Audience level : JoomJock  

This tutorial was contributed by Bernhard Esterhyze, of www.WoozaShop.co.za, which you can visit for more information or to buy an online e-commerce shop.

The tutorial covers some basic information about installing and configuring your Virtuemart store and will be especially useful for developers.

The Wordpress Theme Viewer is available again for theme downloads, however, today it was down for a couple of hours....

This drove me to look elsewhere for themes again and I came across the following three sites:

Rock-Kitty - Free Wordpress Themes: This site is only three months old but already has over 300 themes. Nice thumbnail previews. Not all the themes have live demos but seeing that you can look at the thumbnail it gives you a pretty good indication of the theme already.

Another Wordpress theme viewer : No thumbnails, but live previews. Nice 'Web 2.0' style templates, most of them widget ready

Another collection of Wordpress Themes : Also no thumbnails, just a live demo function.

Audience Level : Joomby  

In this tutorial we are going to go into the techniques of updating your content in a bit more detail. We will give special attention to the WYSIWYG editor.

I will be running an Internet Marketing and SEO course on 29 November 2007 and again on 7 December 2007 in Johannesburg.

The course will cover aspects of Internet Marketing from SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) to Keyword research to link building and more.

To read more about what the course is about and to book, you can click here

Internet Marketing Course Details and Booking Form

It is often difficult for a corporate to justify the costs of website design. There are all sorts of arguments that can be levied against spending money on a website. Some of these are for example that most B2B purchase decisions are not really made through vendors found on the internet. These types of decisions are often made on existing vendor-supplier relationships as well as the ubiquitous 'network'.

However, there are actually some very compelling reasons for a B2B company, or corporate, to spend attention on their website design. Having a website is actually not a nice-to-have or a luxury, or even just case of 'having a presence' or keeping up with the proverbial Jones's.

Let's look at some good reasons why a corporate, or B2B company, should have a website - the main of which is to gain more customers and improve the bottom line:

My friend Phil, the copywriter, recently asked me a series of questions about article writing and SEO. I asked him if I could publish it here and he said yes - so here goes!

Phil: A quick question. How exactly do copywriting articles sitting on a zillion different directories and on my website help with SEO? The articles don't contain my web address and the keywords are not unique. So how do the search engines link my articles to my website? Explain for me please.

We completed the Ignite Products website just in time for the National Braai day, held on 24 September 2007 to commemorate National Heritage Day in South Africa.

Ignite Products ideal for supermarkets and convenience stores and just thing that you need to get your braai going.

The funny thing about building this website was that it was extremely difficult to get pictures of people 'braaiing' together. Strangely enough the stock photo websites were all geared up and presented lots of pictures when you looked for 'braai', which is essentially a South African word for barbeque. But the pictures were all of flames and food - not of people!

Phil the copywriter, another client of ours, did the copywriting for the website.

The biggest problem with Joomla! is that it really is not very search engine friendly. The out-of-the-box URLs are horrible squiggles not readable by any search engine let alone humans (well, I exaggerate, Google does not have any problems indexing these pages, but if you do a search for any popular search term you will see that those particular types of pages do not tend to be at the top of the serach results)

But more important than the URLs, is the way that Joomla displays the Title tag - this is by far the most important piece of text on your whole page, and Joomla displays the site name in the title, THEN followed by the name of the particular content item or page being displayed at that point. Even worse, the default setting for the title is that of the MENU name. How awful is that!

I have just signed up for a new social networking blogging service called BlogRush. It is free, which of course is a real plus point, and it looks as if it could really bring in lots of traffic to a blog.

It works off a referral system - up to 10 levels deep. So obviously if you get in early enough while it is still new it would be better. There is a cool video on their site explaining everything - so why don't you check it out?

Click here to visit the Blog Rush site

I still maintain a link directory on my site - but I am not sure for how long still. There has been noises made by Internet marketers and on webmaster forums now for a long time that Google is not placing as much value on link directories maintained by websites as previously.