All the software solutions quoted here are extensively tested, widely implemented around the world and thousands of programmers are familiar to their technology. This is a very important feature over bundled software. Mainly “open-source” means that the Information Technology Team will have access to the “source code” of the programs, being able to extend, modifiy and customize the end-user need … simply modify the site at will.

The three major Content Management Systems that are presently up to a professional development, design and commercial point of view in internet today are Drupal, Wordpress and Joomla!. For you to aquaint yourselves with them I’ve made a little note on their features in a comparative manner for you to investigate. I’ve had experience using each extensively, and know the ins and outs of actually using the systems. To put this quite simply, I will not be giving you many statistics based on research… I’m giving you first-hand experience.

Each of this CMS systems has its flaws and each has its strengths (which I will explain below) you can build any kind of website with either one. I have built blogs with Joomla and I have built shopping cart websites with Wordpress. It just depends on what you need it to do, your familiarity with the system, and how long you have to work on that program, but that doesn’t make it less valuable, it just makes it less useful for the particular purpose you are aiming.

Wordpress:

Wordpress is an excellent system to use when creating a website that lets you quickly get on-line, but while it is often used as a blog, it can be configured to work in many other interesting ways as well. One particular client of mine recently needed a website that would allow him and his employees to have an internal website for sharing notes, documenting tasks and writing about what was going on. Since Wordpress is easy to use and some of them were already familiar with it, it was an obvious solution. Install Wordpress on a server that they could access quickly and easily from anywhere with an internet connection, and let them get to business rather than have to learn about a whole different system. In fact, my firms’ website, http://www.pproyectos.com, has been built in this technology.

It is key to know that Wordpress is extremely easy to use and setup. I have used it several times with clients that are brand new to the internet and having a website, yet they can pick this system up and use it quicker than the other two. Since WP is already developed to work as a blog, though, it can be setup to do so without any hesitation. Comments are already built into the system, as well as pinging services, multiple blogger profiles, trackbacks and more (these features come seriously in hand when a good web ranking is primary objective). Most of the time nothing needs to be done to those systems either, because they already work the way that the user would want them to.

Wordpress, however, is not to be used for everything.For exmaple, using Wordpress as a shopping cart for certain type of merchandise (selling products that require booking as hotels, etc.) prooved to be a challenge as another solution had to be implemented as complement. Wordpress is not unfriendly to commercial uses, but a very complex shopping cart will have to be coded independently.

Wordpress Pros

Simple to use – Little need for modifications
Excellent sharing information in a sequential manner
Even the most elderly of users can get the hang of it quickly

Wordpress Cons

Not very developer friendly, you need some experience to code vast functionality into it.

Drupal:

This advanced content management system more closely resembles a developer platform than a traditional CMS. Its not to say that only developers can use the system though, but to say that they will feel more at home here than in the other two. Interestingly, being more developer friendly does not automatically make it more user friendly – in fact the developer has to work hard to make it that way if they need the end-product to do so.

There are dozens of more tags and functions that can be used to develop in Drupal than in Wordpress or Joomla. Every single node has its own set of commands and tags that can be placed elsewhere to manipulate the function of the site, and this makes for a very intense experience (whether or not you know what you’re doing). For those that are not so developer-minded, this can be the trial of their lives, but for people who live in code – well, they can literally get lost developing some very cool websites.

Now, these websites can act and function in some pretty neat ways, but Drupal also has the problem that it just doesn’t always look that great. I have seen very few websites built in Drupal that look and feel as good as they function. You can especially see this in the theme directory on the Drupal.org website, where there are dozens of these themes built to prove the exact point I just made. It’s a shame really, because with all of the development advancements the software has, it would almost be perfect with a stronger usability and design interface.

Drupal Pros

Extremely developer friendly.
Can be used to create very complex websites.

Drupal Cons

Not very designer and user-friendly. It’s hard for someone with little code knowledge to make the leaps required to do the very cool things that Drupal is becoming known for.
None or very basic theming (skinning), probably because it has been developers, not designers, that are making the themes.

