Richard Pearce

If you build a standard feedback form using Joomla, it's only a matter of time until you start receiving spam submissions. The way around this for most developers is to use a different form builder that includes a method you're probably familiar with called CAPTCHA. That's a bit of a shame as the Contacts component provides an easy way to create simple forms. So here is a way around this using a free extension.

This post includes a video tutorial.

Google Images is a useful resource that allows searchers to find images on the web related to their search inquiry. Your images may also show up in the standard Google results.

The standard location that Joomla uses to store images is /images/stories. If you don't like this, you can change it.

This post includes a video tutorial.

Last week, I demonstrated how to speed up your site using Joomla's cache feature. Here's a second speed tip:

It is crucial to provide a positive experience for your site visitors and an easy way to do this is to speed up your site so pages are displayed more quickly. Here's one way to do this:

Your website content is divided into what I call "Primary" and "Secondary" content. Your Primary Content are your articles that appear in the main part of the page and these are handled using Article Manager in the Administrator. Your Secondary Content items are pieces of information that appear in other positions such as the header, footer, left and right. These are handled using Module Manager. However did you know that you can place a module into an article? Here are the steps.

This post includes a video tutorial.

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.