Welcome to Alledia, the Joomla SEO Experts

We uncovered some other large geo-sites using Joomla including SanDiego.com and TimesSquare.com but I have a new favorite: NewOrleans.com.

Back in 2006 the site was rebuilt in Joomla by a company called Silicon Chisel who gave a detailed rundown on the move. Not all of those pieces are still in place but the core of the site is still Joomla and I think its a very effective, professional set-up.

If you haven't done so already, you need to head to Joomlacode.org and download Andrew Eddie's presentation on Joomla 1.6. Its also on video at Vimeo. After reading, I'm more encouraged about Joomla's future than I have been for months.

The presentation has 39 detailed slides, so I won't try to recap them all - look for that in a blog post next week. Today, I'll focus on what's important from an SEO perspective:

During the last few weeks I've been working on taking our Joomla training classes online and we've been sending out a free weekly newsletter with Joomla tips and tricks. Last week, I decided to spend some time answering two really common questions:

We had a student at our Cambridge class who put me on this trail of this ... apparently British Telecom are rolling out Joomla for nearly all of their customers' websites. With the exception of e-commerce,it seems to be their default system for building customer sites. For those of you not familiar with BT, it is far and away the biggest telecom company in the U.K.

It is that time of the year again ... I'm headed back the U.K. for a couple of weeks.

Mainly the trip will be family-orientated as I've sisters who are graduating, getting married and having babies. There's a lot to catch up on!

However, it's a rare vacation nowadays that doesn't involve Joomla in some way. So we're holding two Joomla training classes, one in Cambridge on June 25th and another in London on July 1st.

Both classes will be identical to the ones we run in the U.S. with the same materials, resources, price and even the same bad wisecracks. I may just have to edit the Powerpoints a little to replace somes "z"s with "s"s and find some Essex jokes to replace the Redneck ones.

Joomla Day Netherlands took place this weekend and by all accounts it was a great success.

There was the official release for Joomla's new Resources Directory, a presentation with useful security tips by Brian Teeman, and a really good overview of how to create a Joomla SEO-optimized template:

Rene Kreijveld from Webcreatives.nl does a great job of explaining how to create a basic source-ordered template. "Source-ordered" essentially means putting the unique, original text on a page higher up in the code, so that search engines don't have to wade through lines and lines of repetitive code before reaching tha text. I'd recommend viewing the slides in full-screen as some of the code displayed is small (click the icon on the bottom, second from the right):

People who teach Joomla know they feeling ... things have been going well, but suddenly there's a blank look. The student's stuck on one point. You've tried a few ways to explain it, but they're not getting the big picture. You rack your brain and start, "well, Joomla's just like a ... " and you try to dig out a comparison.

Here are my top five favorite analogies to help people grasp Joomla's key concepts. Please feel free to post your own in the comments.

I'm always on the lookout for business trends in our industry and I've spotted a significant new one in recent months. Increasingly CMS companies are supporting different platforms. The choice for each company is different, but the trend seems real:

Examples of Joomla Companies Supporting Other Platforms

• Rockettheme: Joomla and phpBB3
• Joomlart: Joomla and Magento
• JoomlaJunkie: Working on iTemplater.com and building for Joomla, Drupal and Magento
• JoomlaPraise: Working on CMSMarket.com
  
• CMSExpo: Started with Joomla and expanded to all kinds of Open Source CMS