Let's talk about my latest favorite Joomla extension Moovur. Moovur is an extension that applies Captcha (you know...the little code you have to enter to submit a form).  What is great about Moovur is the settings and it's ability to be fluid.  I'm not the most technical person out there to give the deets on Moovur so I will simply tell you how it had enhanced my site.

I recently decided to advertise my prices on my website.  I'm still not certain this is the best way to sell  my services, but I thought I would test the waters.  To have the ability to sell my services via a shopping cart I must have a login form.  You can see how important it is to collect a customers information in this example.  I had never had a login form before because all of my information is free. When I launched the latest and greatest version of this site I began to get a lot of registrations.  The odd thing was that they were obviously bogus.  Random names, gobbledygook, plain old garbage. I received about 30 of these bogus registrations in the last 2 weeks. This was a bit annoying.  

I logged into my Moovur stats today and found that they'd captured almost 3000 spam attempts to register on my site.  All of the sudden the 30 that got through didn't seem so bad.

My site notifies me of every registration. You can see that deleting 3000 bogus registrations would be seriously irritating.  I've got to give it to the Moovur guys for developing this great extension.  It equals real time to me.  Time I could be spending working on a clients website.  Thanks Moovur!

Update:  In the last 24 hours there have been an additional 3500 spam attempts and Moovur got all but one.

Let me tell you how much I LOVE this component.  I was hesitant to upgrade Montano Designs to Joomla! 1.5 because of the utter hassle I thought it would be to convert all of my content and links.  Not so with MTW Migrator.  It was a simple as creating a new installation of Joomla in a sub-folder, installing the component and running it.  If you use Community Builder or VirtueMart you'll need to install those prior to running the tool.  You'll also need to install any modules you have on your old site you want converted to the new site.  I didn't use that option, but keep in mind that the module has to work in 1.5.  Otherwise it won't do you any good to pull the information over.  This tool doesn't install the old modules, it only tells Joomla where to put them.

A security side note:  It is wise to uninstall any non-core components, templates and modules if you are not using them.  Developers try to make them secure, but the bad folks out there are always trying to find a way to exploit websites.

Get it here!

This is one of my favorite components.  There are so many types of websites that can benefit from a calendar on their website.  JCal Pro/ JCal Client is a great solution.  They've released a beta version that now allows you to have multiple calendars.  Maybe your site is for your church and you have many departments with multiple events.  You can now separate these out so they're less cluttered.  If you add on a separate Access Control Level component you could even regulate who sees what on your calendar.

One of my favorite WSYWIG editors is JCE. The first thing I do with a new Joomla installation is load in this editor.

I love the way you can upload images with JCE. I also like the DocMan plug-in for JCE. Linking to articles is also very easy because you get dropdown boxes to select either the specific article or the existing link to the destination.

Getting a new website found is increasingly difficult. Competition is fierce. It's a lot like playing pool in that it's more about finesse than brute force.

I don't offer search engine optimization (SEO) as a paid service. It's important for me to be really good at one thing and Joomla is it. HOWEVER! I am pretty good at SEO. My own site comes up #3 out of 11.5 million results if you Google "joomla web design". I will tell you this was no easy task and it took a long time. If you are willing and dedicate the time, effort and a little money, I'll tell you everything I know about how to get your site up in the search results.

A reliable web host is as elusive as the Loch Ness monster. In the six years Montano Designs has been creating web site and had a web site of our own, we've been through 10 COUNT 'EM 10! web hosts. We started out with Go Daddy back when you got one of the owner's sons on the phone if you called tech support. Like so many business that grow too fast, their support suffered and we moved on.

We've tried most of the major web hosts and some little guys. Here's the problem: The big guys offer loads of data storage and bandwidth for a low, low price in a shared environment. They fill up their servers with some legitimate customers and a few rogues. These rogues do nasty things on their sites like spamming, flooding, and all sorts of things that bog down the server. All of the sudden your site gets slow and you don't know why.

I recently found 18 websites who's owners had blatantly plagiarized my site. Most were word-for-word, a few loose derivatives, 3 even copied my “About Us” information for theirs. That boggles the mind. How can you not know enough about yourself that you have to  copy someone else's information?

Last night I got one of those feelings to do something I don't normally do. There's a little voice in the back of your head that says “you should check this out.”  My little voice was saying that I should check to see if anyone has been infringing on my copyrighted text and sure enough I found scads!!!

This article will explain what you can do if this happens to you.

That is the question!  Not necessarily an original title, but it sums up the point I'm about to make. As some of you may have noticed, Montano Designs got a little web botox a couple of weeks ago.  You know the saying about the cobbler's children having no shoes?  Well it's the same with web designers.  If you're any good, you don't have much time to work on your own site.

I've recently been creating a lot of Joomla 1.5 sites and have begun to fall in love with it's features and new website smell.  I was afraid that upgrading my site would be a royal pain so I delayed the inevitable.  I found a great component that I've blogged about here that made the migration really easy.

To forum or not to forum, that is the question.  Many, many of my clients tell me they want a forum on their website.  Not a problem!  There are some great components out there for Joomla that make it very easy to start a forum on your site.  I personally like Fireboard, but there's a new up-and-coming forum called Simplest Forum. I like simple stuff.

Here's the dilemma: Do you have the time and manpower to maintain the forum?  Do you have a large enough audience to make your forum interesting?  Are your topics of interest?  Because you build it doesn't mean they'll come.

Keyword density is the number of times a keyword or phrase appears on your web page compared to the total number of words measured in percentage. Keyword density can be used as a factor in determining whether a web page is relevant to a specified keyword or keyword phrase in the world of search engine optimization.