How JoomBlog Can Help to Make Your Posts Interactive
Author: Demo User posted in Joomla Related on 2014-10-01 16:18:00
Blogging became an effective marketing tool last year and, it seems, going to stay as such. According to Matt Cuts, the head of Google’s Webspam team, the stress should be put on quality of posts & offering value to the readers. Qualitative content not only drives traffic to your Joomla! website and increases SEO results, but improves your brand, helps to build long-standing relationships with your clients, keep them updated with recent company’s events, discounts and offers. ;
However, blogging will become effective, if and only if your posts are engaging, provide useful information, attract customers and encourage them to share and comment. How to achieve such outstanding results? One of the solutions here is working on blog’s interactivity.
Joomla! CMS is a rather flexible platform and making your articles interactive is a simple matter. There are a few advices that can help:
Embed Checklists
Embed CheckList into your post to share your expertise in a unique way. Let's look at the example below:
Successful Joomla! Site Checklist
Best practices
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Broken links are bad both for user experience and SEO. Users can leave your site if they get stuck with a broken link. Use link checkers to find such links and remove them or redirect to correct pages.
W3C link checker
iWebTool Broken Link Checker
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Your website will never look professional with spelling and grammar mistakes. Learn best practices to improve your writing.
Capitalization
Writing Style
Word Variations e.g. UK vs US
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Imagine you have developed great responsive template that looks awesome in Safari, but what about those who use Firefox, Chrome or even IE? Have you tested on other OS platforms?
BrowserShots.org
Browserling.com
Spoon.net
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You should make sure that all site users land to the same URL whether or not they use www or not. This can be achieved by 301 redirect.
Why use www?
.htaccess Redirect Generator
Accessibility
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Think of those who do not use mouse to browse pages or use screen readerS. How comfortable will they feel on your website?
Common problems and solutions
IDI Web Accessibility Checker
Test using a screen reader
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Is it easy to read information on your pages? Check your pages for color contrast.
Check color contrast online
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Use special markup to add attributes to elements on the web page to create semantically defined sections.
Using WAI-ARIA Landmarks
Guide to WAI-ARIA
Practical examples
Analytics
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Add your site to uptime monitors to track whether your site is still alive.
Uptime robot
GotSiteMonitor.com
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Add tracking code to learn your audience and try to understand how they communicate with the site to provide them better service.
Google Analytics
StatCounter
Clicky
Code quality
Mobile
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Number of mobile users is growing each day, so make sure that your website is friendly enough for mobile devices.
W3C mobile checker
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Viewport meta-tag and @viewport rule control layout on mobile browsers. Be sure to use them if you need predictabe behavior.
Don't Forget the Viewport Meta Tag
Make your website mobile friendly
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Correct field type will result in correct behavior across platforms and devices. E.g. special characters on screen keyboard for email, or digit keyboard for phone number field.
Input type: Email, Url, Phone
Diving in to HTML5 forms
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You do not need to own different types of devices to test your application. Use emulators instead.
Online media query tester
6 free mobile emulators
Opera Mobile Emulator
Performance
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Google provides a number of rules to optimize your page load. And be sure they use it while ranking your website in search results.
Google Page Speed
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There is also a number of parameters you may optimize with tool from Yahoo. Unlike Goole they have documentation that shows how score is calculated.
Yahoo's YSlow
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Use the service to find out what can you fix in server response headers to optimize page load.
redbot.org
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Both Google and Yahoo recommend to optimize your images. Use following tools to reduce image size without loosing quality.
SmushIt.com
PunyPNG.com
PNGGauntlet for Windows
Image Optim for Mac
Semantics
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Markup pages in ways recognized by major search providers to improve the display of search results.
Schema.org reference
Schema-Creator.org
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Check what data is extracted from your pages.
W3C semantic extractor
Security
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Make sure you have the latest version of Joomla! If not, update it!
Download latest Joomla!
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You may perform periodic checks to be sure that site is clean of malware.
Sucuri SiteCheck
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When you develop or customize an extension be sure to protect your site from CSRF attacks.
Explanation and walkthrough
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Create a new user, give it super admin permissions, then delete old super admin user for changing ID of the admin user. Since Joomla! 2.5.5 you may change admin name during installation.
Joomla! directions
Recover super admin password
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Do not use easy-to-guess passwords. But make them simple to remember.
How to make mnemonic password
Generate mnemonic password
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Rename htaccess.txt to .htaccess and make sure RewriteEngine is set to "On".
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Do not let automatic scanners find out that you use Joomla by hidding or protecting /administrator/ folder.
Protect a directory with .htaccess
kSecure plugin
JLSecure My Site plugin
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To block most common attacks it is suggested to establish advanced security using .htaccess file.
Suggested master .htaccess file
.htaccess redirect generator
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Check configuration.php file permissions. Set it to 644, or much better to 444.
