Joomla

Every day I try to learn something new and today is no different.

Hopefully you are aware of the robots.txt file that comes with your joomla web site install and you might even have customised it to add more power and control.

The robots.txt file acts as a signpost to google and other search engine robots, telling which parts of your web site to index and which to ignore.

In advanced usage it can be used to serve slightly different content to the search engines, prevent images from being included in the google image index or even tell google the pages of your site to include in its mobile index.

But have you checked it is actually working?

Read more: Is your robot fully charged?

I am not a fan of template clubs.

More and more the tendency for joomla template club designers is to showcase as many different things as possible that they can achieve in a Joomla template rather than concentrate on the best way to present the site owner's content.

When someone visits a site I have built, I don't want the first thing they think of to be "oh that is pretty" or "ooh look at that slide show". I want them to find the information that they came to the site for in the first place.

And of course I don't want them to think that the site looks familiar because they have seen the template before.

Read more: Where is the search - redux

Back in November I published a blog post "Where is the search?" in which I stated that the search button should be at the top right hand corner of your web site because "everyone else puts it there so that's where your user expects to look."

According to a recent survey of the Top 100 blogs at Technorati by Smashing Magazine 62% of sites have the search box in the top right corner of the site, just like here, with the majority of the rest placing it at the top of the right hand sidebar.