Mobile Websites: What's the Best Way to Optimize a Website

We've had a lot of client inquiries recently about "mobile websites". Clients want to make sure that their websites look neat and sweet on all mobile devices, and we feel that it is a MUST for contemporary web design.

There are number of ways to ensure that a website looks nice and proper on mobile devices, but we prefer to listen to uncle Google. And here is what uncle Google recommends:

Details of recommendations

Google calls mobile websites "responsive websites" and supports smartphone-optimized sites in three configurations:

1. Sites that use responsive web design, i.e. sites that serve all devices on the same set of URLs, with each URL serving the same HTML to all devices and using just CSS to change how the page is rendered on the device. This is Google's recommended configuration.
2. Sites that dynamically serve all devices on the same set of URLs, but each URL serves different HTML (and CSS) depending on whether the user agent is a desktop or a mobile device.
3. Sites that have separate mobile and desktop URLs.

In other words, instead of setting up a separate subdomain with "m.mysite.com" - follow Google's guidelines on how to use CSS media queries to optimize your website's code for mobile devices. You will have only one website but it will look different on desktop browsers and mobile devices browsers.

In fact, Google's recommendation has been our preference right form the start, but some clients feel it is a fancier way to have a separate website which will be optimized specifically for mobile devices. Well, when you take into consideration that you would need to maintain this separate website separately, this option becomes less attractive. But once you put Google's weight behind your advice then clients usually accept it without hesitation.

And if you need my help, contact me via my Ottawa website design site.

Joomla Security: Simple Fix to Help You Sleep at Night

There has been a lot of hacking activities going on recently - for all types of websites, including Joomla websites.

There is a couple of steps one can take to protect a Joomla site and enhance its security:

1. Take regular backups and store them offline.
2. Purchase Akeeba security subscription for EUR85 and install it. Akeeba allows you to take backups in seconds and store them off-line with meaningful and descriptive file names. Joy to use.
3. Purchase OSE security component , note that to install it and use it you will need FTP access. What's sweet is this component is platform independent, you can use it on any site, not only on Joomla websites. It is $160 CDN.

Both Akeeba and OSE allow installation on unlimited domains. Both will enable double authentication: you will have two login screens one after another.

In addition, do not use "admin" for user names and "yourcompany1234" for passwords, and use a different set of logins for each authentication screen.

Overall, these two components overlap in some coverage, but OSE is more comprehensive, as it is installed at a server level. As a web designer, you would want to acquire both. 

Be familiar with your hosting environment. Check with your hosting company and ask them how long their logs are kept. You need an apache log for at least 7 days (the more the better!). Ask them about their backup policies. This is why I don't recommend re-seller hosting companies. They usually don't do any backups and don't keep logs for more than two days. Hostgator is not a reseller; we have been using them for over three years and we are happy with things. Hostpappa is a reseller through and though; I do not recommend them, their service is terrible.

That's it from me today, if you need help, contact me via my website design Ottawa site.

Multilingual Support in Joomla 1.7

Below is a simple step-by-step summary of how to enable multilingual feature in Joomla 1.7:

1. Login to your website, from the Control panel go to Extensions > Extension Manager 
2. Install a Language pack. You need a separate language pack for each language. Download language packs from here:
   
   • http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/languages/translations-for-joomla
   • http://community.joomla.org/translations.html
3. After you’ve installed the required language pack(s), go to Extensions > Language Manager
4. In Language Manager, select the Content tab, create a new item corresponding to the language you’ve installed.

5. From the main Control panel, go to Menus and create a New Menu for the required language (or, if the second-language menu has already been created, create a Mew Menu Item for this language menu). You need a separate menu for each language, and they will all be listed under Menus.

6. This step is very important! After you’ve created the second (third, forth, etc.) language menu items, you need to associate them with one another.

7. NOTE: Joomla has one Home page by default. If you are adding another language, you need to create a corresponding Home page for that language.
8. To add Articles in various languages, simply go to Article Manager, Add New Item, and specify the language. Connect it with the corresponding Menu item in the same language, as usual. Define Alias contents manually, if you wish. Add meta data, keywords, etc.

For more details, check out this batch tutorials on how to get Joomla 1.7 multilingual.  

If you need need a Joomla website, contact me via my Joomla Ottawa site.

Today's Joomla Tip: Fixing capitalization on Joomla standard contact form

The standard contact form in Joomla is probably used most frequently by many Joomla designers, mostly becuase it is so convenient and it is already there! But have you ever noticed the capitalization for certain fields are a little flaky? For example:

Enter your Name:
Email Address:
Message subject:

In other words, there is no consistency in the capitalization of words. It's pretty straightforward to fix.

First I'd recommend that you install the component eXtplorer, to make navigating the file structure easy. Then go to the folder components > com_contact > views > contact > tmpl.

If you need more help, contact me via our website design Ottawa website

Today's Joomla Tip: Porting sites with JoomlaPack

Moving a new Joomla site from development to a production server can be a tedious and frustrating task at best. I've done this quite a few times before I descovered JoomlaPack.

This is a Joomla based component designed to backup and restore your website, but it can also be used to port your website to a different server... in minutes!

Backing up your site:
After you've downloaded the component from http://joomlapack.net/ and installed it on your website, click on Components -> JoomlaPack-> Configuration. Under Basic in Common Settings, set the Output Directory to the root of your website, or better yet, one folder level above the root of your site.

Under Advanced in Profile Settings, you can leave all the default settings. However, depending on your destination server, you may have trouble restoring your backup. To ensure maximum compatibility, change the Archiver Engine to "Zip, using PHP functions" and change the "File List" engine to "Pure PHP File System Scanner". If your backup process seems to hang, you can also change "Backup Method" to "Javascript Redirects".

Click the "Backup Now" link. Once the backup is complete, go to "Administrator Backup Files". Select your most recent backup and click "Download" to pull the backup file to your local machine.

Restoring, Porting your site:
DO NOT INSTALL Joomla on your destination web space. Simply upload the backup file to this space along with the file Kickstart.php (included in the JoomlaPack installation file archive). Be sure to create a MySQL database to support the new Joomla site and assign an appropriate database user to it.

Next, open your browser and go to the Kickstart file on your new site, i.e., http://myNewDomain.com/kickstart.php

Follow the onscreen directions , and voila! Don't forget to remove the installation folder after you're done.

If you need a Joomla website, Joomla Bliss Ottawa is the website design shop in Ottawa I co-own with my wife.

If you need SEO, my wife runs an SEO Ottawa consultancy. We'll be happy to help you.

Today's Joomla Tip: 404 Errors and mod_rewrite

Here's another tidbit about Apache servers and .htaccess.

Usually porting a Joomla site goes fairly smooth, but once in a while, for various reasons, there is trouble when turning on mod_rewrite for SEF. Usually it's a problem with the .htaccess file, some of which I've addressed in earlier posts. But sometimes, Apache server configuration settings can be the culprit.

One such scenario is a 404 error I recieved when navigating to anywhere but the home page. I couldn't be sure if it was the .htaccess file or a server setting, but then I found a great example of how to test whether mod_rewrite is enabled on the server.

It's important to note that redirects in the .htaccess file will still work, even if mod_rewrite is disabled. You need to specifically test with a rewrite rule. For example,

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^link([^/]*).html$ rewrite.php [L]

...in your .htaccess file should redirect any .html file to a file called rewrite.php. If you can reach the rewrite.php file directly in your browser, but arbitrary .html files return a 404 error, you'll need to contact you web service provider and request that mod_rewrite be turned on.

If you'd like more help, then contact me here or via our website design Ottawa shop.