CMS Solutions

Navega Bem – Web Design in cooperation with OrangeWeb have just published an eCommerce site for the Portuguese furniture retailer company ‘Moveis Estrelicia’

Company MD Chris Szabo explained “Moveis Estrelicia have a very large customer base, not only located in Portugal but also the UK, USA and South America. We were asked to come up with a CMS solution that would provide a fast and user friendly experience with an online payment system. Our experience with CMS sites made Joomla! the logical choice”.

The unique site interface which allows furniture to be viewed and purchased online is based on Virtuemart but with a lot of extra programming. Edmund Elzer, the chief programmer explained that his objective was to make the site function in a way that was not instantly recognisable as a standard Joomla CMS. “The Joomla framework is very flexible and allows us to develop the site around the design – rather than having to adapt the design to fit the framework.”

The site uses the Portuguese online payment system ‘Redunicre’ which accepts all the major credit cards.

Imagine your daily newspaper had the same headlines, images and stories…. everyday!

There is nothing new to the concept that in order to maintain readership and attract new readers – a newspaper needs compelling content… every single day.
Well, isn’t your website trying to attract new visitors and captivate current ones?

For a long long time it has been said that ‘content is king’. That is very true. However, to be able to compete on the internet today, to be able to maintain a healthy position in a community driven arena, now more than ever you need to accept and act on the fact that ‘New Content is King’. Whatever you do with your site you should work on the premise that the search engines love new content.

Now lets move on to an even greater truth; New and Viral Content is King!

What is viral content? Well, anything you read on the internet and find worth passing on to your peers can be considered viral. Content that is spread around… like a virus. If you can create content that other readers will want to spread around – you have in actual fact perfect content.

How to create Viral Content in your blog or website:
Whatever you write about – make it easy to understand. Ensure it’s a topic that is interesting and others would want to know about. Make sure it’s interesting enough that other people would want to share it with others.
Images that provoke debate on current issues are a great help. Remember Vanessa and Bertha?

What are the benefits of viral content?
Obviously, like a spreading virus – the more your link is put around – the more people will talk about your article and make links into your site or blog. This in turn will power up your Technorati ranking and attract new visitors.

An example of Royal content:
At the end of October we published an article about ‘Powerful Linking‘ and what sort of strategy should be adopted with company blogs. Within 12 hours of publishing the article could be found on page 1 of Google when searching for ‘Powerful Linking’, which let’s face it is a very general term. Even today the post remains extremely well positioned – see this link: Google and Powerful Linking.

New and Viral content is King.
Viral content is what so many people look for. Viral content is certainly what people bookmark. Viral content is what people recommend to each other. Viral content can start new trends. Viral content can quickly increase your traffic, your page position and eventually maybe your page ranking. Viral content is the perfect foundation for linkbait. Get Viral!

Written by Chris Szabo MD of Navega Bem – Web Design, Madeira island, Portugal.

Vanessa and Bertha are back!

In fact Bertha has been seen all around the world in many guises and we received a lot of feedback from site owners that really were able to translate our play on the on the two into the actual representation of their site performance on the net. (See the original post here). In essence we asked if your web site looked like Vanessa or more like Bertha?

Some of the sites we researched have actually given Bertha new clothes… well newer. And there can be no denying that the Bertha sites do appeal to certain people. We are not judging anyone – but if your website is out there to sell your services, products or you just need to get your message across to as many visitors as possible… here are the facts about crossdressing how your website will make a huge impact – if it looks like Vanessa.

Search engines love new content. New content is king. Getting Google to visit your site on a weekly basis is just so good for business – and it will visit regularly if you take time out and update your content. As often as you can.
If you have come to the conclusion that you can’t change your text content – then restructure it. Move paragraphs around or just plain use different words to describe things. Change your headlines. Change something… search engines love new content!

Change your images or re-introduce the same ones with better saturation, sharper and don’t forget to use ‘alt’ tags to describe the image.

Revise your meta tags. Are you using the best possible description and keyword tags. Is your title tag correct. Improving the meta tags is also ‘new content’ for the search engines. They love it! Remember, you want your site to look like Vanessa; fresh, attractive and sending the right signals.
If you can (and it’s not always possible) lose the tables in your site. Replace them with divs. Today more than ever you need to have a barrier free web site.

Of course, a lot of readers will want a Vanessa website but are not knowledgeable about web programming or HTML. Well, for those of you that want a fresh site which is always up to date – you need a CMS website (CMS is Content Management System). With a CMS website you can edit the content of your site yourself using any web browser or an iPhone:) and you don’t need any technical experience. If you know how to use Microsoft Word – then you won’t have any problem managing your own web site. See our 1 minute demo video about Joomla CMS.

Vanessa made quite an impact on the blogs. One client quite literally asked if we could make a ‘Vanessa’ site for him. That one will be ready in two more weeks

Others asked for more images of Vanessa – they were quite specific about what sort of images. Perhaps in a different blog… at some other time. One guy wanted a larger Bertha image.

Someone else accused me of using women in a derogatory way – but just in case you really hadn’t noticed… Bertha is a man!

Posted by Chris Szabo, MD of Navega Bem Web Design, Madeira island, Portugal.