By  Michael I.

Sometimes you may need to create a page with some content. For example a ‘Terms Of Use’, ‘About Us’ or ‘Privacy Policy’ page. You can create static content for your Joomla website. And I’ll teach you how to.

What is Static Content?
Static content is a page within your website that can be linked to your page navigation or any other menu. I will teach you how to create pages with static content and create main menu links to those pages.

First, you should log in to your site Administration Area.

Then go Content –> Article Manager. Also, you can click on Article Manager icon in your Administration home page. In Article Manager you may see a list of your site content pages. We do not have any pages so our list is blank.

To create a new page, click New at the top right of the page.

Now you are on a page where you may create your content. You will see some fields:

* Title: Give your page a title. It should be short and descriptive (ex: ‘Terms And Conditions’);
* Alias: You can make a title easy to remember for your page. If you leave this field blank Joomla will create an alias from your page title replacing spaces by hyphens. (i.e.: terms-and-conditions if your page title is ‘Terms And Conditions’);
* Section: Choose a category for your page. If you do not have any, choose ‘Uncategorized’. This field is required and your article won’t be published if you leave ‘-Select Section-’ value in the field;
* Published: Here you can change your page publish state. You can check ‘No’ radio button if you don’t want your article to be published. This field is set as ‘Yes’ by default;
* Front Page: This field determines whether your page will be displayed on the front page of your website or not;
* Category: Choose a category for your static content page. If you have no categories or do not want your article to be in any category, leave it ‘Uncategorized’;
* Text: Type your text here. This is your static page. You can use the TinyMCE included editor or download some pretty improved editors and use them to create your own pages.

On the right side you see the article’s summary and 3 sections for advanced settings.

Parameters (Article):

* Author: You may want to have several authors on your site so if you want to personalize your article, choose a name from the list;
* Author Alias: The same as with Article Alias – make it readable or Joomla will do that for you. No pain, but no gain. May help if you have several authors writing for your website;
* Access Level: Here you have three options: Public, Registered and Specials. Choose who will see your article and who will not;
* Created date: As default the current time is set in this field. But you can make it post factum – it will be displayed as published earlier. Forgot to send your Valentine’s Day greetings to your half? Create an article, change creation date and blame him/her for thoughtlessness:);
* Start Publishing: Modify this date if you want your article to be published later. It will be published at time specified;
* Finish Publishing: When you need your page to be published for a limited time (i.e.: New Year Greetings or Promo Page), type here the date (and hour) when you want your article to be unpublished. This feature is also automated.

Parameters (Advanced):

Almost all of these fields are set as ‘Use Global’. The best way is to set most suitable fields in Parameters (it can be found in Article Manager) and customize some of them for each article if necessary. I will describe work of each field in one of my next tutorials.

Metadata Information:

* Description: This is a field where you type in text for your meta description tag. It is crucial to make it informative and describing the content of your page. Keep it descriptive and short about 156 symbols.
* Keywords: Here you can add keywords your page is optimized for (if there are any). They will be added to your meta keywords tag. Do not pay too much attention to this field as keywords do not play that role for SEO they used to play two years ago.
* Author: This field will add meta author tag to your page. Almost useless from the SEO point as search engines does not pay that attention to all meta tags.
* Robots: You may want to restrict crawlers’ access to your article. If so, please put values “noindex, nofollow”. There’re only 4 values for this field – index, noindex, follow, nofollow. But you can use only two of them separated by comma.

When finished, make sure that you check your spelling, check all fields and click ‘Save’.

Now you are done with your new ‘Terms And Conditions’ page and it is time to create a Menu link for this page.

Go to Menus –> Main Menu.

Click ‘New’ at the top right corner of the page.

Then you should choose a layout for your article. If you want a single content, then choose Articles –> Article Layout.

Now you can create a link for your content page. It has many common with adding an article. After filling all fields click on ‘Select’ button.

Choose your article from the list by clicking on the title. After that you’re ready to save your menu item. Click ‘Save’ and this is done.

Now you can choose the order of your menu item if you want.

That’s it, now you know how to add static pages to your Joomla website.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Michael_I.

By  Lance Winslow

The other day, I was paging through a new book at the book store, it seems quite good. The name of the book is; “Quiet – The Power of the Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking” by Susan Cain and it reminded me of a conversation I had with an acquaintance from Australia a few months the prior. He told me that it seemed that “doing nothing” and just thinking or day-dreaming was when some of the best discoveries have been made through human thought and reasoning – and I suppose Plato, Aristotle, and even the condemned Socrates might have agreed while walking amongst the olive trees.

