Allowing people to comment on the articles you publish can seem scary at first. However it adds value to your content and search engines arguably favour sites with comments. Let's have a look at how to add a popular third party comments service called Disqus to your Joomla site.

A sitemap displays links to all of your articles on one page. It can also be used to help search engines index your pages. There are various extensions available to create sitemaps but the one I like to use is Xmap. Once installed, it will create an HTML sitemap to be read by your visitors and a XML sitemap for use by search engines. New articles are automatically added to the sitemap.

Using Joomla to create content is easy but if you have a lot of articles, it can be time consuming. If you have a large site, have a look at a free extension called Mass Content. You can create multiple sections, categories and articles with ease. There is also a mass delete option which is a handy method to delete all the sample data created during the Joomla installation.

Having a goal for your website is vital but you need to measure results to see how you're performing. The goal for a website will vary from one organisation to another but many metrics can be tracked using Google Analytics. This free tool provides much more information than you get from the statistics package provided by your web host.

Here is a quick walk through of how to wrap your text around an image in an article. This assumes you are using the default editor that comes with Joomla.

This article is somewhat more technical than usual but it addresses what is probably the most common problem that people experience with Joomla. Joomla can be successfully used with a number of hosts all of whom have different setups. But once you start installing extensions, you may encounter difficulties with file permissions. If you're not technically minded, you don't know where to begin to solve these problems and spend hours tearing your hair out trying things that don't work or even wrecking the rest of your site.

There are no rules with web development but there certainly are some principles that most sites should follow. Last week I discussed the importance of capturing your visitor's attention quickly. Let's follow on from that by discussing your site navigation.

It is really easy to configure Joomla as a blog but there are a few extensions you should consider to get full blogging functionality. A blog is simply a collection of articles. I demonstrate how to do this in the free Joomla video tutorials.

The term bounce rate is the percentage of people who arrive at a page on your site but don't view any other pages. This is a great metric to measure using Google Analytics because it shows if you are attracting the right people and most importantly, if you are doing a good job convincing them to look at your site.

Before Google maps came along, creating a map for a website was tedious. We used to have to source an original map, trace the required roads onto paper, scan it, add color and then hope that the client liked it. Even a simple map would take a couple of hours.