I have had much experience with Joomla. Take a look at eNews Park Forest for a very complex, well-developed site created to provide news for residents of Park Forest, IL, and surrounding suburbs.

One of the best selling points of Joomla is that it is Open Source, free. You pay only for hosting and a domain name. If you ask a web designer to set up your site — and perhaps your should if you don’t know PHP and MySQL — you pay for time. This could run anywhere from three hours for a simple install to eight or ten hours for installations that are more complex and require more styling.

Joomla is very robust. You can do some incredible things with it, and you can do some incredibly boneheaded things with it.

Let me explain.

A base install of Joomla is very efficient, offering minimal drag on a MySQL server and code that is web compliant out of the box. So, you will start with a good PHP site and a solid MySQL database. If you go to Joomla.com, you will see there are many components and modules to add. Some of them are good, some of them are written using horrible code. These can break a site or cause many CPU-overloads which web hosts will complain about. There’s nothing worse than trying to open your site, only to see the words, “Account Suspended for CPU-Overload.”

Never, never, under any circumstances should you add a statistics counter to your Joomla installation, e.g. Joomlastats or BSQStats. They will horribly bloat your database and may cause CPU-overloads.

If you do add components that require you to change your template, e.g. add a CSS-include or some Javascript to your template, make sure you note this somewhere. If you remove the component, you’ll want to clean up your template so you don’t end up calling files that no longer exist.

That may sound like simple advice, but it’s easy to get lost with very large installations.

For more, I’d advise you to register at the Joomla Forum, start reading, asking questions, and experimenting.
One final piece of advice, I’d recommend setting up a backup site for every live site you install. It’s too easy to make a horrible mistake in Joomla (inserting a comma in the wrong place in your .htaccess or PHP.INI files, or in one of Joomla’s many PHP includes) and finding your site gone. This is even an uglier feeling than the Microsoft Windows infamous “Blue Screen of Death.” In these situations, you will see a blank white screen in your browser with a few lines offering minimal details about your PHP error. A good host can help you repair your mistakes, but it’s better to understand and learn what you did wrong.

All in all, however, Joomla is well worth the time investment.

Welcome aboard. Joomla’s a helluva ride.

I always add my own code to the CSS of any theme, but this one already appears to be very well put together.

Did you know that some people devote their entire domain to a blog?  Yes, it’s true, you can get free blogs at Blogspot.com and event at WordPress.com, the truth is, you get what you pay for.  You don’t have access to your CSS at those sites.  You’re essentially stuck with what you get.

Start a blog at Shire Enterprises!  Fully installed blogs start at only $150 plus the cost of domain registration and hosting.

Enough with the commercial.  Enjoy the new look.

That’s today’s magic number, and the magic number for all clients of Shire Enterprises, Inc. That’s our Dedicated IP at Bluehost.com, our preferred host.

What’s an IP? Our friends at Wikipedia have put this together:

An IP address (Internet Protocol address) is a unique address that certain electronic devices use in order to identify and communicate with each other on a computer network utilizing the Internet Protocol standard (IP)—in simpler terms, a computer address. Any participating network device—including routers, computers, time-servers, printers, Internet fax machines, and some telephones—can have their own unique address.

An IP address can also be thought of as the equivalent of a street address or a phone number (compare: VoIP (voice over (the) internet protocol)) for a computer or other network device on the Internet. Just as each street address and phone number uniquely identifies a building or telephone, an IP address can uniquely identify a specific computer or other network device on a network. An IP address differs from other contact information, however, because the linkage of a user’s IP address to his/her name is not publicly available information.

A dedicated IP address is not shared by other domain names; it is unique to your domain name and your space on the server.

The benefits to our clients are many. Among these:

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – For some reason, sites on a dedicate IP show do better in the search engines. There are quite a few things we do “behind the scenes” to make sure our web sites show up closer to the top of the rankings. For example, if you sell “widgets,” and who doesn’t, then what is to distinguish your site from any other if someone wants to buy “widgets” in your home town? So, someone goes to Google and does a query for, “Widgets in Park Forest.” A site that is properly optimized will show up before sites that are more poorly put together.
• Dedicated IP = Friendly IP: Many hosts allow so many sub-accounts on one IP , and some many be spammers. And an IP can get banned by various spam blockers because someone on that IP is unscrupulous, and if that happens to your IP, then your email (and all others on that IP) can get tagged by these organizations as Spam, and you then get your email blacklisted. It would be, if you have a small list of subscribers or depend on INCOME of a legitimate list. So your email would never be delivered.

These are just some of the ways we’re working to make Shire Enterprises the ultimate design and hosting experience for our customers.

If you read this message, we are at the new site, safely migrated.