Getting a Drupal website published could cost you more time, and thus more money, than Wordpress or Joomla.

Joomla!:

If Wordpress is more for end-users and Drupal is more for developers, and Joomla! is somewhere in the middle. The name Joomla, in fact, means ‘all together’ in Swahili (Urdu). the idea is to concieve a CMS system that works well with designers, coders and end-users.

Designers may choose Joomla because of it’s flexibility. Newcomers to Joomla (and website management) will love the fact that it is very easy to use and even customize as more and more developers create tools that are easier to understand. Developers, likewise, will choose the system because of its large capacity for development and customization. The new MVC framework was built just so that anyone with the knowledge could override the core of the CMS without actually modifying the original code.

Still, it’s far from perfect. It’s still not as flexible as Drupal is with its code. While there are many ways to override what the default code does, there are some parts of the system that just can’t be pushed and stressed as hard as Drupal can be. Also, while Drupal can be used to run multiple websites with one backend and database, Joomla lacks the ability to create multi-sites. It is just powerful enough to be useful, but not enough to do anything.

In a side-by-side comparison with Wordpress, Joomla still has some way to go with being user friendly. In each case where I’ve had people use both systems to manage a website, those that lacked good knowledge of the internet or how their website even worked always chose Wordpress over Joomla. It is simple enough that it can be taught to practically anyone, but not enough that anyone would want to learn it.

Joomla Pros

Somewhat friendly for all types of users – Designers, Developers and Administrators
Has been rapidly growing and improving itself for the past three years

Joomla Cons

Still not user-friendly enough for everyone to understand
Not quite as powerful as Drupal, and can be a bit confusing for some to jump into

In Conclusion

There is not just one system available to build websites with, but if a quick and user-friendly solution will be priority, then Wordpress should be a good choice. If very complex functionality will be required and time and budget are in hand, maybe Drupal can be more usefull. Joomla is neither, and in my opinion, this makes it a little bit weaker.

Besides all you’ve just read, it is my recommendation that the person to explore this CMS software should have a basic knowledge of website handling so to understand the basics of html edition, some coding, javascript and if better, php so to fully understand the potential of this three solutions. Web ranking friendliness is also a good skill to allow you evaluate their potential.

For further information and services, our company can install, customize or upgrade any of this solutions. Please contact us to receive assistance, we will be glad to help.

Buenos Aires Unviersity - Exact Sciences Faculty

Argentina, and particularly the City of Buenos Aires, is worldwide known for its high-quality universities and academic institutions. In the last few years, especially since the Argentine currency devaluation, more foreign students have enrolled on Argentine universities, mainly from Latin American countries who come to start or continue their university studies in Argentina. Therefore, they take advantage of the favorable exchange rate while they benefit from the high educational level.

No doubt this instructional demand has created an excellent professional base for argentina technology companies to harvest their personnel, and Proyectos Informaticos is not an exception. Our team is composed of excellent systems engineers and analysts with experiencie in software development, website development and systems support in Argentina.

Please feel free to contact us if you are interested in lowering your software cost by outsourcing in Argentina. Software development in Argentina is an excellent experience and opportunity, and we can be your definitive  partners for this.

Web Design Company Services

Proyectos’s team is a dedicated and experienced “bridge” to gap the distance between your web design needs and your web design assets. We provide full web design services spectrum, from conceptual idea to realization, including custom programming and SEO services. About cost, don’t worry, give us a try and see that a well done website is a mayor commercial tool. Please feel free to take a look at some of our projects and contact us when desired. Remember, we are the web design company you will wan’t to work with from all others.

A Sitemap is an XML file that lists the URLs for a site and allows a webmaster to inform search engines about URLs (yes, the www.yoursite.com/whatever) on your website that are available for crawling. It allows webmasters to include additional information about each URL: when it was last updated, how often it changes, and how important it is in relation to other URLs in the site. This allows search engines to crawl the site more intelligently. Sitemaps are a URL inclusion protocol and complement robots.txt, a URL exclusion protocol.

