Remember when creating a professional logo was a huge production? You had to meet with a graphic designer, explain your concept and describe the look you wanted. It took time and effort and it cost from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars, depending on the designer, the quality and the concept.

Then the internet came, and new services were born to make our lives easier and the world truly flat. Services like Elance.com let you to submit a logo request — or any other project — and see dozens of designers bid on it from all over the world. You could choose the designer based on his or her portfolio, reviews and bidding price. When people from India and other developing countries joined the fun, the bids really started to fall. Now you could get a logo for $150-$500 easily. You could work with the designer until you got the design you want, and pay only when you were happy. Elance changed everything. Brilliant!

Fast forward a few years and 99designs.com has changed everything again by adding crowdsourcing to logo outsourcing. Dozens of designers don’t simply bid on your logo project, they actually create the logo for you. For $200 you get over 50 logos to choose from. You’re not stuck with one designer who may or may not do a good job and you know exactly what you’re getting. You can even set the project so that designers can’t see what others are doing, and have to come up with their own ideas.

I’ve found that 99designs.com is perfect not just for logo creation but also with the concept. I’ve always found the idea stage the hardest so why not let a few dozen designers do this for you? Just tell them about your business or site and let them struggle for an idea.

Within a few days, you will see designs starting to roll in but wait until the week is over to get them all. The best often come at the end! Look for logos that are clean, simple and powerful. If you see something that comes close, just ask the designer to tweak it for you. They’ll be happy to make the changes.

Here are some logos I ordered through 99designs.com. As you can see, the quality is excellent.

Logos created by 99designs designers

And now another player has joined the game. Fiverr.com is a highly entertaining site that allows users to say what they would do for $5. You are not going to believe what people will do for a fiver. Some of those things are very bizarre.

But some are logos. I ordered a few logos from Fiverr and got a mixed bag. Some were pretty good. Others were… well, what you might expect for five dollars.

But hey, it’s only five bucks so you’re not losing much if you don’t like it.

I ordered a few logos from Fiverr and got a mixed bag. Some were pretty good. Others were… well, what you might expect for five dollars.

If branding is super important to you, then Fiverr is not the right choice; stick with 99designs.com and Elance. However, if you need a logo and budget is more important than branding, then the Fiverr crowd might just be enough. The risk is minimal!

Who is creating your logos? How much do you usually pay? Would you consider any of these services?

Knowing where your module positions are located is one of the most fundamental things you need to know when creating a site with Joomla 1.7, however, for some reason it’s not as easy to find as you would think. It was evident in the Joomla 1.7 usability testing I performed a few weeks ago. The tester simply couldn’t find it. Nor could I. I figured I would be able to do it on Joomla 1.7 relatively easily, but I had to hear about it from John Coonen from CMS Expo.

It was not easy to figure out in Joomla 1.5 but at least it was available as a default value. On Joomla 1.7 you’d have to purposely activate this feature to even see it.

Watch this video that explains how to find the module positions on Joomla 1.7:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Or read this explanation:

• Go to extensions-> templates
• Switch to templates tab
• Click on Options button on top right
• Choose “Enable” on the “Preview Module Position” field
• Save

Now you will see a preview link next to the template thumbnail.

A simple solution:

A simple solution to make things easier for everybody would be to add a preview link next to the “choose position” button, this way it is much easier to find.

Place a link to the site preview with module positions right where the user selects a module position

Did you bump into this issue? How did you find the solution?

iJoomla Speed Check Module

Want to know how fast your site really is? Our new Speed Check module will tell you. Just install it into your Joomla site to see your page load time. It’s a quick, simple — and free — way to find out if your Joomla website is slow.

And you do need to know your site’s speed. Google recently announced that your Joomla loading speed will be a deciding factor in calculating your page rank.

You know that a high placement on search engines is absolutely essential to your website’s success. There’s little point in having a beautiful, well-designed website if nobody can find it.

