BlogSmall business, Marketing, Promotion and Web Design

Yeah, somebody had to brag about how good we are, why don’t I do it myself

A very good friend of mine asked if I can help him set up some Football (as in soccer) Team Manager web sites for two leagues he’s in. Needless to say I was eager to help and within days both http://swisswifa.com and http://www.portrfm.com were set up thanks to the folks that develop Joomla and Mambo content management systems.

Basically both systems still bear very similar look, components and modules are still compatible with both (developers promise they’ll ruin that in Joomla version 1.1 due later this year), system can literally be set up in minutes and I never even imagined having enough time to see all the templates that were developed for Mambo/Joomla. In fact, at some point I was very tempted to use Mambo to run our own Zealus web site.

So far, both sites are running (in addition to core components) guestbook and comments components, admins are thinking of using some photo gallery, although I am not entirely sure as to what exactly they are going to put there.

On the subject of SEO (search engine optimization) – found very interesting conversation on one of the russian forums that discussed doorway making as opposed to “white” optimization methods for web site promotion. Basically, doorway making is considered “black” kind of a deal because it’s cheap, it’s fast, it’s effective and it messes up search engine output. “White” methods are just as effective, but slow, expensive and don’t mess up search engines’ output. In other words – the truth is somewhere in between, I suspect. Those, who need immediate results use cheaper and faster methods while more stable companies will use more expensive but more “stable” results.

Speaking of “more stable” results I recalled that some time ago the US Robotics web site was swarming with invisible text, invisible keywords, invisible links and other “dark side” stuff. Checked it today and the stuff has magically disappeared. Probably recent events with BMW.de played huge role in that…

Via LiveJournal found some fantastic looking web mail systems. Unfortunately out of three – one looks too much like default NeoMail skin, one needs its own web server and another one is still in early alpha (as it looks from Bugs page on SourceForge).

But look at the screenshots!

Zimbra: http://www.zimbra.com/products/screenshots.html

IlohaMail: http://ilohamail.org/main.php?page=ScreenShots

and my favorite – RoundCube: http://www.roundcube.net/?p=screens