Site Review Blog

Nearly every webmaster has heard of Joomla - it is an open source CMS or Content Management system. It is a very popular tool that allows webmasters concentrate on providing content on a website rahter than getting bogged down in putting it all together. Now with a lot of people using it, quite often people tend to use one of the default templates or end up paying a small fortune for someone to design them something unique.

Well, it doesn’t have to cost you a fortune to create your own unique joomla template - you just need to know how to. As we siad, you could go out and pay a few hundred to buy a unique template or you can check out the Club TVK Joomla Template Kit. It is an inexpensive step by step toolkit that will show you how to create a great, unique template for your joomla powered website. The advantage of learning how to create Joomla Templates is that you not only get the ability to make your own website unique, but then you could also sell the templates themselves to other people!

The Club TVK website not only offers the Joomla Template Kit for sale, but has a few Free templates available for download as well. I went looking for a forum on their site and couldn’t find one in the navigation. Well, I thought that If I was payiong for something like this then I would like to be able to get help. But all is not lost - I clicked on the “Getting Started” link and it had a link on it to their forum. Well the forum is only available to registered users, which I suppose is a fair enough. I think that they should have added the Forum link to the site navigation to make it easier for users to find.

Visit www.clubtvk.com

My first question was why? then after I read a little bit it was How. Everone who runs a website knows how important it is to keep in contact with their site visitors and it is even more important with a Blog. Most people have a blog so that they can share information about something, and people read the blog because they want to know more about the topic. Now back to the original why.

The why you might want Email for your blog is pretty easy - You want to be able to let your readers know when you have made an update. Sure, they could visit your site to check if there is an update, they could even subscribe to your RSS feed. The Reality is that everyone checks their email and if you send a snippet from your sit you give them a reason to come back.

Now we know the why we would want to use email marketing to promote our blogs, lets look at the How. This is where Zookoda comes into play. They have developed an email subscription system that is just perfect for Bloggers. They take care of the managing of subscriptions via email and provide you with all the tools to easily prepare and send out the email to your subscribers.

While the FAQ answered most of my questions, I decided if I was going to review what they offer that I would need to sign up. The sign-up process is straight forward, you fill in a form, click the confirm link in an email, then get your login details in another email. Once logged in, you are presented with a comprehensive control panel and everything presented in the FAQ makes more sense. I think that if they had a couple of Control panel screenshots as part of the FAQ it would really show you what you can do.

From the Control panel, you can follow the instructions and start creating your mailing lists. You do everything from here, from creating, managing and tracking your email marketing of your Blog. The best thing about this is that it is totally free. Yes, it costs you nothing to set it up and try it out for yourself.

Visit www.zookoda.com

Technorati Tags: Zookoda

… is not just about the words. Have you ever stopped to consider the typeface/font that the message is written in and how it affects the overall message? Well you are probably like me in that respect - almost taking the font used for granted. I tend to use only a small number of different fonts myself, as long as they look ok and are easy to read they are generally good enough.

Well that was Until I took a look around at Urban Fonts and discovered what they have. They have a heap of free fonts that you can download, along with even more fonts you can buy. Once you download one of their fonts then you need to install it to be able to use it. Well, it took a bit of digging, but I eventually found the link to their FAQ in the welcome message on the homepage and then noticed it was also in the footer. It clearly explains how to use the Fonts on both a Windows and Mac computer.

What I really like about Urban Fonts is their Font Blog. Yes, whoever would have thought that you could write about fonts! After reading a couple of posts, it was like a little look back at the History of various fonts. I must admit the info is fascinating. They also have a forum where you can ask questions and get help if you cannot find it anywhere else on the site.

The site itself has a bit of a web2.0 type of feel about it, With Green and Blue on white as the colour scheme. The Free font pages by default show you 12 different fonts per page by default. You can select to display up to 48 per page.

Visit www.urbanfonts.com

So what is it? is your site Invisible or is it E-Visible? Well, all sites start at the former and hope to get to the latter ASAP and of course, not everyone has the know-how to go from invisible to e-visibile. E:visibility can help you get your website seen and found online with a crafted SEO campaign. The first thing that I noteced about their website was the chance to sign up and get a free Report on your website. They provide a SEO assesment and even a competitor analysis.

The E:Visibilty homepage is very clear on the services that they offer - it is right there on the homepage. You can find out about SEM (Search engine Marketing) which is a paid Search campaign and Organic Search (SEO) just to name a couple. I had a quick read thru their offerings and went back to the homepage. As I don’t have a website that is the face of a company or even a website that sells anything that needs to get targetted traffic I looked around for what else their site offerred.