And we’re dedicated to helping you reach the top of those placements. That was why we released iJoomla SEO, a tool that helps you optimize your website for search engines and monitor your keywords on Google. It’s been a huge success, helping thousands of Joomla website owners over the last couple of years save time and win better rankings on search engines.

We’ve now decided to allocate some of the profits from iJoomla SEO to develop free SEO tools for the Joomla community. This Speed Check module is our first.

Put Your Site Speed First

Site speed is often an afterthought in the development process. It needs to be front and center. Our new module allows you to stay on top of your site’s speed, so that if it’s too slow, you can do something about it.

And there’s always something you can do about it.

In “5 Ways to speed up Joomla and Make Your Site Faster,” our SEO expert Matt King has provided some invaluable tips to help you speed up and optimize your Joomla site. It will make a huge difference in how much love Google gives you.

Designed for Your Site

You can control the colors of every element of the module, including the border color, background color, text color and “provided by” color, to make them work with your site’s design.

If you prefer that your visitors won’t see the module, you can also select “special” as the access level. You’ll have to be logged in as admin on the front end to see your speed.

You can control every color in the module

How to use iJoomla Speed Check

1. Download it here
2. Unzip the file.
3. Choose a version (Joomla 1.5 or Joomla 1.6) and unzip that file again.
4. Install the module and plugin.
5. Publish the plugin.
6. Publish the module.

Why should I speed up Joomla?

Google recently announced that it uses your Joomla loading speed as a deciding factor on where your page ranks in the SERPS, (search engine results). Site speed has generally been more of an after thought to most people, but now it needs to be front and center in your development cycle. It’s pretty embarrassing having a terrific site, but having to wait 12 seconds for it to load. In this article we will discuss how to measure your Joomla speed and 5 tips on how to make it faster.

Measure your Joomla speed. Get a baseline

Make Joomla as fast as a bullet

There are lot’s of tools to measure your Joomla speed. Make sure you are consistent and use the same one throughout your testing.

• iJoomla now has a free module you can install in your Joomla site to instantly display your page load time. You can grab it here. It is free for anybody and a quick an simple way to find out if Joomla is slow.
• Another option is to add an additional line to your Google Analytics tracking code. You can find out more info about this here if you are comfortable with making this change.
• An option directly from Google is to use the page speed testing tool. Be warned though, it will use a lot of technical terms.
• Yet another option is to become familiar with the tools at Pingdom.com. They are a terrific website monitoring company that can provide you with all sorts of info about your site.

You may ask yourself, “Well how fast should my site load?” That’s a tough question to answer. Everybody will be different. If you use the Google pagespeed tool they will assign you a number. Take that number. Anywhere from 1-100, with 100 being the best. Strive to get as close to 90+ as possible.

1) Speed up Joomla by compressing your images better

One of the easiest things to do is make sure your images are optimized for the web properly. Avoid using huge, slow loading images. Optimize the size of the images you wish to use in Adobe Fireworks for the highest compression, with the least image degradation. Photoshop will work, but it is not the right tool for the job. Fireworks just compresses better. (Learn more about why Fireworks is a better option for image compression. )
Above all, never, NEVER, upload a 1200×1200 pixel image, and resize it using html or css. The huge full sized image will load, but just get resized on the fly by the server. Multiply that by a 100 or so visitors and your server is overloaded and about to go offline and of course turn your Joomla speed to mush.

