The Joomlashack Blog
How Does Marketing Automation Save Time?
- Written by Steve Burge Steve Burge
- Published: 10 March 2014 10 March 2014
Have you heard of marketing automation? It's the new school of marketing, which helps busy small businesses attract, convert, and retain customers.
One of the highlights of marketing automation is it's ability to complete all of these steps while saving you time. Ready to find out how?
The ins and outs of Flat Design
- Written by Joomlashack Joomlashack
- Published: 08 March 2014 08 March 2014
Joomla sees its share of user interface trends, as the latest web fad passes from CMS to CMS. One of the latest UI trends is flat design. Instead of 3D elements galore, with gloss dripping off of Web 2.0 everything, you have simple, nearly minimalist designs moving to the forefront. One of the most prominent displays of flat design came from iOS 7, which revamped its interface to embrace this simple style.
Akeeba CMS Update for Joomla
- Written by Nick Savov Nick Savov
- Published: 08 March 2014 08 March 2014
The Akeeba Team recently released Akeeba CMS Update, an extension that improves the Joomla! update experience. Its main features include improved reliability across web hosts, update notifications by email, automatic updates via cron, and a backup-before-update feature.
If it gets good feedback and there's interest, it could potentially get submitted for inclusion in the Joomla core. The Akeeba Team are also the authors of the current Joomla built-in core updater, which I thought is reliable already, but I guess they wanted to take it to the next level. Kudos to them.
With that in mind, here's a preview of Akeeba CMS Update Alpha.
Web Design Failure as Part of the Learning Process
- Written by Joomlashack Joomlashack
- Published: 04 March 2014 04 March 2014
No web designer is perfect, and failure is often an essential part of the creative process. You can have the biggest budget in the world for a site, but sometimes things go horribly wrong. Instead of stressing yourself out over a web design that simply doesn't work, do a postmortem and determine how the design went wrong, and what you can do in the future to avoid similar problems.
Read more: Web Design Failure as Part of the Learning Process
5 Tips to Create a High Power Joomla Call to Action
- Written by Steve Burge Steve Burge
- Published: 03 March 2014 03 March 2014
The Inbound Marketing methodology delivers incredible return on relatively simple tactics. At it's core, Inbound gets it's greatest power from just 7 basic functions: social media, SEO, content, calls to action, landing pages, forms, and automation.
One of the least glamourized and most important of these tactics is the call to action, which is the essential step in converting a site visitor to a lead and customer.
On Joomla sites, Calls to Action are often a custom HTML module that prompts a user to click through to a landing page. Once on that landing page, the user can learn more about an offer, fill out a form, and become a valuable lead for your business.
If you're not quite a CTA pro, these tips will help you create Joomla Calls to Action that get the job done:
Read more: 5 Tips to Create a High Power Joomla Call to Action
How to use Social Buttons on your site?
- Written by Joomlashack Joomlashack
- Published: 27 February 2014 27 February 2014
Once you've constructed your well-designed, responsive website, your users need to be able to spread the word about what they find there. Providing social media buttons is the basic method of encouraging people to share your content with their social media networks, and it's important to understand the best practices for posting these buttons. Here is an overview of social media buttons, to help you get started:
What came first: the Chicken, the Egg or the Buyer Persona?
- Written by Steve Burge Steve Burge
- Published: 26 February 2014 26 February 2014
So you're beginning to put together a killer inbound marketing campaign. What are the first questions you start asking yourself? Is it about the goals of the campaign, the nitty gritty details, the budget, the deadline?
While those questions all need to be answered, the best place to begin is asking yourself who do you want this killer inbound marketing campaign to reach? You can create amazing content all day, every day, but if you don't know who you want to be seeing and reading it, the battle could already be lost. By targeting everyone, you could essentially be reaching no one. No bueno. Therefore I give you, the buyer persona in inbound marketing.
Read more: What came first: the Chicken, the Egg or the Buyer Persona?
Facts and Figures of Marketing Automation [Infographic]
- Written by Steve Burge Steve Burge
- Published: 24 February 2014 24 February 2014
Interested in the world of marketing automation?
This awesome infographic from Capgemini Consulting has some pretty eye-opening figures about how much marketers are investing in Inbound, what it's accomplishing, and more!
Read more: Facts and Figures of Marketing Automation [Infographic]
Important Webdesign Trends we've Noticed
- Written by Joomlashack Joomlashack
- Published: 24 February 2014 24 February 2014
The web industry moves so fast that it's no surprise that the web design trends change every year. If you are wondering what this year will bring when it comes to web design and development, it's time to learn some of the top predictions. You'll find that you have already noticed a few of them in use!
No More Stock Photography
Many people see stock photography as cheesy or even spammy, so it's no surprise that no one wants to look at it anymore. If you want people to take your websites seriously, say no to stock photography. Of course, that doesn't mean you should forego images altogether.
Customizing Kunena BBCode buttons
- Written by joedson silva joedson silva
- Published: 23 February 2014 23 February 2014
Joomla!'s template override mechanism offers wonderful flexibility with relative ease. If you've ever done this, you know it's a simple matter of copying a core file into the right directory under your template's html directory.
Kunena is no exception although with a slight twist. For example, if you want to do your own thing for the reply/edit page, you would copy the file