Ten years ago on September 2005 we opened the Joomla designs website. On the 15th January 2015 we made the decision to change the websites name and domain to Energizethemes.com which was one of the biggest and most difficult decisions we have made in the history of running the website.
Moving an established website to a new domain is never an easy decision. You need to consider so many variables when moving to a new domain including branding, social media, communication about the new domain name to existing customers and partner websites, search engine optimization to ensure the rankings in Google, Bing, Yahoo get transferred from the old domain to the new domain plus you also need to think about the technical requirements about moving domain which we won't go into in this blog post.
All we can say to anyone thinking about changing domain name is that it requires a lot of planning, testing and research. It can be very stressful but it is also a great leaning experience and at the same time very exciting and challenging experience.
Optimizing the images you include at your website is a great way to improve the overall speed of your website. Images weather they are in JPEG, PNG or GIF format which have not been compressed for the web can really slow your website down and have a serious impact on the web visitors user experience at speed of the website.
With more and more people visiting websites using smart phone and tablet devices on mobile connections it has become even more imporant to compress the size of the images you publish to your website.
We have put together a colection of online image optimization tools which are free and easy to use which can compress the file size of JPEG, GIF and PNG images by up to 50% without degrading the quality of the original image.
We understand you can achieve some great compression rates using Photoshop or RIOT and other 3rd party software. This blog post will only focus on online tools which do not require the installation of any software. As long as you have access to the internet and web browser you can use one of the free tools included in this blog.
The latest version of Joomla 3.5 makes use of PHP 7 which can give your website a major speed boost. A large number of web hosting companies now support PHP 7 and it’s pretty easy to enable this version of PHP via Cpanel. This tutorial will show how to make your website go super fast by taking advantage of the new performance enhancements incorporated into the latest version of PHP 7
Step 1: Upgrade to the latest version of Joomla 3.5
Before you enable php 7 via cpanel you first need to upgrade the website to latest version of Joomla 3.5.
A good web site in 2016 is all about providing the best and most relevant content to users across multiple devices including desktop, tablet and smartphones.
Web designers looking to succeed this year should follow the guide lines outlined below to preform a website health check to improve the websites they create in 2016.
Improve the visual content
With the massive growth in tablet and smartphone devices allowing more people to access the web, and more often, you need to provide content that automatically adapts to the users device plus is visually striking on the users device. Your content must grab people’s attention straight away with great images and you will give yourself the platform to retain guests.
Responsive Design
Given the range of devices that people use to access the internet, it is essential that you have a responsive website. This will boost your search engine rankings, it will improve the user experience and it will save time and effort in updating your site, so make sure that your website is responsive. We have designed a number of responsive Joomla templates which are great for building mobile friendly websites.
There is a growing trend of websites offering high quality free stock photos released under the creative commons licence which means you can copy, modify, distribute and use the photos for free in personal and commercial projects. This gives both designers and website owners a lot more freedom and flexibility to include images in the designs they create or in articles people publish at their website.
Some of the high resolution images available for download at the websites do come with some restrictions but a majority of them are free to use for personal or commercial use. The other great thing about the websites included in this article is that they get updated all the time so you can always find something new each time you visit one of the websites.
We don't normally write blog posts about security updates for Joomla but on this occasion we feel it's important to make people aware of a critical security vulnerability in all versions of Joomla 1.5, 2.5 and 3.4. An update was released by the Joomla project team on 21/12/2015 which fixes the security vulnerability in all versions of Joomla 1.5, 2.5 and 3.4.
The update resolves the following issues
High Priority - Core - Remote Code Execution (affecting Joomla 1.5 through 3.4.5) More information
Low Priority - Core - CRSF Hardening (affecting Joomla 3.2.0 through 3.4.5) More information.
Low Priority - Core - Directory Traversal (affecting Joomla 3.2.0 through 3.4.5) More information.
Low Priority - Core - Directory Traversal (affecting Joomla 3.4.0 through 3.4.5) More information
You can read the official announcements by visiting
Freelance web designers need to work effectively and they want value for money in everything they do. We have put together a list of 10 must have tools for web designers which you may find useful to help get more out of your day. We hope you find this article useful and if we have missed any anything let us know and we will be happy to add it to the blog post.
Affinity
If you like the idea of Photoshop but can’t afford the price, this is the app for you. Affinity has a similar layout and feel to Photoshop but it offers plenty of features, tools and non-destructive layers that can be easily adjusted. At the price, it’s a bargain and a great addition.
