Joomla! is a pretty complete / and always growing CMS program designed in PHP and meant to work best with MYSQL databases. CMS stands for content management system, and it pretty much means that rather than saving things in HTML forms - such as website content for example - with Joomla! you can login on an administration page, as you would with a blog, type in the text content, click save, and the content shows up on the specified page. So there’s no need to continue editing HTML pages and uploading them to your server every time. With Joomla! you save the content in the backend and it is saved in the database. How easy is that?

But setting up a Joomla! site isn’t as easy as setting up, for example, a Wordpress blog. You need to understand how to edit pages - everything from content to page design - how to install and activate plugins and extensions. If you are technically savvy you can learn the basics of Joomla! in a few days. The fun part is that once you know the basics the possibilities of expansion are endless. There are so many features that you can automatically implement on your site, from a login, to registration page, to contact forms, and polls, and much more. And lots of people are using Joomla! as the platform for their website, such as iHop, Harvard, and even the United Nations.

I spent all of last weekend learning the ins and outs of Joomla! Everything from setting it up on a local host with WAMP, how to test it, add pages, how to put pages in order, etc. I also learned how to create a custom Joomla! template. There are also lots of free templates out there to choose from - but Joomla! just went through a version update - I was working with version 1.58, and some of the templates for previous versions such as 1.0 didn’t seem to work properly in this new version. That’s why I decided to take the time and learn how to create my own designs. (I am sure any problems by the way will get fixed - the Joomla! community is full of loyal programmers that contribute in helping other users find fixes and solutions through the Joomla! Forum.

Joomla! is an open source system. That means that it is free to download and start working with - You do need to know what you are doing to set it up and get it to work and look and function how you like - but once you have one of these setup, you will be happy with your site. There are so many options and things you can do with Joomla! that’s very likely why it takes a while to get one completely ready. But maintaining it is easy once it’s ready because everything’s doable through the backend, so long as you understand how to make the backend function. The beauty is that unlike HTML, if you mess something unknowingly, you can easily fix it.

I will place a link to my Joomla site as soon as it is complete.

First get yourself a copy of Dreamweaver - if you are reading this, I’ll assume you got this covered.

Then, follow me:

Start an HTML page and type in "If I click here a pop-up message window will open.

Then:

Highlight the words you just wrote down.

Then:

On the top of Dreamweaver click on "Window", and then click on "Behaviors."

Then:

On the right panel, a Behavior window will appear. Click on the "+" sign to add a behavior.

Then:

Click on "Popup Message"

Then:

Type in what you want the Popup Message to say. I typed in "Thank you for clicking on me" as an example. The click "OK"

Then:

In the panel you will see that the "Popup Message" behavior has been added to the text. Now, select when the behavior should be triggered. In my example, I will choose "onClick" which means that the popup message will appear when clicked on.

Then:

Save the HTML page and open it in your favorite browser. Then click on the text and the pop-up message will appear.

Now you know how to create a popup message the right way using Dreamweaver. This works the same way with images. Just highlight the image and go through the same steps I used on the text. Then whenever anyone clicks on the image a pop-up window will appear.

I want to explain one more thing. Usually the text to click on for a popup message to appear is setup as a link, that way people who hover their mouse arrow over it, can know that something will happen if they click on it. In my browser for example, whenever I scroll over a link my mouse arrow converts into a hand to let me know that something will happen if I click on it. However, what if you only want the popup window to appear but you do not want to create an actual link that will take them away from your page? There’s an easy way to make a browser think something is a link when in fact clicking on the text will not take the visitor away from the page. Heres’s how you do it: Highlight the text again (or image if that is what you are working with) and type in “javascript:void(0)” as the link address.

Type in javascript:void(0) as the link address.

The reason you should type in javascript:void(0) rather than “#” is because “#” makes the entire page start from the top. So if you want the pop up message to appear when clicking on something at the bottom of a page and not have the page move, then you should use “javascript:void(0)”

That’s it. You are now an expert at creating Popup messages.

For a great example of a pop up message at work, visit this contact form of a page that I helped create. Click on the little padlock under the send button and see what it says.

Thanks for reading!

So Google came up with a way for webmasters to tell the Google robot crawlers that you prefer not to use the description in DMOZ but rather the one in the description meta tag. The solution they came up with was a command you can include in your Robots meta tag.

If you want the command to apply to all search engines, the robot meta tag would look like this:

<meta name=”robots” content=”noodp” />

If you want the command to apply to only Google, the tag would look like this:

<meta name=”googlebot” content=”noodp” />

The “noodp” command stands for No ODP (as in don’t use the ODP/DMOZ description). MSN was one of the first search engines that followed this command. Google followed suit once they realized it was a worthwhile approach at the problem experienced by webmasters.

View Source - Meta Tag View

A meta tag, also known as an HTML tag, is a bit of code between the two header tags in your source code that tells search engines what your site is all about. In our opinion meta tags are very important. While we have seen some sites rank high in search engines without the use of meta tags, we believe that they “can” play a role in your search engine optimization efforts.

Many SEOs have different opinions about the effectiveness of meta tags in search engine optimization. I have seen many websites without meta tags rank higher in search engine results due to other factors such as high PageRank and site/domain age. However, if you want to use best practices, you should definitely consider using meta tags. And, in many cases it works - I have seen pages sky rocket to the first page of search engines after meta tags were effectively optimized.

The header tags look like this:

<header>meta tags go here</header>

It can also look like this:

<header>
meta tags go here
</header>

The three most important meta tags are the Title tag, the Keyword tag, and the Description tag. There are other tags, but for the purposes of SEO, these three are the most important.

The default title tag looks like this:

<title>title goes here</title>

While this version of a title tag does not contain a “meta” attribute, I consider it a meta tag because it works alongside the keyword and description tag. Some SEOs also include a title tag with the “meta” attribute, such as this:

<meta name=”Title” content=”title goes here” />

This is a bit redundant since the <title></title> tags already take care of letting search engines know what the title of the page is. However, some SEOs use both versions within their code to define their title.

The keyword tag looks like this:

<meta name=”Keyword” content=”keywords go here” />

The description tag looks like this:

<meta name=”Description” content=”description goes here” />

When used properly, meta tags can “help”. It is also a cool way to control the anchor text and description displayed by Google, Yahoo, MSN, and others in their search results.

Note, the meta tags alone will not boost your page rank. It is not a magical or instant solution to higher placement in the search engines. I have determined 10 ingredients in effective SEO. Meta Tags comprise one of those ingredients.