitemaps easy to design. Double-check the sitemap to see if it flows and connects properly.

Make a few Mock-ups of the Home Page and Other Templates

Now with a good sitemap at hand, it should be much easier to make a general layout of the homepage with all the links and navigation buttons. Mock-ups of the home page are highly recommended to make the coding faster. If you do not have an idea on what colour scheme or graphics to use, start with basic boxes and lines just to create a skeletal structure for everything to fit into.

The objective here is to know, for instance, how many columns your layout will have or an estimate on how big the banner will be. If you have a better idea on what your site is going to look like, you can use a graphics application like Photoshop to create a more detailed site mock-up. Do the same with other templates as well.

The mock-up and sitemap diagram will serve as two key resources for the actual coding of the templates and layouts of the web pages. Following these steps properly should make it easier for coders to forge a good design without many revisions.

Derek Rogers is a freelance writer who represents a number of UK businesses. He Recommends Hampshire-based Studio Republic for their professional and highly effective Content Management System (CMS)

This article shall cover the essential tools offered through the Gmail client. Gmail is Google’s personal email client, which can also build anyone a virtual office accessible from any computer with Internet access. People are given a Google account with email. This account allows the user to send / receive emails as usual however; any other email accounts can be routed to Gmail as well. This means the user can check all their mail in one location, as well as send mail from different email accounts also from the same location. However Gmail has many other great features besides receiving and sending emails, which allows anyone to build a virtual office. iGoogle, Contacts, Calendars, Documents and a personal profile all accessible from any computer connected to the Internet.

iGoogle:
The first step is to sign up for a google account. This is your desk, so to speak, your main online interface. When a user logs into their Gmail account they are directed to this page- iGoogle.

Contacts:
Instead of having the traditional paper written contact info, which must be carried around at all times one can use the contacts feature in Google. This gives the user complete access to any contact information wherever there is access to the Internet. No more worrying about computers dying out and losing all your personal data, or having to carry your laptop around everywhere. Located in full Gmail client.

Documents:
The Documents feature is very useful for many types of business. Google makes available three important programs: Word, Excel, and Power Point. These programs are accessible online from the Gmail client (full Gmail client- upper left). Anyone can use these programs to create files which can be stored online, and again accessible from anywhere. A great feature is the sharing option. This allows the file creator to share their work with others by sending them a link to read or edit the files. This is a great feature for colleagues to collaborate on a document together without being in the same space.

Calendar:
Calendar is exactly what is sounds like, the user schedules their work, budget, bills etc. This program allows the user to have multiple calendars visible on the main window of the program. The user can color code different calendars for easier separation. Also any or all calendars can be shared with outside people by emails. Other workers can see schedules, timelines, or receive updated schedules all on the Internet. This makes it easier to keep a group of people well informed without having to send constant emails to all parties. Calendar automatically sends an email to pre-selected emails every time an update is made.

Profile:
This area is where the user fills in all pertinent information about themselves or business. If all the fields are filled Google will place the information in their search engine database for others to find. This profile also can be accessed by a web address Google will provide once the profile is filled. If you are doing any web business, traffic is the key, which means people must find your page easily. By filling in the Google profile your business is submitted to the biggest search engine in the world. If you have other web pages make sure to create links off of your Google profile page to them. This will establish a network. The more links any web page has coming back to it raises its ranking in the search engines. This means higher traffic conversions.

These are just a few of the features available from Google. There are many widgets and new tools developing all the time from Google. I suggest you explore all of Google has to offer. With just a laptop and cell phone anyone can do business anywhere completely free of a cubical. And for existing companies this is a very efficient way to keep overhead to a minimum. Once users acclimate themselves to this set up, they will soon discover many new ways to customize their business operations into whatever suits them best. I have put a number of basic tutorials on the applications mentioned above visit my YouTube site at http://www.youtube.com/jaksloot for videos.

Good luck to you mates.

Jak

Joomla is a very powerful open-source content management system that is used for many commercial and non-commercial websites. There are thousands of extensions that can add functionality for almost anything imaginable. While the original installation provides basic functionality and many users only install a suitable template, there are some simple extensions that make life with Joomla much easier and pleasant.

The first required extension is JoomlaPack. It is an elegant solution for complete backup, from files to the database. This is a component every Joomla website should have installed. The second very useful extension is the “eXtplorer” component. This is a complete file manager for Joomla. With eXtplorer you can browse the directory structure, download, upload, view and edit files. The user interface of eXtplorer is very similar to typical FTP software. You have a total access to all the files and directories.

In general, Joomla provides user interfaces for uploading image files. In most cases this is enough. But in some cases you need to upload a file to a different directory, to edit a file that belongs to some extension or otherwise access the Joomla installation. A common approach to do this is to use a FTP client software which is usually used to upload the files to the web server. This is a standalone application that must be installed and configured. If you are accessing your website from a public computer then it is very likely that you will be only able to use the browser. In such cases a file manager extension is a great solution to have all the files under total control without any additional software. The security aspect of this relies on the security of the website. If you are not using the default user name and your password is long and complex enough, then you should not be worried.

The second advantage of Joomla file explorer is the ability to unpack archives. You can simply upload a zip file containing many small files and then from the file explorer interface unzip this archive. This is a much faster way that uploading individual files.

