Websitetology

As professional web developers of both the Joomla! and Wordpress Content Management Systems (CMS) we come across many different surveys and comparisons of the two. Water and Stone poses the question “What is the most popular open source content management system?” and actually uses statistics to provide an unbiased report.

If you’ve ever wondered if Wordpress and Joomla! truly are the best pieces of software that we could be using, then take a look at this survey. In the first few pages you’ll read “that three systems have come to dominate the present market: WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal.” But don’t just take that as proof, look at some of the stats that are given throughout the 51 page paper.

Search Engine Visibility

The Next Wave’s core competency compared to other web hosting and design firms in the Dayton area is that we focus on getting our clients on the front page of Google. Sure, you can have a great looking website, but if no one can see it what’s the point? So, one of the first thing we looked for in this survey was any information on search engine ranking for Wordpress and Joomla!.

Joomla! comes out on top with more than 1 million inbound searched links at the time of the survey, with Wordpress right behind with 403,000. Notice phpnuke and MediaWiki with more than a million links as well, however these are “black hat” search engine optimization techniques that were implemented to create and keep inbound links permanent to skew search.

Do a search for “Content Management System”, and Joomla! comes up second in Google. A search for “Blog Software” (or a variant of that) and Wordpress is right up there on top. This just shows that the websites that provide these two are strong in search engine optimization and Google loves to read from them. If you have a website powered by them, Google will love your site too (provided you continually update).

You can also see what people are searching for on Google, and the results that turn up for those searches. The top two systems? You guessed it, Wordpress and Joomla! with a huge margin of difference from the third CMS on the list Drupal.

Ratings

OpenSourceCMS.com has a list of all of these and allows visitors to rate and comment on the various ones that are in use. For ratings, Wordpress comes out on top with a rating of 4.4 out of 5. Joomla!’s up there too, with 4.2 out of 5.

Brand Strategy

“The open source CMS market is maturing and, with the increase in competition, the competitive landscape is changing. The historical leaders have been supplanted by new names. The data collected in this portion of the survey shows that in almost every way the mind share in today’s market is dominated by just three brands: WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal.”

Wordpress and Joomla! are at the top of everything in this survey. Their branding is superb and still growing, their ranks and ratings are high above the rest of the pack, and both have HUGE community groups that help to make the two CMS’s more stable, more flexible, and even better for web development than other systems. The next time someone says that Joomla! and Wordpress aren’t good for web design, tell them otherwise. The facts are there, leading edge developers realize these systemsenable amazing work for clients in at minimum- half the time as building a website from scratch.

Read this, read it again if you want to. Print it out and pass it to your co-workers or show it to your boss so that he/she will let you start using Wordpress or Joomla!. And if you’re interested in learning more about the systems, come to our next Websitetology seminar and we’ll give you the crash course that will set your business on top.

Download: Open Source CMS Survey

Once your site gets popular, the next problem is comment spam. It’s all Google’s fault for giving points to inbound links- no mater what the connection (give or take). Spammers will say the stupidist things just to get a link back to their site- or even something innocuous like “Nice site, I’ll be back” or some other compliment that adds nothing to the conversation. These suck- because if you have people subscribed to comments- they all get these stupid messages as well.

Spam Karma 2 is still the mac daddy of all spam killers in our book- but, it’s lead developer, Dr. Dave has decided to throw in the towel- which is really too bad. Too many WordPress updates were making his life a living hell. It’s too bad the core dev team believes it’s their way or the highway- because his spam killer works better than Akismet (from the developers of WordPress, which has a funky license- it’s not quite free).

Mollom is in Beta- and my friend D’Arcy Norman is giving it a test run. So far, it’s not SK2- but, remember- that’s what Beta means. Here’s what they say on the Mollom site:

The web is changing. User contribution is now what makes or breaks a site. Allowing users to react, participate and contribute while still keeping your site under control can be a huge challenge. Mollom is a web service that helps you identify content quality and, more importantly, helps you stop comment and contact form spam. When moderation becomes easier, you have more time and energy to interact with your web community. Mollom is currently in public beta.

