We are running our next Joomla training course on 20 February 2010 in Johannesburg. The course is a hands-on course for newbies to Joomla and use a case study to go through the whole process of creating a website in Joomla, from understanding how to structure content, to manipulating and loading images, to installing components and plugins, to making your site SEO friendly.

The course is hands-on and intensive for the whole day, and at the end of the day you will be fully equipped to build your own Joomla website. The course comes with a full support manual, a CD with the most useful plugins and components, and free Joomla templates

Click here to read more about our Joomla Training Course on 20 February 2010.

So you have wanted to upgrade your joomla 1.0 site to joomla 1.5 but scared to make the jump in case you lose your current content? Well you no longer need to worry about that any more as in this tutorial we can show you how to migrate your Joomla 1.0 content to Joomla 1.5.

Click on the read more link below to get to the meat of the matter.

I have used Google webmaster tools for a while now. I just love the way that it gives you a peek into the 'behind the scenes' world of your website. Using Google webmaster tools you can see where your site is positioned in the various versions of the search engines, and whether you have problems with your site indexing. It also gives you the opportunity to submit a Sitemap, which can really help to get your site spidered quickly.

I have written about the Google webmaster tools before, but recently Google made an update to their interface and changed some things around. Let's take a look at what has changed...

Stock images, rightly or wrongly, are one of the best ways of spicing up an otherwise dull website page.

Pictures speak to the emotions and portray a specific image - in fact, as any advertising agency would probably want to tell you 'image is everything'.

In the web design world this is actually not true and I can get really frustrated with the idea that the actual graphic design aspects are placed on some type of pedestal and that it is a case of 'graphics über alles' - actually, if your website content matches up to what your website visitors are looking for then the actual design of the site does not really matter that much. No really!

Nevertheless, for a corporate website or a brochure type site, stock images can be used very effectively to add interest to a web page.

Click on the read more link below to find some good sources for stock images to use on your site.

Everybody knows that it is much easier to develop a website on a local server first before uploading it to the actual web server. The turnaround time for testing and fixing is just that much quicker using a local server.

Typically one would not really set up an actual Linux server to work on, although that is certainly possible and lots of companies do exactly that, but we prefer to make use of what is commonly known as a WAMP server - a portable, standalone application that combines Windows, Apache, MySQL and PHP/Perl. A WAMP server therefore is like running a fully fledged Apache server on your Microsoft Windows PC.

This article is contributed by Sarah Scrafford, who regularly writes on the topic of web design degrees. She invites your questions, comments and freelancing job inquiries at her email address: sarah.scrafford25@gmail.com.  

We've all come across it at some time or the other and accepted it at face value, that is, at least until the actual reality proves to be otherwise. Web hosts who claim an uptime of 99.99 percent are putting up those numbers on their advertisements because they know how important uptime is to a vast majority of sites that jostle for space and attention on the World Wide Web. No one goes so far as to explain how they came up with all those nines on the number, but they do know that if they end up keeping your site down for too long or one too many times, they'll end up losing an existing customer and many more potential ones.

And that's because it's an age where uptime has taken on more meaning than ever before - with Web 2.0 and social networking sites, blogs and the like taking up oodles of storage space and lots of bandwidth, they cannot afford more than planned, or at the very worst, semi-planned downtime. While the first refers to times your host plans maintenance tasks, periods that are announced well in advance, the second denotes times that important security updates and patches have to be installed, with the time period being announced as soon as possible but not as soon as clients would normally like.

But the third and most unsettling of downtimes is that which happens without the hint of an announcement - unless you have the resources to monitor your site at all times, you may not even be aware of such outages until some well-meaning friend brings it to your attention. This happens for various reasons - traffic bursts on a few sites on shared servers can cause other sites on the same server to shut down for lack of bandwidth; hardware or software malfunctions on the server are likely to cause outages; and the worst, malicious software could be used to target your site and prevent others from accessing it.

The last kind of downtime is the one that Web 2.0 sites are keen to avoid - they maintain a large number of servers and databases, and a denial of service attack is the last thing they need. The downside of popularity, if you can call it that, is to have to be constantly on the lookout for anything that could jeopardize their site's uptime, the feature that all websites want a hundred percent of.

This website offers absolutely stunning free Wordpress templates. This is the designer's own website, not a collection of submitted templates so it is a small collection, but man, they are extremely high quality.

Check them out:

Wordpress Themes

I have recently started to use Wordpress for quite a number of my own sites. Wordpress themes are actually quite fun to design - one almost feels that you can do what you like and not have to stick with strictly 'stiff-upper-lip-corporate' designs such as for Joomla, for example.

So I designed a quick Wordpress template yesterday, making use of the free vector art available on http://www.bittbox.com/ (check out the site - lots of free vector art available as well as utilities such as paintbrushes for Photoshop etc - great stuff).

I am making the template available for free download here - click on the thumbnail screenshot below.

There are many tools available to make the Internet Marketer's live easier. Some of these can be positively dangerous in the hands of the wrong person. And no, I am not even talking of black hat SEO, spamming or anything as overtly dangerous like that.

There is something available on the market called 'content spinners'. These tools take an existing piece of text, preferrably a Private Label article that you want to change so that the article is more unique, and 'spin' it so that the end result does not resemble the original.

Now, sometimes unscrupulous people take other people's content and also try to spin it. This is content that they really do not have any rights over. Luckily for the original author (me), the end result was, well..., less than what they expected it to be.

Some kind soul traced this article back to the original one that I wrote, (have no idea how she managed to do that, the feat in itself is worthy of Sherlock Holmes...) and emailed the mangled piece of work back to me. 

My original article is posted in various article directories, you can read the original article on this link, for example:

http://www.articletrader.com/internet/a-hosting-review-can-help-you-find-the-right-web-hosting-provider.html 

The same article that was spin doctored can be read below - enjoy!