Tuesday, November 12, 2019

Archive: October 2018

Roksprocket 4 Column Grid In Gantry Hydrogen

17 October 2018
Grimey
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Categories: Gantry, Joomla, Joomla Extension

While working a Joomla! site built with Gantry 5 Hyrdogen template I was having an issue when switching between different column quantities. If I had the columns set to 3 everything was fine; however, when I tried to switch between 3 to 4 columns everything was in one column.

I got around this issue by going into the basic CSS file. This file is located on root/components/com_roksprocket/layouts/grids/themes/basic/basic.css. On line 23 I changed the following:

.sprocket-grids-b-columns-3 > li {width: 33.333333333333336%;width: -webkit-calc(100% / 3);width: calc(100% / 3);}

to 

.sprocket-grids-b-columns-3 > li {width: 33.333333333333336%;width: -webkit-calc(100% / 4);width: calc(100% / 4);}

Once I knew this would work I added the CSS to my custom.css, and set the original “basic.css” back. My override was working fine.

I hope this helps someone else out there…

 

SEO In Joomla 3.X

15 October 2018
Grimey
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Categories: Joomla, SEO

I often start SEO from an existing website. Here are steps I always perform when starting the task.

  1. Start an Excel spreadsheet with 9 columns
    Page/article, Current URL, Current Title,Current Description, New URL, New Title, New Description, and Notes
  2. Then I go to Google and in the search box itself you type:   site:thedomain     Then hit enter.
    This will bring back the pages that Google has indexed. This will be critical to know so can later remove old URLs in Google’s Webmaster Tools, recrawl the site, and be up-to-date. This part can take a while so you have to consider this could double your time spent on the job, so be prepared to bill for it or you will be sorry.
  3. In Joomla you will need to set up the URL to be Search Engine Friendly. In the Administrator area go to Global Configuration >> Site >> Search Engine Friendly URLs ( turn this on), Use URL Rewriting ( turn this on). These changes will require you to change your htaccess.txt and change it to .htaccess. I don’t have it set to “yes” in my  image below, but turning on “Add Suffix to URL” will give the page the “.html” at the end.
  4. I prefer to do a lot of the rest in the menu item. The “Browser Page Title” and the “Alias” is where item #2 from the above image will show.
  5. Staying in the Menu item I move over to the “Metadata” section to add my “Description”. This is part #3 in the upper image.
  6. Here I would rework my Excel spread sheet my making sure my new titles are less than “54” characters long and the description is less that 134 characters long. The name of the page should include the service or search term you want to use for that page. I use Wordcounter.net to determine how many characters I have in my new titles and descriptions.
  7. Next go into Google Webmaster Tools and remove the old URL’s that you won’t need anymore. Click the “Temporary Hide” button, put in the URL, and Google will do the rest.
  8. I don’t always add Sitemaps, but here is where you can do this in Google’s Webmaster Tools.

I meet with NOVA JUG recently and the presenter Dorothy had a bunch to offer. Some of the plug-ins she mentioned.

She also really talked up this book by Simon.

This site for analysis of a website. https://en.ryte.com/

For a security update the group discussed changing a setting to not send the password to a user in plain text.

https://www.joomlashack.com/blog/joomla/passwords-emails/

I hope this helps someone else out there…

 

Getting Customers To Leave A Google Review

5 October 2018
Grimey
No comments
Categories: Google, Google Business Listing, SEO

Listing a business with Google is a no-brainer. Google is such a one-stop-shop for looking something up. Of course you always want your business listing a close to the top a possible, so making sure you have your Google listing as complete as possible is to get some reviews.

I have some customers that are low-tech, but want to use tech to get more business. I wanted to make it as easy as possible for a customer to be able to solicit their customers to leave a review. The customer did more landscape work; however, the business listing was under “construction”. Searching for a landscaper in his area wasn’t yeilding results. This is relevant in case he wanted to tell the customer to look him up and review him.

I found this great article about creating a tinyURL that will link the customer right to the screen they will need to review that business.

How To Ask Your Clients For Google + Business Reviews

The basics are as follows:

  1. Log into Google
  2. Bring up that business listing.
  3. Click on the “Write a review” button.
  4. Now copy the URL and paste it into a URL shrinker like “TinyURL”

That’s it. Your client can send this TinyURL for the customer to quickly leave a review.

I hope this helps someone else out there…