Home | Mollom.

There are different philosophies on comment moderation- we tend to recommend that you let spam filtered comments post automatically- as soon as they’ve been screened by your filter- no human intervention. Every once in a while something gets through- but, in general, the speed of conversation gets your network going faster than waiting for you to moderate.

Many corporations are scared to let the unmoderated comments post- but, that’s bunk. If they want to say something crappy about your brand- they’ll either say it on your site, or elsewhere- where you may not be able to respond or correct it.

Found an excellent article on WordPress as a Content Management System- and much of it agrees with what we’ve been preaching and teaching for the last couple of years. It is well worth jumping over and reading the whole thing.

The key for us is how easy it is to use WordPress- as compared to other CMS systems. The author of the following article also said the same thing:

I just know WordPress, and I know it is easy to use (as opposed to, say, Joomla) for not so familiar clients. Add a solid support for “static” content, being the WordPress Pages, and more newsy update flows controlled by the Posts, and you’ve got your needs pretty much covered for most websites online today.

If you can’t use it yourself, and keep your company on the forefront of Industry news and trends, you don’t really have a website. We also see the terrific value WordPress offers as an Search Engine Optimization tool. Use WordPress right- get to the front of Google.
Here is his very helpful checklist:

Checklist for Creating Web Sites with WordPress as the CMS

These are the things I tend to think about before choosing and designing a website where WordPress will be used as the CMS. There’s probably other things as well, things I just haven’t take into account since my clients haven’t had that kind of need yet. Feel free to add yours in the comments, sharing is caring after all.

* Is there even a need for a CMS for the client?

* Is WordPress the correct CMS? Will it fit the needs? Is the translations available for the WordPress backend good enough? How will it be upgraded?

* Will I need to extend WordPress using plugins? Are any hacks to the core necessary, because if they are, how will I make sure that these won’t break when the core is upgraded?

* What types of content will there be, and what should be deemed static (i.e. use Pages), and what is flowing updates (i.e. Posts)? How will I present this, and what is the main type of content?

* How will the permalink structure be? Should it really say “category”, why not “view” or “updates” or something else?

* Will the menu be static (i.e. coded into the theme) or controlled by WordPress (i.e. listing using WordPress tags for Pages and categories)? How could this go wrong in the future?

* What hierarchy will the Pages have? This is important for the URL, since it should be coherent with the menu hierarchy after all.

* How will I present sub-pages (i.e. Pages having a mother Page)? Should there be any at all?

* Do I need Page templates for various sections? How will these work with sub-pages?

* What categories will I use? Should the client be allowed to create new categories?

* How will I present Posts content?

* Do I need category templates for the various categories?

Things To Consider When Using WordPress as a CMS | Devlounge

Although he asks for comments on this post- they don’t seem to have them- but I would add that the issue of using Categories and Tags are still a little fuzzy for most people.

Think of Categories as the table of contents of a book and tags as the index- and you are track to better understanding how they should work. All of his points really don’t apply to people using off the shelf themes- which are the jack of all trades solutions for the most part. To really optimize WordPress as a Content Management System, you are really talking about custom theme development.

We’ve just completed an implementation of WordPress as a CMS on www.girlfriendology.com, head over and take a look.

Over at the WordPress Codex you will find an overview of WordPress 2.7’s (potentially) upcoming features.

A number of additions to this new version will be good news to the people who develop WordPress themes and WordPress plugins, but we discovered several notable entries that will be of interest to users and administrators.