Joomla can access its files in two ways. Directly or by a FTP account. FTP access is a convenient way to solve issues with file permissions. Usually, for security reasons the account is configured to access only the website directory. However, it can be configured to access the whole hosting directory. If this is the case then you have a very elegant way too access all the files, not just those that belong to Joomla. This means that with only one Joomla component you can have web access to every single file. This is a great advantage when you need to transfer some files and all you have is a web browser.

Joomla is a great web content management system. With a simple file explorer extension you can make it even greater.

The author is a big fan of Joomla CMS. His latest project is the http://jtagcables.com/ website dedicated to various JTAG cables. Since each Joomla installation includes also some file explorer extension there is no need to use the FTP software except for the initial installation.

Joomla is a free content management system. It has a huge number of developers and users. It is used for almost any type of website, including small corporate sites. For any additional functionality that you would like to have you can find at least one extension. Installing and managing Joomla website is easy and needs no expert knowledge. One of the most important aspects of any website is its optimization for search engines (SEO). This means that the website should not be only intended for human visitors, search engines should also find relevant data. In general, SEO elements are divided into two groups, on-page and off-page. There is one on-page element that is many times neglected. This is the format of the uniform resource locators (URLs), or in other words, the address of individual pages.

If we have a small site with static HTML pages we can name them according to their content or title and the same applies to directories. Joomla CMS is different. The pages are not static, they are dynamically created. This means that the web address of any page is in general a series of various parameters that tell Joomla what content to create. For a normal human visitor this is of minor importance because he is focused on the page content. Unfortunately, search engines look also at other parts of the website, they take into account also not so visible elements like meta tags and URLs. Therefore, it make sense to name pages according to the content or title of the page. This naming should not be some manual process, it should automatically reflect some existing parameter suitable to create URL. This applies in particular to content management systems where most tasks are or should be automated.

Joomla does not allow users to name page URLs arbitrary. The only possibility is to enable the setting “Search Engine Friendly URLs”. This feature converts “unreadable” page addresses to meaningful names. Having search engine friendly (SEF) URLs means having page addresses that clearly represent section, category and page names. This built-in functionality is somehow limited. You have no control over the creation of the new URLs. This is many times an annoying and limiting factor. Of course, there are solutions to this problem.

You can install one of the many SEF extensions that do the same job but have many parameters where you can adjust the look of page addresses according to your needs and taste. One of the very popular Joomla SEF extensions is the sh404sef. This is a component that rewrites Joomla URLs to a more friendly format. It also has the possibility to create custom meta tags. This means that sh404sef is also a SEO component. Its features do not end there. This component provides also some security features like prevention of flooding. In fact, sh404sef is a very complex Joomla extension. You need some time to make it work according to your wishes. But the end effect is well worth this effort.

Having friendly URLs is important for search engines, but also human visitors can benefit from clearly named web addresses. Therefore, using SEF URLs is recommended for every Joomla installation.

The author uses SEF addresses even on small sites like the http://johnlennonmusic.net/ website. For example, the address of the John Lennon Biography page consists of the page title. This makes it easy to determine the page content from its address.

Joomla is a popular web content management system used for various types of websites, from small homepages to medium size corporate pages. Joomla is free open-source script based on PHP language. This means that there are no static HTML pages, each page has to be rendered from the data in the MySQL database, template and various extensions. This makes it very flexible.

However, this approach has one big drawback. The rendering takes tame. Every time the page is requested, Joomla has to create it from scratch. For each request there are a lot of database queries, file reads and scripts processed. Depending on server load the page creation process can slow down loading in browser which can lead to bad user experience. Pages that load slowly are not visited frequently. As soon as the page does not load in expected time, users navigate to the next website.

The simplest way to speed up Joomla websites is to use caching. This is a process for storing created pages to files which are loaded on next requests for the same page. Caching significantly reduces time to load pages. There are two settings for caching in Joomla. One in global configuration and one as a cache plugin.

The main cache setting is on the global configuration page. Here you can enable it and set cache time. This time is important because it also defines the time after which users will get new content if it has changed since their last visit. This setting affects caching of individual modules and component views. Each time some part of the website is rendered it is also saved to a file for later reuse. This file is kept for the time specified in cache settings, default value is 15 minutes. For each module you have also individual setting regarding caching. You can either use the the global website setting or switch off caching of particular module. Polls, rotating banners and highly dynamic content should not be cached.

The second setting is a system cache plugin. If enabled, this plugin caches whole pages. Here you can also define the time after which cached pages will expire. This setting can significantly increase website performance since each page will be rendered only once during the lifetime of the cache file. However, if the content of your pages is dynamic and changes from one visitor to another, then you will probably have to disable this type of caching.

There is also an additional global setting for faster data transfer: GZIP page compression. If enabled, each page is compressed before it is sent to the browser. This is an additional improvement for faster loading.

Joomla provides many nice and fancy features. Unfortunately, each additional element increases page creation time. Joomla caching options can significantly reduce page loading times and contribute to better user experience.

The author is a big fan of Joomla CMS. He uses caching even on small websites like JTAG cable. There are only few simple pages about various Jtag topics like Jtag wiggler, software, pinout, etc. Even such simple pages can benefit from caching. Since the content does not change, each page can be quickly loaded from the cached file.