Google Plus - Facebook Minus

The much-maligned Google Plus has received copious amounts of attention in the past couple months after becoming the number-two social network in the world. A report released by GlobalWebIndex, a collection of market research on web usage conducted by London-based consultancy Trendstream, found that Google Plus had accumulated 343 million active users by January 2013, up from 90 million total users a year before. This massive surge means that Google Plus has passed Twitter (288 million active users) but is still a distant second to Facebook (693 million active users).

Speculation about Google Plus’s future growth, the end of the social network’s “ghost town” image, and rumors of “Facebook Fatigue” tended to be the topics discussed in the flurry of blog posts that followed GlobalWebIndex’s announcement. Unfortunately, little time was spent looking into the reasons why Google Plus has grown so rapidly and become a force to be reckoned with in an industry that has killed off many seemingly strong products in the past.

This is good. Facebook is a monopoly, and clearly, it is not going anywhere anytime soon. But like with any monopoly, it is good to have an opposition to it. 

At Joomla Bliss, my website design company in Ottawa, we find it hard to find time to create useful and meaningful content to our main website for our existing and prospective client, but there is also LinkedIn, Facebook and now Google Plus. And don't forget Pinterest!! We really wanted to avoid useless reproduction of the same info, but soon we will have no choice, so we will be copying and pasting snippets of texts from one place to another, like everyone else..

Mystery Solved: Joomla 1.8 renamed to Joomla 2.5

We were a little embarrassed to find out that the mystery with the numbers between Joomla 1.7 and Joomla 2.5 was solved so easily.  Joomla 1.8 was renamed to Joomla 2.5 and voila  - a whole new Joomla. The next version is going to be 3.5 we hear. We look forward to new changes and hope they will be for the better.

In the meantime, I am doing an SEO seminar for the Ottawa Catholic School Board next week. Very excited!

If you need a website, please review website design Ottawa website. Check out our website portfolio section.

CMS for SEO and Web Design

Why Not Use Proprietary Content Management Systems (CMS)
This week I had a meeting with a business owner here in Ottawa who was looking for order SEO for his website. He told me that they are using a proprietary content management system for his website that was provided to him by his web design firm. "Oh, no", I said to myself.

A web content management system (CMS) is a must for any website nowadays. Not having it is like not using email, well, almost. But proprietary CMS would be analogous to buying pipes for your house that were manufactured by your developer who followed their own specifications. So if you want to replace or fix some portion of the pipes you can't just go to Canadian Tire and buy it, you have to go back to your developer. Besides, if you ever want to add some a bathroom or powder room, you will also have to ask your developer to design them all for you FROM SCRATCH - instead of going and buying those pieces ready-made and installing them. This is exactly what you will be doing if you sign up for a proprietary CMS instead of open-source CMS.

But don't listen to me, do your own research. Simply Google "open source content management systems" advantages and disadvantages. Pluses and minuses.  Here is a list of open source web CMS. Focus on the ones based on PHP.

The three most popular open source CMSs based on PHP are Joomla, Drupal and Wordpress. I prefer Joomla because it is much more flexible and scalable than Wordpress and much easier to use then Drupal. Security and load time are virtually identical for all three of these CMSs.

Doing SEO with Joomla or other reputable open-source CMS is much faster. The main reason: there are dozens of plugins and components developed in the last 12 years that make SEO faster. Those plugins and components (i.e. extensions) will not be available to you if you are using a proprietary CMS, so your SEO will need to be done page-by-page by hand.

I had another conversation recently where a company has just built a new website - without any CMS! Using HTML, can you imagine? This was a 800% longer and more expensive project than it needed to be. The reason why they decided not to use Joomla? Someone told them it is not good. Joomla is the most popular CMS on the planet. Does this fact not deserve a little research? How can you rely on one person's opinion without checking it out for yourself? I find it hard to understand. Oh, well, this company paid a huge price tag for this decision. What's most surprising is that the company is in the high-tech field, you'd expect them to be more savvy than an average non-technological business, right? Not so. It is not the first time I encounter this. My coffee business and landscaping clients end up being more clever in web site decisions than many of my high tech clients. Even software development companies - go figure!

I even wrote an article explaining why open-source software is often better than commercial software. Take 10 min to read it and you will understand that using a proprietary CMS would be a very costly mistake.

If you have questions or need help, do not hesitate to contact me via my SEO Ottawa website or Joomla web design website.