1. The ability for readers to subscribe to a post’s comments is now part of the core, and does not require the “Subscribe to Comments” plugin (a plugin we install on every one of our client’s sites!).
2. Sitemaps, a file format developed by Google, is a very powerful tool for informing search engines (not just Google) about where your content is, what it is, and how frequently it’s updated. Currently, in WordPress 2.6, a plugin is needed to automate this process; WordPress 2.7 will apparently make this part of the core. We can only speculate if the same level of functionality will be present in the core implementation versus the “Google XML Sitemaps” plugin that we use.
3. In WordPress 2.6 and below, comments on posts have no heirarchy, and how one reader “responds” to another reader is not dealt with in any officially sanctioned manner - it’s basically a flat listing of comments. The Codex entry hints at “comment threading”, which potentially means comments can be nested, like a message board. This might be a dream come true for sites with large, active communities.
4. Geotagging is growing in popularity, and it gets a mention in the Codex. How this will be implemented is currently an unknown, but for some bloggers, especially those who use their WordPress site to organize events, could really benefit from a unified way to introduce geodata into their posts.
5. Lastly, we see “versioning of template edits”. We surmise that this means template editing from the Dashboard will have some form of version control, like Posts do in 2.6, and ultimately, it implies enhanced theme editing abilities in the Design section of the Dashboard. For people like us who do frequently template wrangling, this might be one of the best things to happen to WordPress since its original conception!

We will keep posting as we learn more about WordPress 2.7.

If you’re interested in how you can leverage WordPress/blogging to increase your online visibility, we humbly suggest you take our inexpensive, informative, one day seminar - Websitetology.

How many times have you wanted to show someone the whole webpage- but can’t screen grab it? Problem solved with the Abduction plug in for FireFox.

Capture an entire web page or part of a web page and save it as an image.

For the sake of making this extension findable: This extension takes screenshots of websites.

Useful for showing people bugs in a website, creating snapshots of design progress, or perhaps even creating a gallery of websites.

Right click on any web page, frame or iframe, click “Save Page As Image…” and then drag a box around the piece you want to save.

Works with:

* Firefox: 3.0a1 – 3.0.*

Homepage http://pixelcarnage.com/projects/abduction/

Abduction! :: Firefox Add-ons to add it to your Firefox install or go to Tools>add-ons and do a search for “Abduction!”

Just one more reason not to use Microsoft’s horrible browser, Microsoft Internet Explorer.

We just found the new WordPress statistics plugin Cystats, and have fallen in love with it. This is a powerful little tool that we found  searching through the 83  statistics plugins listed in the Wordpress directory. It’s so powerful that it even has stuff that Google Web Analytics doesn’t have- and displays it all, in your dashboard to help you analyze your Wordpress site.

Cystats plugin is easy to install and set up;upload the files to your wp-content/plugins directory, and then activate it in the backend. You’ll immediately be able to see the most commented and visited pages and posts, as well as start recording visitor trending, searchbot visits, search strings, top referrers and more. There’s even a way to see the screen resolution and web browser that your visitors are using to view your website (mobile views should be going up too).

You can download Cystats by clicking the link below. Here’s a screenshot :

Cystats Plugin Download

You can’t have a business without a website anymore than a business without a phone. Spend a day with us and learn everything you need to know about how the web works- but the secrets of how you get to the first page of Google without paying for ads.

Anyone can learn to maintain a website using the newest coolest Web 2.0 tools- which means nothing to buy, no code to learn and the ability to connect with customers easier than ever before.

At a recent short presentation to the Greater Dayton Advertising Association Professional Development program we got 100% positive reviews and comments like “obviously knows his material well” and “one of your best presentations. Lots of useful info to implement immediately.”

Your website can become a powerful business tool and easy to use if you take this seminar. Your webstats will prove it in no time.

So sign up now- we know you’ll become one of our many successful Websitetologists.

Friday, 22 August 2008 at Nehemiah University, 750 S. Main Street Dayton OH 45402 from 8:30 am to 4:30 pm.

