Yellowbox Solutions

Mega Agent Real Estate

Ken Mitchell — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 01:00:19 +0000

Mega Agent Real Estate is a website for a group of real estate agents. It is used by clients to learn about the current trends in the housing market, as well as searching for properties. We coded the site in Joomla, though much of the real estate and property management is done by an external site which we integrated into it.

We enjoyed the challenge of integrating the many nodes on the front page into Joomla.

The great design was done by Julie at Anything Creative.

What is a Content Management System (CMS)?

Ken Mitchell — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 19:51:08 +0000

A website is made up of one or more web pages. Each web page is fetched by a web server (from either files, or databases, or some combination of the two), packaged into envelopes for traversal through the internet, and presented on your computer monitor by a web browser. A small website may consist of just a couple of web pages, each represented by a single file on the web server. But a typical website can quickly grow to dozens, or even hundreds of web pages. This would be nearly impossible to manage if each web page was a separate file. That’s where the CMS comes in.

The magic of a CMS involves some underlying technology that we will not go into (such as PHP and SSI). Instead of managing individual files, a CMS manages content. You input pieces of content into the CMS, and it presents the content on any number of web pages. A CMS is also (typically) database driven. This means that content, along with settings and other pieces of metadata, are kept in a database instead of individual files. The CMS will fetch the data from the database and display it in a predefined manner.

With a CMS, managing a full website is as easy as sending an email or creating a Word document. Instead of hiring someone to make changes to you web pages, you can do it. It also makes creating large websites more cost efficient. A CMS will also make changing site structure easy. For instance, if you once had a page called “Services” that listed every service you offered, and you decided you needed to separate “Services” into “Landscaping Services” and “Home Repair Services”, the CMS would make that possible without requiring a developer.

Captain’s Galley Seafood

Ken Mitchell — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 04:27:39 +0000

Captain’s Galley Seafood is a site based off of Joomla! CMS. We coded the template to Joomla! and custom coded the component that displays the menu.

The design is by Julie at Anything Creative.

Coastal Home Solutions

Ken Mitchell — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 04:20:08 +0000

Coastal Home Solutions is a site based off of Joomla! CMS. We coded the template to Joomla! and custom coded the component for displaying “Homes for Sale” and “Floor Plans”.

The design is by Julie at Anything Creative.

Crossville Dixie Youth

Ken Mitchell — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 02:39:50 +0000

Crossville Dixie Youth is a website used by a youth baseball league. The President of the Crossville Dixie Youth approached us about creating a website so that players and coaches could get up-to-date information on game and practice schedules, as well as parents downloading forms. The site was coded in the Joomla! CMS.

What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Ken Mitchell — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 21:35:17 +0000

What is Search Engine Optimization and why the big fuss over it? Well, Search Engine Optimization, or SEO as we call it, is taking a website and making it appealing to search engines. Now, that is obviously understating the complexity of it all, so let us dive in a little deeper.

When a user is searching for a service or product on the internet, they enter search terms or “keywords” into a search engine such as Google or Yahoo!. Search engines compare those keywords to an index of webpages and return results based on the ranking of each webpage for the keywords. This page of results is call the Search Engine Results Page, or SERP.

So how does this all fit together? Search engines display results in order of the most popular. Since roughly 80% of pageviews come from search engines, you want your pages to rank high. That is where SEO comes in. The purpose of SEO is to optimize a website or webpage for search engines in order to achieve higher ranking in the SERP. This is a complex game of cat and mouse as search engines are constantly changing criteria by which they rank pages. It’s no wonder that webmasters and owners of websites are turning to professionals to have their websites optimized for search engines.