Please make with the squishy-squishy for your images

2) Extensions, scripts, bloat

Joomla allows you to install an almost infinite amount of extensions and plugins and tools in seconds. The problem is all of these have been developed by individuals who may not share the same coding practices as the Joomla core team. One component might use jQuery 1.0 with is 19kb, one nifty gallery might use jQuery 1.5, but sends it to you uncompressed so it is 208kb, your forum might be using MooTools, (but not the one in Joomla) and thats another 180kb. Then some other wiz-bang of an extension has some .js that is 248kb. Before you know it you have 10 different types of frameworks being loaded on EACH PAGE LOAD. That is huge code bloat and will bring your server to it’s knees, as well as make page load times incredibly slow.
When installing a Joomla component you cannot always go for the fanciest or prettiest or nifty-ish, you need to factor in what javascript it uses as well. If you are clever, you can do all the cool things you need, and load only a small amount of .js and save yourself loads of headaches.
If anything, you need to decide if you really need that cool toy on your site, or if you simply put it there for eye candy. Ideally, keep the amount of .js to five and under. One is ideal.

ZOMG! javascript overload!

3) Compress, compress, compress

In your Joomla configuration there is a setting called gzip compression. If it is not enabled, click it and save it. This will allow all the css and html to be compressed on the server and a much smaller packet of data get’s sent to your computer, and then uncompressed by your browser. This might seem like a lot of work, but it will make pages load faster.
(some webhosts have this enabled already on their servers. If enabling this setting in Joomla breaks your site, the chances are good it is already being compressed and you can just change it back. It’s not possible to do multiple compressions with gzip.)

zip-zip-zipity-zip it.

4) Anybody got any extra cache?

Caching can be enabled in your Joomla configuration. It takes frequently accessed items and stores them so it can spit them out at you faster. The upside, your pages load faster, the downside, your content is not always 100% fresh. For most sites this is no huge deal, unless you are changing articles every 30 mts or so, and if you are you have other issues outside of the scope of this article.
Save this tip for when your site is completed and ready to go live. If you enable this while you are still building your site, you will wonder why changes to pages or image are not taking effect and drive yourself bonkers.

All the cache in the world.

5) Does your webhost stink?

An often overlooked issue with slow Joomla loading websites is a poor webhost. Are you on a shared server? If so you are sharing your internet connection with hundreds of other websites. Where is your host located? Are you located in Florida and your webhost is in California? Did one of the sites on your shared host get hacked and use up tons of bandwidth? These are all questions you need to ask yourself. Is the 4.99 cheapie hosting really good enough when your page load times are in the double digits? If you have a desire to be a big site, with lot’s of traffic, you need a VPS or a dedicated server. Shared hosting is for n00bs.

hey, is the server offline?

Summary

By following some of these tips, not only will Google potentially rank you higher in their search engine, your visitors will have a much nicer experience. Your dad/mom/sister/buddy/neighbor might not be bothered by waiting 10 seconds for your site to load, but the people on the web need it now, or they will take their business some place else.

How about you?

Do you have any tips or tricks I didn’t cover? Let us know in the comments, we would love to hear from you.

If you’re selling software, eBooks, DVDs, CDs and even iPad apps or any digital product, you’ll need a 3D graphic in your marketing material. It’s the best way to let buyers feel that they’re purchasing something tangible and valuable.

A number of different plugins for Fireworks and Photoshop can create 3D graphics, but if you’re looking something both professional and easy, try MyeCoverMaker.com.

Select the Design

You can choose from almost 50 different designs to start your creation, including: Software Box Open Top, Open Book, Paperback Stack, DVD Case Open, iPad Vertical and CD Case Printed Disc.

You can choose from almost 50 different designs

Choose the Background

Once you’ve selected the design, you can choose a background or even upload your own and crop the section you’d like to use.

Select the background or upload your own

Crop the background

Add your Cover Details

With the background created, just add your text, insert clip art or upload your own images.

Insert your text. You can enter text more than once

Enter any other details and an image

Generate the 3D

Now the magic starts! With just one click of a button, this tool will generate the box for you. You will be amazed at how professional it looks.

With just one click of a button, this tool will generate the box for you

Pricing

• Some designs are free
• $9 per month
• $90 per year
• $5 per download

You can also try it for free without having to register — which is very cool.

What are you using to create your software and ebook covers?

Create a button like this easily!