We tell people to check their own site by going to Google and searching for site:yourdomainname.tld to see how many pages Google sees and how it sees them. Now, Wired shows us how to go scan all the Craigslist sites for a certain item- using the same trick.

Go to Google, type in site:craigslist.com “search term” and you’ll find ever P150 Vespa across the country.

If you’re a Craigslist addict, you know the Holy Grail of the online classified site would be a way to search the entire site at the same time.

For whatever reason, Craigslist does not want you to do this. When the question of searching the whole site at once is posed to Craigslist discussion forums, the response is always “you can’t,” and the civility of responses goes downhill from there. It should be noted that searching the entire site goes against the culture that Craigslist attempts to engender. It was never meant to be an alternative to Ebay, a global online forum for trade, but rather a community-based forum for trade. Do not be surprised if your communications with people outside your area are ignored or you are treated as a scam artist.

So if you want to buy a car, find a job or trade antique fly fishing lures, and you’re not having luck in your specific locale, you would search the San Francisco Bay Area region landing page, then New York, Great Britain or any other city, state, or country where cars, jobs and fly fishing lures are found.

read the step-by-step by following this link: Search Every Craigslist Site at Once - Wired How-To Wiki

You can also find out how many places your competitor has your product name on their site using the same logic site:yourcompetitionsurl.tld “your product name” etc. etc.

Just another cool Google tool.

Gotta love the developers of WordPress- they release the new version early, put a post up on their developer blog- with a 3.5 minute video to showcase the changes- but their posted video doesn’t play in Firefox 3 on a mac!

I’ll embed it here too, where it works (above). Here is the list of new features:

WordPress › Blog » WordPress 2.6

• Word count! Never guess how many words are in your post anymore.
• Image captions, so you can add sweet captions like Political Ticker does under your images.
• Bulk management of plugins.
• A completely revamped image control to allow for easier inserting, floating, and resizing. It’s now fully integrated with the WYSIWYG.
• Drag-and-drop reordering of Galleries.
• Plugin update notification bubble.
• Customizable default avatars.
• You can now upload media when in full-screen mode.
• Remote publishing via XML-RPC and APP is now secure (off) by default, but you can turn it on easily through the options screen.
• Full SSL support in the core, and the ability to force SSL for security.
• You can now have many thousands of pages or categories with no interface issues.
• Ability to move your wp-config file and wp-content directories to a custom location, for “clean” SVN checkouts.
• Select a range of checkboxes with “shift-click.”
• You can toggle between the Flash uploader and the classic one.
• A number of proactive security enhancements, including cookies and database interactions.
• Stronger better faster versions of TinyMCE, jQuery, and jQuery UI.

2.6 also brings the return of PressIt as PressThis… We’ll have to see what that means for our favorite feature.
Wiki style editing and revision tracking. Google Gears implementation- very basic at this point. And- finally a theme previewer so you can see what a mess you’ve made of your theme before everyone else has to- at least in your browser.
We’ll be testing 2.6 real soon- and hopefully, it won’t break too many sites.

First observations:

• On the plugins page it seperates inactive and active plugins, and it gives you a little orange alert symbol that tells you how many plugins need to be upgraded from all pages.
• The templates page is cleaned up with more info on each template, and only listing a certain number of templates on each page (click the next page to see the rest).
• The fields that can be filled out to add information, like when adding a new link, allow clicking on the titles of the fields to put the cursor in the text box. Not any easier, but certainly allows for accesibility.
• Widget editor does not jump around like it used to when moving the order of widgets.
• In the Post and Page editor, there is a seperation from the normal parameters and the newly titled Advanced Options…which were there before but now are more distinctly labelled.
• It seems faster and cleaner for navigation.

We’re in the middle of updating our cart software to the latest and greatest version. The wonderful folk at Instinct are helping us with this process, and during this time the shopping cart might not behave correctly.

Registration for our upcoming Websitetology seminar is still available. Please call us at 937-228-4433 and we can accept credit card payments right over the phone!