LakeLanier.com Relaunches With Joomla

This is probably the most satisfying post I've written in the three years of this blog ... this weekend we relaunched LakeLanier.com using Joomla.

About LakeLanier.com

The site has been a labor of love. We live on the lake and I can see the water out the window while typing this post.

The launch also marks the end of a long process. The site had only one previous owner and he'd run it for around 15 years, having registered the name back in the mid-1990s. It took around 18 months to go through the sale process and then another several months to build out the site on evenings and weekends.

About Lake Lanier

The lake is an hour north of Atlanta and its really a beautiful part of North Georgia if you ever get the chance to visit. The Olympic rowing events were held in here in 1996 and the Superbowl of fishing, the Forrest Wood Cup, will be here next year.

About the New Joomla Site

Here's a rundown of the main extensions we relied upon:

Forum: JFusion and phpBB3
Events: Eventlist
Community: Jomsocial
Slideshow: Frontpage Slideshow
Multiple blogs: MyBlog
Template: Bolt

Special Offer ... Review Us and We'll Review You

Part of our Joomla business is taking peoples' sites and telling them where they suck in terms of SEO. Here's your chance to turn the tables ... tell us where our redesign of LakeLanier.com sucks. What's difficult to use? What looks ugly? What's taking up too much room?

The best constructive criticism will win a free 6 month SEO Club subscription and site review.

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Your Comments (10)

Cory Webb

February 03, 2009

Nice work, Steve! I notice there is a link to LakeLanier.info at the bottom of the page. I clicked on it, and the site that came up looks like it has almost identical content. Are you planning on differentiating between the two sites? If not, I would just make the .info domain name point to the .com site.

Also, it would be a useful feature if the map on the home page were an interactive Google map.

Also, I hope Shane Watson is paying you a lot of money for that ad placement, because it looks like the site belongs to him.

Overall, nice work! You should do this for a living! ;)

Charles Duane

February 03, 2009

That's quite a sitemap! - Charlie

Steve Burge

February 03, 2009

Hey Cory - thanks for the feedback. Yes, we're slowly starting to 301 the .info to the .com

Working on finding the best Google Maps integration still. Recommendations welcome :)

Cory Webb

February 03, 2009

How about a custom Google Maps integration?

Klaus Nitsche

February 04, 2009

Hi Steve,

congratulations! That looks like it was a major project. The site is a bit slow though from my end of the world.

Looking forward to that JFusion review. :)

On the multiple blogs, what about displaying the authors' names along with the pictures?

There are some smaller issues with the URLs, for example: The menu "Real Estate" is not SEF'ed while the submenu entry "Lakeside communities" is. And on the front page where you have those four pictograms, some URLs end in ".html" and some don't. Minor cosmetic point though.

As for Google Maps, I have had extremely good experience with the plugin from tech.reumer.net. Mike is a real pleasure to work with: very friendly and very supportive.

Good job!

Kind regards,
Zorro

Steven Johnson

February 04, 2009

Site looks great. Lots of content and pages.

One question. How was this page created?
http://www.lakelanier.com/attractions/

Was it manually created? or is it the output of a component?

Thanks!