If you are continually being asked by clients to share website and app mockups, you know how time-consuming a task it can be. Using the Cloud Comp app is a really easy way to share this work with your clients, pleasing them and allowing you to focus on more important matters.
After many months of development the latest version of Joomla 3.7 has been released and is available for download.
The latest verison of the content management system comes with 700 new features, improvements, and updates.
Some of the key features and new improvements the development team and community have incorporated into Jomla 3.7 include the long waited Custom Fields feature, Multilingual Association component, enahnced TinyMCE editor, improved administrator and front end workflow prcesses and an enhaced user experience which makes managing a website much easier for administrators
If you don't have much money to host your Joomla website then a free hosting service could be the best option for you. Although free hosting services have limitations they can still provide you with everything you need to build a website. The number of companies offering free web hosting has increased and quality of the hosting has also improved. You also get less restrictions forced upon you including having to display advertisements on your website. However as with everything that’s free you will still have some limitations including the amount of disk space you get, bandwidth you can use and resources on the server you can use.
Good for testing out Joomla on a live server environment before committing to investing in a paid service.
Great for getting to know how Joomla works by building your first website on a free hosting service.
You only plan to run a small website which will use limited disk space, bandwidth and resources on the server.
It’s normally very easy to setup Joomla as the hosting company will provide the option to install the CMS via Cpanel.
Disadvantages of using a free web hosting service
The bottom line is paying customers will always come first. If you have a technical issue you may have to wait alot longer to get the problem resolved.
Limitations will be in place based on the server resources you can use including the amount of bandwidth, disk space, MySQL databases, sub domains, email accounts you can setup and use.
The website may not behave in the same way as it would by hosting the website on a paid plan.
Popup advertisements used by the company to subsidise the service may appear on your website.
You may have to use the company’s domain name in your website address.
The website may experience more downtime compared to a paid service.
The Joomla installers which are available to install via the hosting control panel can be outdated.
The list of advantages and disadvantages to support the case for free hosting could go on and on. Free web hosting is great for learning about and testing out Joomla to see what is has to offer. It’s also good for small websites and for people who don’t mind living with the limitations the service has to offer. However if you need support and want a stable environment to run your website then a free service may not be the right solution for you.
Whether you’re creating a new website or planning to update an existing website to give a fresh new look some good quality icons can make a big difference to the visual appearance of a website.
Applying a uniformed set of icons to your website is a great way of getting your message across to website visitors about the services or products you offer.
We have put together a list of 20 great looking free icon sets created by web designers cross the internet which can be used for any purpose. Whether your planning to create a business, travel, art of e-commerce website or any type of website you have in mind we are sure you will see an icon set included in this blog post which you can use to spice up your website.
All the icons included in this blog post are free to download and use for personal or commercial projects. They also come in vector, Photoshop or illustrator format so you can easily edit them if required.v
You can also find lots of great free icons created by some very talanted designers by visiting https://dribbble.com
The latest version of Joomla 3.5 was released on 21st March 2016. This blog post will outline some of the key features the developers have built into the latest version of the content management system. You can also find out more information by watching the 3.5 features video.
Support For PHP 7
One of the big selling points Joomla 3.5 has to offer is that it allows you to take advantage of the latest version of PHP 7. Don't worry you can still run your website on the current version of PHP 5.6 after you upgrade to version 3.5. However if the hosting company supports PHP 7 and you choose to enable it you will see some big improvements in the overall speed of your site.
One of the big benefits of running a website using PHP 7 is the performance improvements it has to offer. PHP 7 takes advantage of the new PHPNG engine which is basically a refactored version of the Zend Engine called Zend Engine II that’s uses the extensible object model and allows you to execute code much faster using less resources on the server.
We have put together a list of Joomla tips and tricks which we though you may find useful.
The tips and tricks included in this blog post are not intended for experts but for people just getting started with Joomla. Please also note the blog post does not cover everything, we have just picked out what we believe could be useful to you.
How do I Put my website in offline mode
Joomla gives you the option to put the website in offline mode. This feature is useful if your still developing the website and don't want to provide visitors with access to the website. You can still use all the functionality via the administrator area like creating menu items, categories, articles, installing extensions and so on. You can also see the changes you have made by logging into the front end of the website.
Select the System menu and Global configuration menu item.
Select the Site tab and you will the site offline option.
To take the site offline choose the Yes option.
You may also want to change the text which appears when people visit your website.
You can also upload your business or website logo.