My skill at creating graphics is pretty limited – perhaps to making smileys out of colons and brackets. But I do sometimes need to create awesome buttons for my Web pages. Buttons are important. They’re the links that people click to buy products so they need to be bold, beautiful and inviting. Designing them used to require either special skills or large design fees, but it can now be done using an online tool for the super-cool price of just $10 per year!

My favorite service is MyCoolButton.com. The site has a bunch of button generators in designs that range from Web2.0 through glassy to Apple and Windows styles. Just enter the text and choose your font, color and size. You’ve got all the flexibility you need.

Select your button generator

Select the shape

Select the color

Select the font and the text

Adding an Icon to Your Button

When creating a button, you can choose one of the many icons available or upload your own image and customize the button yourself.  Here’s some I created for a recent promotion, using Joe and Betty, the stars of our Ad Agency movie.

Our own Betty on a button!

Joe's button

MyCoolButton.com’s collection of icons include flags, social media, weather, functions and more.

When creating a button, you can choose one of the many icons available or upload your own image

Downloading Your Button

Once you’ve created the button, click it and you will be able to download it as a PNG file. Simple!

Creating iPhone icons

iPhone app developers — or people who like the cool style of iPhone buttons — can use the site’s awesome iPhone button generator. Here are some examples:

Create iPhone apps buttons easily

What are you using to create your buttons?

Social media buttons have made spreading the word about your website easier than ever. Users love the “like”, “share” and “tweet” buttons because they can easily recommend Web pages to their friends, family and followers. Website owners love them because they get free exposure and incoming links.

Users love the “like”, “share” and “tweet” buttons

So how does it work? Just place the social buttons on your Joomla website. When users click them, they’re taken to the social media site (usually Facebook or Twitter) where they can post the link and even add a few words about the article. Their friends and followers can see the link and click through to the site. Brilliant!

Get free traffic with social media

There are two ways to add social buttons to your Joomla site:

Use a module

If you want to promote the entire site, rather than specific articles, you can install a Joomla social bookmarking module and place it “above the fold.” Your visitors won’t be able to miss it wherever they are on your site.

Use a plugin

If you want allow users to share specific articles, install one of the many available Joomla plugins that place social media buttons automatically on your articles. Some extensions even allow you to choose the sections and categories on which the plugin appears.

Here’s a video that explains how to add a social media module to your website. There are several available that work in roughly the same way, but PGT SocialWeb is my favorite.

Adding a social media module to your Joomla site:

Click here to view the embedded video.

This is how you do it:

1. Download and install the PGT SocialWeb module.
2. Go to Module Manager.
3. Filter by pgt.
4. Open the module and change the title.
5. Disable the title and enable the module.
6. On the right, hide all the buttons except for “share” and “tweet.”
7. Select “home page” as the URL.
8. Save/Apply.

Adding a social media plugin to your Joomla site:

To use a plugin that allows users to share specific articles, download any of the Joomla Social bookmarking plugins. You can find a full list here.

Do you use social bookmarking on your Joomla site? What’s your favorite module/plugin?

You know, we work endlessly to fix bugs and add new features and enhancements to your iJoomla products, but not everyone knows about these upgrades. That’s a shame because they always bring a real improvement to the extension’s function and usability. Now there is a new, super-easy way to keep your iJoomla Extensions up to date!

iJoomla Upgrade Alert Plugin – FREE

iJoomla Upgrade Alert is a simple plugin that displays an alert each time an upgrade is available. When the alert shines red in the right corner, click the link to see a list of all the iJoomla Extensions installed. Extensions which can now be upgraded will be highlighted in red, and you’ll be able to see the version to which you should upgrade. You will also see a link to the change log and to the download page. How cool is that?

To use the plugin, just download it here, install it and publish.