It is also important to understand that Sitemaps supplement and do not replace the existing crawl-based mechanisms that search engines already use to discover URLs. Also, using this protocol does not guarantee that web pages will be included in search indexes, nor does it influence the way that pages are ranked in search results.

But to my experience, this is a must. This is the fastest way to notify google about your website and changes and should seriously aid in your SEO process. To elaborate, please take a look at our article about Making Wordpress Search Engine Friendly.

Sitemaps are particularly beneficial on websites where:

Some areas of the website are not available through the browsable interface, or webmasters use rich Ajax, Silverlight, or Flash content that is not normally processed by search engines. The webmaster can generate a Sitemap containing all accessible URLs on the site and submit it to search engines. Since Google, MSN, Yahoo, and Ask use the same protocol now, having a Sitemap would let the biggest search engines have the updated pages information.

So, let’s work on a way on how to automatize this process, which is a very simple task in wordpress.

Google Webmaster Tools

Although this is not mandatory, as we wan’t to be shure our sitemap es being posted, we will need a google webmaster account. The url for registration is http://www.google.com/webmasters/. Once your account is created, you should create a record for the site you wan’t to work with, and via the google authentication methods, confirm the site ownership. I personally recommned the script placing in your website root modality, as I have done this process various times and this choice has proved to be the one that never fails.Now, we should install our XML sitemap automation.

For this, we will include another plugin in our installation, a plugin called Google XML Sitemaps.

XML Sitemap Generator

This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO. Please download from here (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/), decompress and install this plugin by uploading the resulting forlder into the ftp://yourwebsite.com/wp-content/plugins folder.

Once this process is complete, you should activate the plugin. In the plugins section of your wordpress admin panel, please activate this plugin. All settings are pretty self explanatory and you should not have to meddle with them much, but in the configuration page (the link in the plugin detail in the plugins section) for this plugin you should add your google account info for google notifications to be done automatically.

Some features about this plugin :

• Post Priority (this is especially useful, even more so if you have Popularity Contest enabled)
• Auto-detects the sitemap location
• Options to include or exclude specific content types (example, posts, categories, archives, tag pages, etc)
• Easy to change the frequency for robots to re-crawl pages (example, Daily, Monthly, Yearly, etc)
• Easy to change the priority level for each content type
• And many more.

Finally, we should test our reporting of news to the google services. To do this there are two procedures. Manually, forcing the update, and automaitcally, allowing the plugin to perform the update. Automatically, the plugin will perform the update anytime your wordpress website is updated (you can configure which parts of the website to report – tags, posts, comments, etc.).

To revise your results, please log into the webmaster tools area in google, click your website and in the left panel click on Site Information>Sitemaps. There you should see the google sitemaps and the amount of indexed urls you have.

to continue to ”Website Development With Wordpress: Adding your first Entry” please click here.

Plugins are small scripts that can extend WordPress to do almost anything you can imagine. There is a directory in the wordpress.org (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/) website where you can take a look and find literlly thousands of them, whom can improve your worpdress experiencie in almost endelss ways.

In this small section I will discuss only two of them I consider ver important for you to implement. Further options are also considered, simply google “wordpress plugins” and you´ll find thousands of people recommending diferent solutions for your wordpress website. I’ve tried these and recommend them.

First of all, Backup !!!

Yes, you need a copy of your content and don’t want any problems with damaged or lost information. Although your host may have a backup implementation, it is never wrong to simply secure a copy of your information.  This is a simple plugin to help you automate the process of backuping your wordpress database to ensure there is no content loss.
Please download, extract wp-db-backup.php and upload it into /wp-content/plugins/ and activate it under the Plugins menu. Then Click the Manage menu in your WordPress admin area. Click the Backup sub-menu. When activated, this plugin will look for other tables in the same database (this can solve a general backup of the website). You may elect to include other tables in the backup.

