Domain name registration is the most important step to take when setting up a website, although not actually the first step. The first step to take is to choose a good domain name! (You should also read this article on domain name registration and how to choose a good domain name) 

Your domain name is the name of your online presence. Care must be put into choosing a good domain name, since it will live with you forever (while you are on the Internet!). Remember that a domain name is inextricably linked to your website. You cannot have the one without the other. I once had clients who registered a website in their company name and wanted me to change it after a couple of months to the shorter abbreviation of the company name. This cannot be done without harming your online presence! If you had put any effort at all into building your website and marketing it on the Internet so that it becomes visible; and if you have started to see those efforts pay off in the form of targeted visitors who came to your website looking for the specific products and/or services that you are offering, be prepared to lose some of that if you really want to take the radical step of changing your domain name after your website has already been established.

Sure, the technical boffins will talk to you about permanent redirects so that all traffic previously going to your old website will go to the new one, but there are other factors to keep in mind.

1. Your presence has been established through other websites linking to you and using your domain name in the link. Suddenly these links are now pointing to the old website and not the new one. Yes, setting up a permanent redirect will prevent the problem of visitors clicking through and not being able to find your website, but all those lovely links coming in to your website and voting for you will take a dip. The search engine gurus will tell you that Google knows about permanent redirects and all the good karma that you built up by having links pointing to the old site will now be transferred to the new...but why take the chance?

2. One of the factors that Google also takes into consideration when deciding where to rank your website in its results is the age of your site. If you suddenly decide after a couple of months or years to change your domain name, you are basically setting up a new website from scratch.

3. Any branding awareness that you might have built up around your website name will take a knock.

4. Setting up redirect commands so that they work correctly is a tedious and laborious task and errors can creep in. The site will have to be moved with all the file names and page names intact. Changing file names and page names at this point can be very detrimental to your rankings in the search engines.

5. Google has taken the lead with being able to understand redirect commands, but not all the search engines do. Traffic that you might have received from other search engines could therefore be negatively impacted.

6. You will have to maintain two hosting accounts, one for the old one and one for the new, in order to make sure that the traffic going to the old one keeps on being redirected to the new one. If you do not go through the trouble of contacting webmasters (possibly thousands of them) and asking them to change the URL in all their links on their websites, you will probably have to keep these two URLs running in parallel for ever. You never know how many people have bookmarked your site (or has kept your old email address in their contacts folder). You might get visitors trying to visit the old website or use the old email address for a long time after you have made the move.

The conclusion is that if you choose a domain name - put a lot of thought into it since changing your domain name after you have already been established on the Internet is frankly not worth the trouble. If, however, you have to do it for legal reasons, such as a company name change or takeover, for example, you will need to understand that keeping the old name and using a permanent redirect using htaccess is the best way for keeping the continuity and traffic to your website.

Contact us for your domain name registration requirements and prevent making a costly mistake in registering your domain name!

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Download Internet Fairy (300 KB)

Have you booked your seat for the Internet Marketing breakfast seminar yet?

It is on the 15th of March (Thursday) and seats are limited.

I will be discussing in detail the best strategies for building links and getting traffic (leads/customers!) to your website.

Check out the details here and make a booking!

http://www.tm4y.co.za/seminar.html

Web design can be quite a daunting prospect if you are new to the Internet. You would like to create your own website but have no idea where to start. Html? Photoshop? Fireworks? FrontPage? Dreamweaver? 

If you have the inclination, the passion and the energy it is quite possible to create and maintain your own website. But there is a learning curve involved.

Here are some tips and some shortcuts to get you started.

What is website hosting, and why do you need it, and what is the difference between website hosting and the actual website and website design?

Let's start at the beginning and look at all the concepts around the Internet, web sites and website hosting.

Once a website has been designed, it needs to be hosted on a Web Hosting Server. A Web Server is where your Web Pages will reside - so that they can be accessed by people around the world who use the Internet.

Web hosting providers provide the following basic services for web servers - any other features can be considered as add-ons in theory, although in practice they are rather essential to run a successful Internet business or business website.

Since I wrote my previous article on using PHP in Joomla content I have had a few more enquiries on how to use it. Apart from that, the original mambot (kl_php) is not available any more on the Joomla extensions site. I know that there is a new one available (run_php) but I have to admit that I haven't tried it yet. Well, you know, kl_php works great for me, so if it ain't broke - don't fix it!

Here is the download link to the original mabot - kl_php.zip

Please note the following: kl_php can only really be used in content, not in modules. In order to evaluate PHP code in modules, you need to download and install the following module : mod_kl_evalphp.zip

Copy the module and rename the title for each new instance of a module that you would like to have with embedded PHP code.

Intro

This tutorial is for anyone wanting to learn the awesome php framework known as cakephp! This guide will show you right from the beginning how to bake a very simple app.

•         No previous cakephp knowledge needed!

•         Newbie Ready!

This tutorial will by no means show you how to create a full fledged app, it will however create a very simple "app" with a Model, Controller and a View, so that you can look at the source code and get your head around M/C/V's and how scaffolding works.

In the past couple of months I have started to install JCE editor as a standard on all my Joomla websites. In my opinion this is the best free WYSIWYG editor available for Joomla at the moment.

Of course, if you have another editor that you would like to punt - feel free to bring it under my attention.

I also haven't tried any commercial editors yet, so I cannot really say how they compare.

But for a free editor, JCE Editor is great value for money!

So what makes it so great?

The editor itself comes packed with all the standard features that you would expect from a good WYSIWYG editor: Redo and Undo buttons, bullets, numbering,  indent, outdent, cut, copy, paste, align right, left and justified and table formatting.

And then the little extras: A paste button to paste from MsWord. For you that have ever pasted text directly from Word you will know that you get the most horrific formatting thrown in as a little present from Mr Gates. With this nifty button, it pastes clean HTML but retain your style formatting (e.g. Heading 1 becomes an <h1> tag) if you had any. Wonderful!

A paste button to paste plain text, without formatting. Again, if you are pasting from somewhere where you might unwittingly carry formatting along that you might not want, this button will save the day.

But the creme de la creme are the available plugins (please note, some of these plugins are not free and requires a subscirption):

Firstly, the image manager. The image manager was the reason why I originally decided to use the editor and I have to admit shamefacedly that I do not actually use { mosimage } any more. The image editor allows you to upload an image on the fly from your local drive AND resize and optimize it while you are doing it. You have control over where to place your image. You can also create a thumbnail on the fly of your image.

Secondly, there is an advanced linking manager available. If you have ever tried to link to an internal article you will what a pain it is. The link manager brings up your articles as well as a search box to search for articles. You can link directly to any of your articles through this facility.

Frankly, there are a couple of other utilities available as well (such as the ability to have a Lightbox type popup for your images) that I haven't even tried yet.

Support for this editor is very active (and in fact, the author is a fellow South African - Ryan from www.joomlacontenteditor.net - thanks Ryan!).

How do you get use the editor?

Some basic steps:

Step 1: Download the latest version of the JCE Component here:

Download the JCE Editor Component for Joomla 1.5

and the plugin here:
Download the JCE Editor Plugin for Joomla 1.5

and install both the Component and the Plugin. This installation of the editor also automatically installs the plugins for the Image manager and the Advanced Link manager.

Remember to publish the plugin!

Remember to make JCE Editor your default editor!