Webmasters,  especially novice webmasters are always looking for quicker ways to update and maintain their websites without the need to code in HTML or a scripting language.  One of the solutions is CMS (Content Management System). A member of Webmaster Forum puts a beginners guide to one of the most popular open source CMS on the market today; Joomla.

Excerpts from his post below, you can read the full post at the  begginers webmaster forum.

The basic Joomla! package is designed to be easy to install, even for non-programmers. Most people have no trouble getting our software up and running, and there is plenty of support available for newbies. We have a growing, active community of more than 40,000 friendly users and developers on our forums eager to help.

Once Joomla! is installed and running, it is simple for even non-technical users to add or edit content, update images, and to manage the critical data that makes your company or organization go. Anybody with basic word processing skills can easily learn to manage a Joomla! site.

Via a simple, browser-based interface you will be able to easily add new press releases or news items, manage staff pages, job listings, product images, and create an unlimited amount of sections or content pages on your site. You can try our simple demo to get quick taste of what Joomla! is all about.

Sometime, actually most of the time you do not need a degree in rocket science to do the necessary things required to get your website well ranked in search engines. In a post giving ten of the basic optimisation you need to carry out on your website, Temi Odurinde give beginners tips needed optimise their website, a few of the tips are given below, you can read the full list at webmaster forums

The line between web design and search engine optimisation and search engine marketing are blurring all the time. A good web designer must know the basics of search engine optimisation and a good search engine optimisation consultant must know the basics of web design.

Search engine optimisation (SEO) refers to the process of optimising Web sites and Web pages to rank well in search engines. It is called a natural search result when a web page comes up in the main search engine listings.

A different way of getting into search engine results is a pay-per-click system. When a user performs a search the results contain sponsored listings, which are related to the keywords used. They are usually above or to the right of the free listings. As the name suggest you have to pay for a pay-per-click system.

Search indexes or search engines are the predominant type of search tools. Large search engines use software known as spiders or robots to grab Web pages and read the significant part of the information stored in them. Based on this information they run complex algorithms to index what they found. Search sites known as meta indexes allow you to search through multiple indices.

A number of smaller indexes do not user spiders to examine the full content of the page. They rather pull off information from the meta tags or use the information provided by the person who enters the site into the index.

Search directories collect the information transmitted by the site owner and categorise the data. In contrary to a search index it does not contain information from web pages, but information about web pages.

Search sites let you search through an index or directory, but they might not have their own search system and use external results. Only search systems build an index or directory. Google and the Open Directory Project provide search results to many search sites.

More useful search engine optimisation articles can be found at webmaster forums :: you can subscribe to webmaster forum RSS feeds here

New webmasters tends to ask very important questions that experienced webmasters tends to forget how difficult such matters can be for new webmasters. A young webmaster recently found creating robots.txt file a challenging task, so a simple rough and ready robots.txt file was created for the young webmasters, here is a what a robots.txt file should contain for the benefits of those who may need some info on robots.txt

# robots.txt for www.SiteName
User-agent: *
Disallow:

The robots.txt above allows all robots to index all parts of your site, here is what you need to do if you want robots to leave some parts of your site alone. On the third like which says “Disallow:”  just add the folder you wish robots to leave a alone, lets say you cgi-bin folder, just add this:
/cgi-bin/

so the new robots.txt that allows robots to every part of your website except the cgi-bin folder would look like this:

# robots.txt for www.SiteName
User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/

 O’Reilley is with coining the word Web 2.0, he is regarded as one of the foremost Internet thinkers, hot on his heels is UK Webmaster forums member Marketraise who published his manifesto for Web 3.0 a few but recently followed that up with a Web 4.0 manifesto, excerpts from Marketraise Web 4.0 manifesto follows.

I had previously posted articles on web 2.0 and web 3.0.The responses were quite similar.When I posted with web 2.0 the response was web 2.0 is finished and web 3.0 is in trend. When I posted on web 3.0 the response was web 4.0 is the current brand in software. This meandering article doesn’t really offer much in terms of defining what these various Web stages are.
I’ll give it my shot:
Web 1.0 was the Hypertext/CGI Web. (the basics)
- Web 2.0 is the Community Web (for people: apps/sites connecting them).
- Web 3.0 is the Semantic Web (for machines).
Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 are a fork we are moving into now, where one is focused on internet architectures for people/community/usability and the other is focused on internet architectures for machines.

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