Now simply select how you’d like the backup to be delivered:

• Save to server : this will create a file in /wp-content/backup-*/ for you to retreive later
• Download to your computer : this will send the backup file to your browser to be downloaded
• Email : this will email the backup file to the address you specify

Click “Backup!” and your database backup will be delivered to you.

When having the database backup emailed or sent to your browser for immediate download, the backup file will be deleted from the server when the transfer is finished.
Only if you select delivery method “Save to server” will the backup file remain on your server.

Additionally, our website will need a contact form. This is very easy to implement.
Download WordPress-Ready Contact Form v.2.0WP. This plugin has a form overview page to allow you to confirm the plugin’s general configuration, a set of extensive security features to countermeassure spammers and forgers and a form set-up error management to help ensure you set-up critical parts correctly. You can also customize the style of your forms to match your template (see our “Installing your chosen design theme” section for this set of articles).

WordPress-Ready Contact Form v.2.0WP

This plugin is simple to install and can be done in a matter of minutes. The following steps will guide you through the process:

Unpack the *.zip file and extract the /wp-gbcf/ folder and wp-gbcf_readme.txt file. Using an FTP program, upload the /wp-gbcf/ folder to your WordPress plugins directory (Example: /wp-content/plugins/). In the sub-directory, /wp-gbcf_themes/, using FTP or your server admin panel, change the permission of the CSS theme files to 666, but you’ll only do this if you’ll want to edit them. Open your WordPress Admin panel and go to the “Plugins” page. Locate the “Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form” plugin and click on the “Activate” link.

Once activated, go to the “Contact Form” page and select the “Configuration” link on the sub-menu. If you need help, review the “Form Configuration Instructions.” You won’t be able to enter the URL yet, though. Once configured as much as you can, go to the “Write” page and click the “Write Page” If using a default page template give it a name like “Contact Page,” for example. Now go back to the “Configuration” page and add the URL of your newly-created form page. “Save” your changes. Now go to “Manage” and click on “Edit Pages” link on the sub-menu. Then locate your contact page an click on the “Edit” link to the right of it. With the page file open, add this code <!–gb_contact_form–> to the text area and “Save” the page.

To style your form, select the “Styling” link. There you may select one of the ready-made themes (designed for specific popular WordPress themes), use no theme, or create your own using the style sheet editor provided.

to continue to  ”Website Development With Wordpress: Planning your strategic sitemap” please click here.

First of all, install some kind of website statistics software. An online solution like Google Analytics it’s at the top of the list!, but you may also consider Piwik which is a PHP MySQL software program that you download and install on your own webserver. Monitoring your website is a must in commercial software!

Piwik Main Screen

Allow space for a minimum of 250 words of relevant text if possible but you should be careful about writing too much text and loading it to your website or blog site. For the Internet, there are different types of writing that are more appropriate.  Bold only key ideas in the text. Adding too much bold will over-emphasize the whole page, which is counterproductive. Generally, bullet points, bold words, short paragraphs and breaking up a lot of text and make it easier for viewers to read. Also ensure you have the right balance between text and graphics. Graphics-heavy Web sites with little (or no) text can make it hard for a search engines to determine the relevancy of your site to queries you should rank for. Images and graphics, on the other hand, help tell a story about your products and services.

Break up long paragraphs with photos or bullet points. Use a readable font and font size, and one that is hopefully easily scalable for low-vision users. Use quality graphics and photos. Poor photography can lead to less trust in what you’re offering. Remember: a picture is worth 1,000 words. If possible avoid Flash elements and java photo slideshows, they usually are visually attractive but various different web clients (mozilla, Internet Explorer, Chrome, etc.) may not show them correctly or use up bandwidth and system resources.

Create an eye-catching website header. This makes an impression on visitors, much like the façade, front door, or foyer of your store. Also consider how easy the home page and interior pages will be to manage in the future. Simple objective designs seriously influence the sites appeal. Please work on a modular design and consider your website should be able to link new pages and grow and change over time. Also use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to keep excessive code out of the way. This leaves a clean and concise interface for the search engines. And please remember your phone number should be prominent and located at top of page in large type. Additionally, if your business is not web based, location of your offices should be prominent and obvious on the page. Use header tags on every page — your tag should support the page title and be relevant to on page content that follows it.

