How to Choose a Joomla Template?

Joomla design templates can save you time and money when creating a website. You don't even need any design experience to change your website's appearance. Professional web design template can help you a lot if you make right decision when choosing a template. There are thousands of web templates over the Internet and it sometimes it is very difficult to make your choice. Few simple advices can help you choose the best template for your site.

First of all you should analyze your business goals. When you're clear on your goals and know what you want to get from your visitors, you may start creating a website and choosing a template. Keep your mind clear and you will make your search much more efficient and easy with some simple steps that I will provide.

Tips To Choose Best Joomla Template

What Website Do You Need?

Website templates determine a site's structure, look and feel. Do you want to start a blog with mostly text content or some sort of photo gallery? Maybe you need a social network website? Don't forget that your site design should be related to your site's theme and reflect your site's idea. Joomla music template will have a different feel and look than a sport website template, a web development company, or a muscle cars site. Website's structure should meet your site's needs. Do not forget that template is what determines a website's feel and look and it should meet your stylistic requirements.

What Template Layout Do You Need?

You should choose a Joomla template that works the way you need and no complicated changes are required. Template layout is also very important. Layout is what makes your content look the way it looks when you're building a website. Layout is what makes your content look the way it looks when you're building a website. Remember! Choose by a structure - imagine how do you want home page and other pages to look like? Do you want to have images, links and media? Or you want more plain text pages? Do you want an image in your header? Ask yourself all questions you have before ordering a template. Try to avoid templates that look good but too much design work to be done in it to make it suitable for you.

Will You Be Able To Customize The Joomla Template?

Most modern Joomla templates allow you to do necessary changes to make design unique and suitable to your idea. You can change colors, images and fonts and make your website user and SEO friendly. You should make sure that template supports all customization options you may need before buying it. Note to self - customization is a slight improvement but not a total redesign.

Is Customer Support Included?

Professional Joomla templates should be supported by professionals. It doesn't matter if templates are easy to customize and update, but it is always a pain in neck when you cannot get any technical support from experts. Remember what is hard to understand for you is obvious for another and your problem is not a problem at all - just a minor glitch. Make sure you can reach support team when you really need it.

Are Templates Created Professionally?

There are thousands of Joomla templates in the web. Some of them are free, some are paid. Some are poorly designed, some designed professionally. Your website design should attract and be fast to load, be easy to navigate and memorable.

Also important part is cross-browsing and make sure that template is SEO friendly. Best Joomla templates usually are created by designers and developers both. So they make sure that it looks excellent and takes few seconds to load.

Chosen properly a Joomla template can save you money and time. The perfect template for your website is one that will make your site look catchy and clean and will include all features you need.

http://www.mightytemplate.com/

Choose Wisely: PHP Templates and Search Engine Rank

This article is intended for PHP web developers who create template systems for consistently presenting website content. PHP designers who create their own template systems should be concerned about how their choices affect the website's position in search engines. Below is a discussion of three types of systems, their impact on search ranking and a recommendation for the best approach.

Webpage as a CGI Argument

In this architecture one PHP script contains the entire template, and plugs in content from a file it reads in - getting the file name from a CGI parameter. These types of systems are not only prone to security problems (as users can modify the path argument to retrieve arbitrary files) but are also ineffective for search engine optimization.

This particular design does not allow for titles and keyword/description meta-tags to be associated with individual pages. This is because the header portion of the template includes the section within it, and only allows for one site-wide title and set of meta-tags. Titles are one of the most important page elements, and having one title - unrelated to the actual content retrieved - results in a lower rank in search engines.

There are two other detrimental SEO effects this type of system has. The first is that each unique page is viewed as an aspect of the template script, rather than as a unique standalone page. This can result in search engines lowering the importance of individual content pages relative to the template script - which is often not the desired result. The other weakness of this approach is that having individual pages set up as CGI arguments makes site metrics harder to track, as statistics often show a visit to a specific page as a visit to the general template script. The popular web statistics packages AWstats and Webalizer are most affected by this.

However, this type of templating system is popular and sucessfully used in the world of e-commerce. In such systems, product information is stored in a database and is inserted into the template when a product is requested by its code. This means that both a unique title and a set of meta-tags can be stored alongside the product data (or generated on the fly), and inserted into the global template effectively. The only detrimental effects that remain are the latter mentioned two, and are usually an acceptable tradeoff for the increased ease of administration that a database-driven system provides.

Template as an Include

In this architecture, each page on the website has its own filename with a .php extension. The top and bottom portions of the template are stored in separate files that are included (using include_once() ) by each content file. This technique increases the importance of the page with search engines, as each page is its own standalone page rather than a CGI argument. This type of template system also makes it simple to track page views through regular website statistics software.

On the other hand, this type of template system still has the weakness of having one title and one set of meta-tags for the entire site. This is, again, because the header portion of templates has to include everything from the opening of the tag to the end of the code for the header portion of the template. And this area includes the title and meta-tags. One workaround for this type of system is to code the top template page to check which file it is being called from, and to substitute a suitable pre-coded title. Although effective, such a system is cumbersome to maintain as each new page that is published warrants a new title and meta-tag entry in this secondary system.

Body-Only Includes

The ideal PHP templating system will permit content producers to enjoy the reusability of templates, while maintaining unique titles and metadata for each page with ease. The system that meets all of these SEO needs is a "body-only include" system: a system where each php content page includes the top and bottom portions of the template (as in the previous approach), but only includes the elements below the body tag. This translates into a document that has its own html, head, title and meta tags, has an include_once() statement which is called at the top of the body element and includes the top portion of the template, has the content, and an include for the footer portion of the template. Such a system allows for individual editing of the title and meta-information during the creation of documents and solves the problems that both of the aforementioned systems face.

I find this system the most search-engine friendly, because it keeps the title information and the content together - allowing for the presence of relevant, unique titles for each page. This system is also the most human friendly, as storing the title information in the same file as the page content allows for fast updating and avoids maintaining a second "workaround" system that attempts to match titles to content.

Conclusion

The types of template system that PHP developers choose to implement for clients' sites have a crucial impact on the future search-engine popularity of the client's webpages. Important factors to consider when developing a template solution are: relevant titles tied to content, relevant meta-tags, standalone files and ease of statistics tracking. The popular approaches of page-as-an-argument and template-as-an-include do not effectively provide these functions. Including template information after the body tag, and keeping headers intact is the best way to ensure that sites are optimized for search engines - and this is why you should consider using the Body-Only Includes model during your next project.

Jacob Filipp is a Canadian search engine optimization specialist at Powerspirit. Jacob has 7 years of experience as a web developer and webmaster.