When the alert shines red in the right corner, click the link to see a list of all the iJoomla Extensions installed

Extensions which can now be upgraded will be highlighted in red, and you’ll be able to see the version to which you should upgrade

iJoomla Extension News Plugin – FREE

The iJoomla Extension News Plugin shows what’s new in your iJoomla Extension. Through RSS feeds, you’ll be able to stay up to speed with all the latest developments. After all, we don’t want you to miss any cool new features or important upgrades!

You’ll be able to learn about the latest:

• Extension News
• Change log
• Video tutorials
• General iJoomla News
• iJoomla Blog

To use the plugin, just download it, install and publish it. The news tab will appear on each of your iJoomla extensions automatically.

Through RSS feeds, you’ll be able to stay up to speed with all the latest developments. After all, we don’t want you to miss any cool new features or important upgrades!

Here’s a video that explains how to download, install and use these plugins:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Almost as satisfying as sticking your tongue out at Facebook

I’ve been bitching about the Facebook user experience for a while now, and things just seems to be getting worse. Maybe it’s the Law of Attraction: the more you focus on something, the bigger it gets.

Now Facebook has rolled out a new mailbox feature that is so flawed it will require its own blog post. In the meantime though, I want to share with you an incredible tool that’s almost as satisfying as sticking your tongue out at Facebook – and a lot more effective.

I wrote about Facebook’s usability issues some time ago. The main issue with Facebook is the enormous amount of garbage and uninteresting information that rolls through the stream on your home page. It shows everything from who joined which group, to who friended whom, and who scored how much in what networking game.

But I don’t want to know that stuff. All I really want to know is what my friends are saying or posting. I want to see their status updates, the links they want to share, and the videos they recommend. I don’t want to know how their farm is doing.

Facebook home stream shows everything from who joined which group, to who friended whom, and who scored how much in what networking game

So when Facebook added a filter to the top of the stream page, I was a very happy social networker… until I saw it in action. It lets you show only status updates or only photos, or only links, from everybody or a certain group. That should be great. But it isn’t.

I don’t need to show only one thing at a time and I don’t want to have to filter to see it. I want to choose what I see and what I don’t see! If I don’t want to see who befriended whom, I should be able to simply check a box and hide that information.

I don’t need to show only one thing at a time and I don’t want to have to filter to see it

The Solution: F.B. Purify Plugin

So after my last post regarding the most annoying Facebook behaviors, a few readers suggested I try  www.fbpurity.com. It doesn’t fix all Facebook’s usability disasters, but it does make the experience A LOT nicer!

FB Purity is a browser plugin that seamlessly cleans up your Facebook interface. You can install it on Firefox,  Google Chrome,  Safari and  Opera but not on Internet Explorer —another good reason to abandon this horrible browser!

Once installed, just open Facebook and… hey presto! You’ve got a clean stream. Even the ads on the right are gone! No more ads for “serious adult singles” for me.

And it’s easy to roll back. If you happen to miss all that garbage information or if you’re worried someone might have beaten your Mafia score, you can always click “show” to display those posts. If you still want to see which groups your friends join, that’s not a problem.

It’s easy to roll back. Just click on the "show" links, to see what you're missing

Clicking the F.B. Purity link allows you to control exactly which information to show and which to hide: a real dream come true! Your stream – your control!

Clicking the F.B. Purity link allows you to control exactly which information to show and which to hide

I highly recommend that you install this plugin today, and start enjoying some relief from all that Facebook noise and clutter. Live long a clutter-free Facebook stream!

That still leaves the question though of why this feature isn’t part of Facebook. Why do we need to install a plugin to control our pages.

Have you tried FB Purity? What do you think about it? What would you want to add to it?

Any site that sells products or services needs a testimonial page. Those personal accounts and recommendations give your site credibility and increase your ROI.

The best testimonials you can post are video testimonials

The best testimonials you can post are video testimonials. If you host events or meet clients, take a video recorder with you, even if it’s just your iPhone or a Flip cam. Before your clients leave the event, ask them to speak about your product or service and record their comments. The clip doesn’t have to be perfect but try to find a quiet corner with a solid background that’s not too busy.