If you include an online store, create logical and custom navigation with “Product” and “Purchase” links in clear view. Place strong call to actions throughout the site. Make it very easy for your user to find the “buy” button and get through your checkout process. Buying or reserving information should be prominent and above the fold (book now, checkout, shopping cart, etc). Don’t overload your contact or RFP forms with information. Make it simple and easy to fill out and submit — name, phone, e-mail address and comments are the basics. If you ask for personal information via a sign up or contact form, then you need a privacy policy.

Search engines don’t care how the words are delivered — paragraphs or bullet points are fine — just as long as your services and products are fully described on each page. Write unique page titles and meta descriptions for each page. This is ad copy, so take advantage of it. Sell using great keyword phrases and calls to action. Have a static HTML sitemap and an XML sitemap that can be uploaded to your Google Webmaster Tools account. Remember: when you add pages to a site, update your navigation and sitemap. Consider having static sitemap links that use main keyword phrase for the page it links to. It doesn’t hurt to wrap some descriptive text around those sitemap links either.

Finally, if you go into the process with some knowledge, hiring someone who can build you exactly what you need to be successful will be much easier and you’ll have some realistic and professional advice. If interested, please contact us, we can quote you on a site that accomplishes all of this and more.

One of the main reasons to choose a CMS (Content Management System) as one like the Wordpress platform is it’s search engine friendliness. Making wordpress search engine friendly is, basically, to improve search engine readability. The reasons for you to make this changes are so to improve this friendliness, and this is not a minor thing to consider.

A word about search engines: google.com is the ultimate search engine website. With almost 98% of all search traffic being routed via their website and their automated advertisment campaigns (aka. adwords) we want to be google friendly. In fact, most other search engines (as Microsoft’s bing, Yahoo, etc) make use of google to feed their own systems. So, google.com is the place to be. We will make our website the more “google friendly” we can. And, luckily,  this can be made with very little effort.

Permalinks

First, let´s change the way your URL’s show in the address toolbar of your web client (internet explorer, google chrome, firefox, etc.) By default, the wordpress instalation uses interrogation symbols and a lot of numbers to reach each page in your website. This is not so friendly to search engines. In fact, a simple “houses.html” would be more useful if you wanted to be placed in the search engine directory under “houses” keyword. And what would be great would be to simply use the post title as a url address. So, if you made a post under tha title “Nice Houses”, then this post page could be reached via “www.yourwebsite.com/nice-houses”.

In wordpress this is a very simple configuration. Please go to “Options>Permalinks” and change “Common Options” selection to “Date and Name” and save your changes. Once this is done, the whole database will be updated, and from now on, your pages will be reachable in the form “http://www.yourwebsite.com/2009/11/02/sample-post/”.

All in One SEO

Now, we will wan’t to prepare our webpages (not only the page address) for google indexation. This is not a complex process. I personally recommend a wordpress plugin named “All in One SEO”. This plugin will allow you to customize your keywords, title and description (and other meta tags) in an every page and a sitewide basis.

To install this plugin, simply download it from the author website and copy it into the /wp-content/plugins/ folder. Then goto the plugins section and activate this plugin.

Once active, you will be able to access a link under “Options>All in One SEO”. Please enable it, and change the home title, description and keywords to convenience. Make sure Canonical URLS and Rewrite Titles are checked. The rest should be left more or less the same.

That’s it. If you followed every step, your website should be up and ready to be google indexed in no time. A final word: allthouhg indexing is a fairly straight forward process, ranking (google placement of your website in a visible, reachable, searchable position) is not. On the contrary, usulally this is a very complex and lengthy process that requires analysis and a good strategy for your website to be properly placed in google. If you’d like further information on this process please contact us, we sell SEO services and would like very much to assist you anyway.