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If you still on Joomla 1.5.x, do not use the standard jos_ table prefix.
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Do not promote that website is built on Joomla! and its version for security reasons.
Remove Joomla generator tag
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If you go live with the site being established on development environment, a good idea would be to check /log and /tmp folders paths in "configuration.php"
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You do not use them and do not update them. So they are potentially dangerous.
Vulnerable extensions list
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Look in your website structure for staging/development files and delete them (.psd, .bak, IDE files, copies etc.)
SEO
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Show search crawlers what content should be indexed and what should be removed from index.
robots.txt tutorial
Create robots.txt online
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Meta data (title, description) should be unique for each page. Use text formatting tags (h1, h2, h3; ul, li, etc). Include keywords into texts – unique for each page if possible. Use images with unique names and fill in alt tags.
How to use HTML meta tags
HTML Formatting Tags
Alt attribute
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Once your page is correctly marked up, Rich Snippets will be displayed in Google search results.
Online tester
Getting started
Add authorship
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Check most important SEO criteria and calculate your grade for every page of website.
SenSEO for Firefox
Social Media
Usability
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Make use of 404 page by offering useful links and site structure.
A more useful 404
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Nowadays favicon is widely used, so be sure to change default Joomla!/template icon to your own one.
Online generator
How to properly link a favicon
Understand favicons
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Use SEF extension to get human-readable URLs instead of address line with parameters.
11 best practices for URLs
URL rewrite in Apache
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Power up your site search with specialized services.
Google Custom Search
Consider ''Open Search''
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Use browser/OS specific features to make your website look nice anywhere.
Safari on iOS
Internet Explorer on Windows
Windows 8 Tiles
Do you use other cool tools in Joomla! development and maintenance? Share your experience — we'll be glad to extend our checklist.
Embed Commenting System
It allows users to participate in discussions, share opinions and gives you a valuable feedback! A blog platform either has its own built-in comment section or can be integrated with third-party plugins. As an example JoomBlog component in addition to its own commenting system with anti-spam captcha is Disqus service compatible.
Insert media files, links, pdf files, eBooks and other type of content
It will diversify presented information and make it engaging and interesting for your audience. You can do it by using a bunch of plugins: Content plugins allow the files integration while Button/Editor-XTD plugins simplify integration for non-tech users.
Implement surveys & polls
By using surveys you will be able to find out site users’ opinions on a particular topic, ask for advice or even gather useful information for your research or future blog post. By means of polls your blog readers can quickly share their thoughts without spending time on writing comments. In case you would like to know site visitors’ opinion, using native Joomla! features, Survey Force Deluxe extension is the easiest and most appropriate way to do it.
Product Improvement Survey
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Thank you for choosing JoomPlace! It's very important for us to know whether you are satisfied with our Joomla! add-ons or not. Please take a few minutes to participate in our Product Improvement Survey. Your feedback will help us to address any issues that you may have as well as to enhance our components to meet your needs. Thank you!
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Create quizzes
By inserting online quizzes into your blog articles you will be able to engage with your audience, start up a competition or test users’ knowledge on products, goods or services you provide and then reward a perfect quiz passage. For instance, check Joomla! Quiz Deluxe integration!
Insert comparison charts
Describe or compare products’ features by means of attractive charts! Instead of long plain text, present the information differently using colorful rows & columns. Have a look at Joomla! Comparison Chart interaction:
CheckList Versions Comparison
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CheckList Standard Subscription
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CheckList Professional Subscription
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Checklist creation, editing, deleting by an administrator |
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Advanced Checklist permissions |
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SEO optimized |
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Social Media integration |
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Content & xtd-plugins |
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Different display options |
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Checklist Front End Authoring |
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Drag & drop edition option |
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Checkbox tips & notes adding and deleting options |
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Guests/registered users access rights and permissions to comment set-up |
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Disqus commenting system integration |
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Star Rating System |
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Printing & PDF conversion |
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Copy to my Checklist option |
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Price |
$29 | $69 |
Integrate testimonials
In addition to comparison charts, integrate testimonials into your article to show clients’ reviews of described products. Visitors will receive a full picture and gain knowledge of other users’ experience. Here is an example of Joomla! Testimonials Component insert:
Add to your blog posts catalogue/journal/magazine/portfolio
Digital publication with flipping pages will help to gain more visitors’ attention to your post. The best way to do it is using HTML5 Flipping Book.
Photo Album: JoomPlace Birthday
Add infographic
Infographic is trend nowadays! It allows presenting statistics and huge amount of data easily and in a fun manner. JoomPlace team has integrated an “Embed” & “Share” buttons into JoomBlog component to give you a chance to share created infographic separately from the rest of the content, not losing traffic leading to your website.
It should be noted, that any other tool, that encourage users to interact with your blog posts, encourage them to share and comment, is worth using! You will find the right one only by trial-and-error method!
What tools do you use? Share with us!