What I found was their SEO Blog and even though it only has a few posts, I was quite impressed with the content. The posts clearly explained some SEO terms and concepts that I had not actually seen explained that way before. The content of the blog seemed to me thatthe writer definatley knows quite a lot about SEO and SEM. The good info didn’t stop at their blog, there are also a good collection of great SEO Articles. The articles were grouped together and presented in a way that made sense.

The amount and quality of free info that is provided on the E:Visibility website gives me confidence that they would be a company that I would put on my short list when looking for an SEO company. I would request a free report and see what they recommended as part of my evaluation of their offerings.

Visit www.evisibility.com

Do you run a company? Are you a Senior IT Executive?If you answered Yes and have a little bit of free time then  you may be interested in participating in a Survey.  Executive Platform is an online community of Business decision-makers.  The community participates in surveys and in recognition for participation, earn points.  The points can be exchanged for either executive gifts.

Now, why would an executive want to actually go and participate in a survey?  Well there are many reasons, and one of them is this - by participating, not only do you earn points but you also get access to some other important data for your company.  You are able to get a benchmark of your company v’s competitors, and also satisfaction Surveys.  The information you can get by participating can be invaluable to help you grow and improve your business.

It costs nothing to join, just a bit of time to complete the surveys, and you can choose how many and which surveys you complete.  Not everyone will be able to join - you must meet a certain criteria in order to participate - this is not something for someone running a small business from home.

Visit www.execplatform.net

For anyone planning to travel around Europe on a budget you wil want to try and find the cheapest arline tickets you can.  Now, in a market like Europe there is around 50 different Airlines in the budget category to choose from.  Now, to try and find where each airline flies to and from would be a real headache and take forever if it was not for a site like low cost airline guide find the cheap flights could take you weeks.

These guys are not trying to sell you a ticket on any airline, they are just trying to make it easy on you and give you a short list of which companies fly on the low cost airline routes around Europe.  How it all works is really quite simple and clever.  First, you simply choose your origin city, then select a destination.  Then, all the budget airlines who service that route will pop up.  By short-listing the airlines for a chosen journey, you can then simply pop over to their website and do your bookings (of course after you have checked out the prices of all on offer for that route).

Once again, I have found a site that won’t win any beauty contests, but what it provides is brilliant! - It is simple and fast to use and when you are looking for something in particular this is a good thing!  The site is focussed on making it easy to find cheap airlines and it does it very well.  They have even gone to the trouble to have the site translated into 7 other languages as well.  For a market such as Europe, they have researched their intended audience and made sure as many people as possible are able to use their site.

Even if you have no intention of ever travelling around Europe, take a look at the site.  A Great no-frills site that makes it easy to find cheap airlines.

Visit http://www.low-cost-airline-guide.com/

If you are even remotely like me, you shop for the best deal you can get.  One of the ways to get a great deal is by using coupons. The Keep Ca$h site is a great place to find online coupons.  A lot of the bigger Online stores often provide Coupon Codes as an incentive to get people to shop with them.  Coupons can be for all sorts of Items and for all sorts of amounts.  I must admit I didn’t know that you could find things like 20% off Plus free shipping codes.  I just picked this as an example from one of the current offers on the front page!

Of course, when buying some big ticket Items, a coupon could save you a small fortune.  Another current offer will get you $1000 - Yes, $1000 off the price of a Plasma TV.  Are you convinced yet?  I just wish I got $1K off the price of My Plasma!  It is worth your while when considering any purchase to do a quick search for a coupon - it may save you afrom a few $$ to a lot of $$.

Now, the website is styled as web 2.0 - bold colours, big text, rounded corners, simple layout and easy to use.  If you have never used a coupon before, the help section is really good at explaining the what and how.  I think that too many sites that provide an online service forget that their visitors may not understand what they are offering or how to use it.  The Help and FAQ is well written and easy to understand. They get a big plus for this.

You can easily browse all of the deals available by store or use the search to find coupons for a particular item.  The search is fast and comprehensive.  Well, we just typed in “plasma” and got a list of a couple of pages to browse thru.  The search results are ordered by the date they were added under each store.  There were offers added today, so you can almost be guaranteed if you find an offer it will be valid.  If you just want to stay on top of deals, you can sign up and get a weekly newsletter with all the new deals in it.

Visit www.keepcash.com