Displaying items by tag: Joomla

Tuesday, 14 December 2010 11:24

Boating in Boston

The aptly-named Boating in Boston provides boating services, lessons and camps throughout the greater Boston region with five different bodies of water featured in the program.

When owner Michael Aghajanian contact us, the site had been in operation for some time, based around an existing Joomla! install. While the page was serviceable, it didn't have the flare that was needed to convey the fun and exciting nature of the business.

Injecting character into the site also made this one of our most enjoyable projects to date.

Published in Web design
Monday, 06 September 2010 09:55

The fallacy of validation

Validating a website has become standard practice among designers over the last few years. As a site nears completion, the designer tests the site against the W3C Validator service to ensure that the code meets the standards, allowing them to proudly display a badge declaring their competency.

I have no real problem with this, except insofar as it provides no value (except to the designer's ego!) to show this badge.

The real problem lies with the claim that validation is inherently valuable as an SEO tactic. Sites like Google, Amazon and a plethora of other high-ranking sites stand as proof positive that validation alone will not ensure your site ranks highly.

So why is validation touted as an SEO technique?

Published in Analytics
Monday, 30 August 2010 09:14

DIY Web Design Mistakes: #1

I'm starting a new series, DIY Web Design Mistakes, quick examples of real-life problems caused by DIY design.

Today's candidate is The Boat Shed Restaurant in Maroochydore.

DIY Mistake #1: Not checking your site's listing in organic search

Otherwise, this can happen:

DIY Web design mistakes #1, not checking your search results

Yes. That's the Joomla! default description Meta Tag. Why this is bad and how to fix it, after the jump.

Published in Design
Thursday, 12 August 2010 13:03

Our work on Joomailer

There are some days where you get to sit back and feel proud for the work you've just done.

Today's one of those days.

We've spent a large part of the last week working with FreakedOut, German Joomla developers, on their new offering: an integration of the award-winning email marketing tool, MailChimp.

This was a fantastic project for us. We've done a reasonable amount of User Interface work in the past, but due to confidentiality issues we've never been able to discuss or use these past projects on our portfolio.

Here's how it worked out.

Published in Joomla
Tuesday, 03 August 2010 16:46

Joomla + K2 = Awesome

It's no secret I love K2, the content construction kit for Joomla.

While Joomla's core article system is reasonably robust and the introduction of template overrides made it possible to more easily theme elements of Joomla that were previously untouchable, K2 takes both theming and editing to the next level.

Designers have much greater control of each 'view' of content presentation and editors have less to worry about when publishing articles.

It's a win-win situation for aesthetics and usability.

Published in Joomla
Wednesday, 08 September 2010 17:41

Joomla analytics tip

While this isn't strictly a Joomla tip, it's certainly something that has helped me more easily track the volume of traffic that comes from specific posts I make on forums and social media sites. 

One of the reasons I find this necessary is that I'm very active on multiple forums and often reference my own blog posts when helping others. While it's easy enough to see that a certain amount of traffic is coming from one of these forums, it can be a little tougher to get an idea of which specific discussions are generating interest.

So I use a very simple trick and append my URLs with an identifier. For example, in a recent post on the K2 community forums, in a discussion about tagging, I used my own blog as an example. The URL I gave them was http://thinksync.com.au/blog?utm_source=SBF&utm_medium=forum&utm_campaign=tagging.

I generated this URL by using the Google URL Builder.

Now in Google Analytics, I can look in my campaign view and see 'tagging' appended to any traffic that arrives at my site from that post.

This is great intelligence, helping me to determine which topics are popular and worth spending time on for future posts. 

Published in Analytics
Monday, 14 June 2010 14:51

Ambient living

Ambient Living is the brainchild of Tish Pagano, a boutique online giftware store that caters to those who love fine things.

Unlike many other online stores, Ambient Living's products are hand-picked by Tish and carefully chosen for their aesthetic properties. It's an approach rarely seen in the pack-em and stack-em world of ecommerce and as a result the product range is unique, compelling and uniformly beautiful.

As such, it was extremely important for us to craft an image that fit the sensibilities of the site's potential visitors.

thinksync definitely oozes with passion for what they do, which is evident in every piece of work they produce. Their ability to create and design a concept from my ideas is outstanding. They genuinely listened to me and were quick to respond in great detail. thinksync proved to be extremely professional, reliable and fantastic solution providers. I would certainly recommend their services to others wanting a team who goes beyond the call of duty for website development. Tish - Ambient Living

Published in Web design