Post the recording on your YouTube channel and  be sure to give it a good title description, something like: “iJoomla Ad Agency Testimonial and Review.” The title will help people who are looking for testimonials about your product to find them.

Once your video testimonial is on YouTube, you can easily post it on your site. Because that testimonial is one of the most compelling arguments for selling your product, I recommend putting it in a module position above the fold.

Adding a YouTube video testimonial to your Joomla site:

There are many ways you can add a YouTube video your Joomla website. You can download an install a Joomla YouTube video from ‘corePHP’, this module costs $7. Another great option is to use a component called Jumi. Jumi is a handy little extension that comes with a module that allows you to dump any code in it so you won’t risk your HTML editor stripping out important code.

How to add a video testimonial using Jumi:

• Download Jumi
• Install Jumi
• Go to Main Menu and unpublish the Jumi “hello world” menu item. (Jumi developers should really consider not overwriting our default menu item!)
• Go to extensions -> module manager
• Filter with the word “Jumi”
• Open the module and change the title to “Video testimonial”
• Enter the video embed code on the right
• Publish and save module
• Depending on the module position you’ve chosen you may have to resize the YouTube video by changing the width and height inside the embed code

Jumi allows you to dump any code into a module

So that’s how you can put a video testimonial on your site. But it’s much easier to get people to write a testimonial than to talk to a camera and you don’t always have access to your customers offline. If you can’t get a video testimonial, a written testimonial can work well too — ideally with a real full name, website URL and, most importantly, a photo. These give the testimonial much more credibility than text alone.

Adding written testimonials to your Joomla site

The simplest way to do this with core Joomla is:

• Create a new category called “testimonials”
• Add articles with the testimonials to the category
• Create a menu item to link to the list of testimonials in “category blog” style

It’s a method that’s simple and it works, but it’s not great because there is no easy way to enter fields like name, website, and photo, etc.

Adding testimonials using RSMonials extension

Thankfully, there is a Joomla component that does allow you to publish testimonials perfectly and even lets visitors submit their own. It’s called RSMonials and it’s free. A big thanks to Grace from the OC Joomla Meetup where I gave a presentation a couple of weeks ago for introducing me to it!

I love this extension because it works beautifully and without any major bugs. It’s pretty basic but it does the work, and any Joomla beginner can use it without too much difficulty. It comes with a component, a module and a testimonial scroller. If you want your testimonials to show without scrolling, install the regular module. If you want them to scroll, you’ll need to install that module.

RSMonials CPanel

Here’s how to get it up and running:

• Download RSmonial
• Install the  component
• Install the module or the scroller module
• Create a new menu item and link it to RSmonials
• Open the settings page and configure your testimonials (don’t forget to replace the admin email!)
• Publish the scroller module

Testimonial Page Created With RSMonials

A list of testimonials will appear on the testimonials page linked from your menu. The testimonials will be ordered by newest first and have a submit form at the bottom. Customers can send in their own testimonials and you can choose to auto-approve them.

You can easily make any changes to the styling and settings.

This is a great extension but it does come with a number of advantages and disadvantages:

Pros:

• Free.
• Easy to install.
• Works well.
• Scrolling testimonials are very appealing.
• Submit testimonial feature is very useful and even asks for a photo.

Cons:

• No way to re-order the testimonials. However you can change the posting date if you want to have control over which testimonials show on top.
• Many of the settings require me to type in “true” or “false” instead of choosing from a drop down menu.
• No way to hide submit date.
• When tested, I didn’t receive notification of a new testimonial.

We have installed it on iJoomla Ad Agency and we’re very happy with it. You can see it here with a scrolling testimonial on the left:

http://adagency.ijoomla.com/testimonials/

Do you have a testimonial page on your Joomla site? If so, how did you create it?