Events, Happenings & Cool Stuff

In today’s world, it’s more effective to have a website that has some automation. I cannot say enough about Joomla, and it’s free! I hooked up Nichols Insurance Group in Lakeland with their own Joomla website.

Joomla does take a bit of tweaking to change the default template (which isn’t very attractive). This is where I come in. I encourage my clients to learn the back-end so they can easily add pages themselves (including pictures) so I set-up the framework, style it and make it search engine friendly (which is very important). The stock versions of Joomla are not friendly for search engines.

Nichols Insurance Website Almost Done

Here is just a few of Joomla Features:

• Your customers can easily create their own accounts, and you can keep any page you want private to the public. For example, if you look at the screen shot above you will see the get estimate widget for an insurance quote. If Nichol’s really wanted to, they could force people to create an account first and make it visible only when someone is logged in.
• Joomla has widget friendly sidebars so you can easily place Twitter, Facebook and other widgets in seconds just about anywhere on your website.
• Custom Google Maps have come a long way. Make it easy for your customers. Check out the demonstration here.
• Don’t spend thousands on a website when you can get this for a few hundred. Joomla can easily be restyled if you want a new look in the future, without compromising your search engine rankings. For more information, you can contact me here.

Be Sure To Customize Your Directions Page Like This

With Joomla, you can even add cool photo galleries like this!

As a trial, the tenants of Old Town Square in Lakeland Florida plan to build a strip mall blog to help promote each other. This is a great idea for all business owners, whether on not they have their own website.

Old Town Square Lakeland Florida

“The problem with most small business websites, they don’t have the content in them that a reader would link to” says Mike Annable, Co-Owner of PAWS Print & Web Solutions based out of Lakeland Florida. “Having quality links pointing to your website is hard to come by these days. This is a great way to promote your store and your website at the same time. If a strip mall of 10 stores all chipped in, they would have their own blog for $2.08 a month. This small price would include hosting for 2 years and a unique domain name. It’s a no brainer, really think about it.”  Mike’s fiancee’ Tracey adds, “For less than the price of 1 cup of coffee, we could all benefit.  If you do the math, it’s about $.07 a day, I find more than that doing the laundry!”

Search engine like Google, Yahoo and MSN love blogs with quality content. If every store posted “1″ blog entry every 10 days, you would end up with a powerful blog as it would be updated daily. The Search Engines Love Fresh Content, and this is the best way to get out there.

Many people are intimidated by anything technical, but blogging is very easy. Each shop owner would have their own username and password where they would log on and easily publish their own stories and photographs.

The following businesses operate out of the Old Town Square (with links to their website):

• Nichols Insurance Group
• Family Medical Center
• Bob Hogue School Of real Estate
• Superior Property Management and Sales
• Porter GPS
• Primerica
• Salon Allure
• Mission Health Massage Therapy

Mike Annable can be reached direct at 863-812-6411.