Event Calendars

Event Calenders are a great way to let people know what is going on with your business and the dates that activities are going to take place. When choosing an event calender you have many options available depending on which Content Management System that you plan on using it with. Today I'll be looking at the Event Calenders for Joomla, as always I will begin my search using Google and see where it takes me.

Google Calendar

Using a Google Calendar a nice choice for those new to events calendars and has many options. It allows you to organize your schedule and keep track of life's important events all in one place. Below are some reasons to use an event calendar.
Share your schedule

• Get your calendar on the go
• Never forget another event
• Send invitations and track RSVPs
• Sync with your desktop applications
• Work offline
• Is Free

You can embed the calendar on your personal website by copying the embed code and placing it into your own HTML. Google calendar also allows you to change the colors, and size of your calendar to what ever you feel best suits you. Firefox seems to have some issues with the Java Script but you can make it work with a little head scratching. You can also link to your calendar if that works best for you.

JEvents

JEvents for Joomla is a lot more complicated but is a very powerful tool for Joomla users and developers. You can download JEvents 1.5.3 and it offers a ton for themes that you can choose from to fit your needs. The Calender itself is pretty self explanatory once you have it installed it allows you to post your schedule for your business or your own personal needs. There are a lot of resourse out there on the internet to help you get started using JEvents but I find them extremely difficult to understand and get it installed.

To add an event all you have to do is go to the day and click on the date and add event. You can then select the category for the event and enter a description of the event. JEvent has a very nice editor that allows you to customize it in many ways, very nice. You can set reminder that will email you on what ever time frame you establish.

JCalPro

JCal Pro is a W3C-validated, multi-language events calendar component with a gorgeous, CSS-based front-end display. Feature highlights include, native Joomla! permission for event creation/management and event viewing, multiple calendars including private or public calendars, WYSIWYG event descriptions, administrative theme installation and management, back-end event management, an integrated search plug-in, feature-rich mini-calendar and latest events modules, RSS feeds and SEF URL support.

JCalPro is a very attractive calendar and is supported my Joomla and to me was the easiest of all to understand. If you want to add an event there is a icon in the top left of the calendar that says add event, how easy is that to understand. Add the necessary information using the WYSIWYG editor and save it. It also allows you to send emails to yourself or other reminding them of the event that is coming up. You can configure it to be private or public, its your choice.

My Pick

JCalPro all the way. It's simple and very attractive and even more impressive it was easy to install and use and that made me happy

CMS Templates --- Joomla

Starting off any web project can be a daunting task and for me it’s the hardest part of any project, it’s that first step into an unknown world of what am I going to do with this. The first step a developer needs to take is sitting down in front of the ole computer and having a look at the many templates available on the internet. This not only gives the developer and little help but also a little inspiration to boot.

To Template or not to Template

As a newbie to Joomla designing a template from scratch is not the worst thing I could do, it would give me the experience of learning the this new CMS and become a little more familiar with its inner workings and interface, however, using a template offers many advantages and allows us to see just how powerful Joomla can be. The web as many resources and all you have to do is go to Google and type in a search to be flooded with free online templates, here are my top five sites for Joomla Templates.

• Joomla 24
• Joomla Shack
• Best of Joomla
• Joomla Bear
• Site Ground

This project I'm about to undertake is part of a Emerging Technologies Class at AB Tech and it involves coming up with a working template for Art Space which is a charter school located in Asheville North Carolina. This project is a full blown database website that the school will use to let Students and Family know what is going on and fill out any necessary form that is required. I have chosen

Art Space Charter School

I think that any school should have a simple and welcoming site that is fresh and inviting for potential visitors, having said that I think warm color scheme would be the right choice. It also needs to be user friendly and have a clear navigation menu that allows parents and visitors and easy means to find what they are looking for. For this project I have chosen the Going to School Template.
The reason I chose this template is that is has the look and feel of a school already, with only the modifications to be made for my existing needs I think this would be a good starting ground for my project. The color scheme is simple and the text is easily read.

Resources for learning Joomla

Im providing a quick list of places that you can go to learn Joomla, these links are in-valuable for the beginning programmers that wish to delve deeper into the world of CMS's and Joomla.

• Joomla Tutorials
• Compass Designs
• Joomla Shack
• Rocket Theme

Search Engine Optimization vs. Search Engine Marketing/Visibility

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a well known term that is used widely in today’s web community and Clients that wish to have a website built often refer to this when talking with web developers. Clients want more than anything to have their website returned at the top of the list when Google returns its list of search item results, but is this really what clients want? I would have to say it’s not. In this blog we will talk about the difference between SEO and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Search Engine Visibility (SEV) and what your client really wants.

What Client really Want

Clients want their site at the top of the list and that is really Search Engine Visibility (SEV) but the difference between the two can be confusing to those who are not knowledgeable in this arena. SEO is really a component of search engine marketing, SEO is the process of improving a web site’s placement in the listings of the search engines like Google, Yahoo and many others, these listings are commonly known as “organic” listings. The term SEM is the process of marketing a website via the Internet Search engines: whether by improving rank in organic or natural listings, paid or sponsored listings or a combination of both.

SEO involves:


On-site Optimization:

• Improvement of your HTML code on each page of your site
• Improve the relevance of keywords
• Include Meta, Title and Description tags
• Have good site navigation structure and link wording

Off-site Optimization: Getting back-links from other relevant sites by using keywords or anchor text in the links themselves.

SEM goal is to create additional traffic to websites by increasing their visibility on search engine results pages (SERPs). There are several ways to improve SEM.

• Paid inclusion: this is where you pay a search engine company to add your site to their database and your site will appear above other non-paying sites.
• Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising: where advertisements appear alongside of normal search results or on relevant pages on other sites.
• Email Campaigns and Safe lists: these can be free or from a paid provider, create a newsletter and have an opt-in option.
• Write Articles: articles is a great and free way to promote your online services
• Banner and Link Exchanges: Banners need to be catchy and specific on placed on sites that are pertains to your target audience.

Content Management System (CMS) and SEO /SEM/SEV

Search Engine Optimization along with SEM and SEV are largely about good content and proper links and navigation right? So implementing a CMS would be a big help in your efforts? This is not always the case.

CMS must be SEO friendly but most were not designed with SEO in mind, here are a few examples of the problem.

• Dynamic URLs: that use special characters (%&=) throw up red flags to search engine spiders
• Bad Meta Tags: Many CMS do not even allow users to assign unique, relevant Title and Description tags to content
• Keyword Poor URLs: some CMS often do not let you create URSs that include keywords
• Unfriendly Search Design: more than a few CMS can make a page total invisible to a search engines because of text in images, script-based navigation, overuse of AJAX and a host of other practices.

Search Engine Friendly CMS:

When searching for Search Engine Friendly CMS there are a few things to consider and not all CMS that say they are SEO compatible really are. Make sure you understand what you are getting because some CMS mean is that the programmer can modify the systems with add-ons, although this approach works it does require a trained developer who understands it more in-depth. A better solution is a CMS that directly implements common SEO task, that is human/search engine readable URLs, 301 redirects, Meta tags that are built into the CMS itself.