We hope this helped you making wordpress Search Engine Friendly.

to continue to  ”Website Development With Wordpress: Adding Wordpress Plugins You Will Need” please click here.

Castel Telecomunicaciones

Database driven website for chilean company Castel Telecomunicaciones. Programming, graphic design plus desktop back end software to feed the database. Everything done in php, Mysql for Apache.

This client was, and still is, a friend. We worked to develop a tech-like very simple design for his online catalog and to promote his image in the internet. This was an exciting and very good process. He now conducts most of his international sales via de website and has entered various new markets and exported to other countries due to this technology.

Now we have reached a fully working wordpress installation. So, let’s make it look as it should. Remember that when your design was chosen, in the website you did your search, the design should have a wordpress version compatibility note. For example, the original design applied to this website you are reading was 2.7, meaning that the version for wordpress you should installed is 2.7. Please don’t disregard this recommendation.

First: Download your theme of choice
To install a wordpress theme, we will need to download it first. There are thousands of themes in the web, and in our personal wordpress template store we carry some of the best. A wordpress theme is a set of files usually compressed in a single zip file. It has a style.css file containing the name (unique to the directory), tags, version (in the format of x.x or x.x.x and be unique to the theme) and classes: .alignright, .alignleft, .aligncenter (see http://codex.wordpress.org/CSS for more details). It includes a screenshot file, screenshot.png, and be a real screenshot of the theme, not a splash screen. A GPL compatible license. It exposes RSS feeds, it support Gravatars and widgets, it shows (usually in side bars) post categories and tags, the blog title and tag line.

Once downloaded, the files should be extracted into a directory under the themes name. For exmaple, if the theme is called “theme 987″ then the directory for the files should be ”theme 987″.

Second: Upload the theme directory to WordPress
With your ftp file transfer program of choice (please see our previous post for a recommendation), upload the decompressed directory into /wp-content/themes/ directory. This should leave you with something like a /wp-content/themes/theme987 directory.

Third: Activate the theme within your WordPress admin panel

Wordpress Theme Selection

Login to your WordPress admin panel, and navigate to the Presentation tab. In the center you will find the “Current Theme”. This is the theme wordpress is configured to use right now. Below it, the list of “Available Themes”. These themes are themes you can use but aren’t configured as “Current” right now. To activate our desired theme simply click on any miniature in the list. The theme will enlarge and in the top right angle of the screen an activation link will present itself. To continue please press this link. Once this is done, this selected theme will turn into the “Current Theme” and if you go to your wordpress site (leave the administration area) will see your newly chosen theme.

If you don’t like this option, you can still change this theme anytime with the same process described in this third part of the article.

to continue to  ”Website Development With Wordpress: Making wordpress Search Engine Friendly” please click here.

Scalix

Scalix is an extremely stable, linux-based groupware server that can be used alongside or instead of Exchange. For Enterprises and Businesses feeling pressure to reduce IT spending and get away from Microsoft server proliferation, Scalix is a linux-based groupware server with a decades long heritage that mimics Exchange via standard and proprietary interfaces. Scalix is best known for it’s excellent Outlook user experience.

WITH SCALIX YOU CAN:

• Provide the Outlook experience your users expect with push email, PIM, group calendaring, free/busy services, public folders, delegation, and more
• Reduce your email budget with cost-effective licensing and low-cost server operating system choices like CentOS
• Keep email flowing and your pager quiet with a stable infrastructure that uses compute and operational resources efficiently
• Integrate with in-house custom applications with an open platform and API’s

NEXT STEPS:

• Read more about the Scalix Enterprise Edition
• Read about other organizations that use Scalix
• Request a Scalix Enterprise Edition trial
  If you’d like to try Scalix in your own environment, we’re happy to provide you with a free 30-day trial download of the Scalix Enterprise Edition. At the end of your trial the system will continue to function for a limited number of users.

Scalix Trial Download

Proyectos Informáticos has partenered with Xandros to offer scalix support in Argentina and Latin America, please feel free to contact us about this service.