Business Directory site in Joomla 1.5 launched

Joomla.in launches the Business Directory project using Joomla 1.5. Emaratonline.biz is a business-to-business and business-to-consumer portal for UAE and MENA region. The objective is to be one of the primary facilitator of business within UAE and MENA region and around the globe.

A custom design was created for the portal with professional look and feel. The portal features business directory, free and paid membership subscription, business offers, notice board, discussion forum, members chat, business recources, career section for resume upload and job search and other interactive features.

Custom 404 page in Joomla 1.5

Joomla 1.5 has a default 404 error page which is devoid of the main website theme. It looks something like this:

In SEO perspective, the website should have a 404 error page with proper links to the site. According to Google SEO guide, avoid using a design for your 404 pages that isn’t consistent with the rest of your site.

To change the default 404 error page in Joomla 1.5 is quite easy. Just follow these easy steps:

Create a normal article with some message to the users who have arrived on the error page. Publish this article as a menu item and grab the URL for the article. It will be like:

http://www.joomla.in/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=122

Now you need to edit the file which contains the code for 404 error page in Joomla. Open the file templates/system/error.php in any editor. Just below this line: defined( ‘_JEXEC’ ) or die( ‘Restricted access’ ); add the following code:

if (($this->error->code) == ’404′) {
header(‘Location: ‘ . $this->baseurl .’index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=122′);
exit;
}
?>

Replace the old error.php file with this one.

Now you can open any non-existent URL on your website like http://www.domainname.com/non-existent-url.html and you will find that the custom error page has opened.

Managing Page Title with Joomla 1.5

Proper Page titles are considered as one of the important constituents of onsite SEO. Basically, the page title should be comprised of proper keywords related to that specific web page. Lot of websites till today use their company name as the page title for all the pages of the website. It’s not advisable to use only your business name in the page title, unless it is the only keyword for visitors to search for.

Now in Joomla 1.0, the Page Title was populated automatically based on the title of the content page. In Joomla 1.5, there is an option for managing the Page Title so that it can be made different from the title of the content page. For this follow these easy steps:

1. Create a content page
2. Add a menu item “Article” and attach that content page with it.
3. On the menu item detail page, click open the Parameters (System) from the right sidebar.
   
   
   
4. Add your Page Title here and it can be different from the title of the content page.

PS: Do not make the mistake of stuffing the Page Title with unneeded keywords. Too many keywords lessen the significance of page title. According to Google SEO guide for Page Title:

• Accurately describe the page’s content
• Create unique title tags for each page
• Use brief, but descriptive titles