For an example, my acquaintance used Sir Isaac Newton who supposedly, as the story goes and I have no reason to refute it, was sitting under a tree when an apple fell on his head, so I laughed at this example and said; “sure, all that makes total sense and let’s add Sir Isaac Newton, sitting by a tree when the apple fell, just day dreaming – “ah gravity!” Ha ha ha.”

Now then, I’d like to add to his summation the concept of “cross-pollination” and being able to connect dots, in the spatial reasoning portion of the brain, borrowing from different industries, or areas of endeavor, and making sense of things unrelated, borrowing strategies, ideas, designs, innovations. Then I’d add the concept of curiosity, which causes random “thoughts to fly around” and some sit on the back burner, uncategorized, re-categorized, or waiting for a home while the mind finds multiple places to connect through memory by association.

Next, I also believe the N400 brainwave is able to pick up anomalies, things out of place, and that the brain’s chemical splash and reward system which favors such things, increases the brain’s ability to strengthen the connections in that regard, in those types of tasks.

Then I have some theories that there are all sorts of types of thinking and that it’s like racing. Use the whole track, and a super mind should be able to use various strategies of thinking when it serves them, and run those call them (programs) simultaneously, and cross-reference, checking itself. Best of all we can build a multi-decision matrix program to do that simultaneously to get to the Best Answer – in other words once we understand this process in a human brain we can build rules to program an Artificially Intelligent computer like IBM’s Watson to do the same.

Well, I’ve talked long enough, and it’s time for you to have some “Quiet Time” to think – me too, and do let me know what you come up with after you’ve broken through to the next level of higher thought and have come up with an original thought along these lines of inquiry.

Lance Winslow has launched a new provocative series of eBooks on Innovation in America. Lance Winslow is a retired Founder of a Nationwide Franchise Chain, and now runs the Online Think Tank; http://www.worldthinktank.net

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Lance_Winslow

By  Lawrence Reaves

WordPress makes life easy when it comes to establishing a presence on the web – popularized as the leading blog platform, WordPress as an application is expanding its own horizons and is a popular ecommerce platform in its own right.

As it is so simple to establishing a WordPress site, everyone is doing it, and “everyone” is making the same mistakes – make sure you are “someone” and look at what you are doing with your WordPress site and see if you need to change some things around.

The Rookie Basics

There are two things which mark a WordPress site out as a “rookie” – firstly, make sure you use a login name which is associated with your site identity, i.e. not your own name! Secondly, change the default name for posting articles to the name of whoever you want associated with writing them and not “admin”. If you are the poster to the WordPress site, using your own name helps you gain more exposure but more importantly, it personalizes the site itself.

Create a Blogroll

Using a blogroll will help generate some link backs to your own site as well as providing a launch pad for your own traffics to navigate off to instead of simply drifting away from your website.

A blogroll can be created within WordPress by navigating Blogroll > Categories Link and completing the dialog box for the site you wish to to include on your blogroll. Complete for as many sites as you wish to include but try not to go mad, a lengthy blogroll is simply not helpful for users.

If you include a site on your blogroll, let that site webmaster know you have done so and ask for a reciprocal link.

Use Categories

The default for WordPress is “Uncategorized”, which looks like you don’t care about the posts and is also very bad for your Search Engine Optimization (SEO). You can create categories for your posts, which looks more professional or you can simply change the category title from “Uncategorized” to something else, such as “Good Stuff to Know” or whatever takes your fancy. Simply navigate over to Manage. Categories and following the dialog box instructions for renaming Uncategorized to something more meaningful.

Create a Meaningful Link Structure

When you post on WordPress, you will be able to create additional interest and goodwill at the same time by including good links. If you are working on a topic, it helps to use hyperlinks to reference people and sites within your content. This provides further information for readers and allows you to generate internal links to other pages of your site or to other websites you control. If you are linking to other sites, then you can ask them for a reciprocal link back to your site. Either way you are creating a more mature looking website – newbie sites tend to have very little if any internal or external links.

By following and applying these three simple tips, you will transform your WordPress site from an “everyone”-style effort into a professional looking site which delivers more value for your traffic and is likely to be used far more.

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Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Lawrence_Reaves

By  Robert Bennet

Need to learn how to put any module in Joomla articles? Joomla has some of the coolest modules out there and most of them are free of charge.

And at some point you might want to put a component on the content area (the article part).

Modules and components such as galleries are much nicer when they are on the article. In this article you are going to learn how to do this step-by-step.

Instructions

Step 1

Install your module or component

Step 2

Go to Extensions and click on plug-in manager from the top admin menu.

Step 3

On the Plug-in Manager, click on “Content – Load Module”

Step 4

Under Details on the edit plug-in page, set enabled to “Yes”.

Step 5

Under Plug-in parameters, set “enable plugin” to “Yes”.

Step 6

Set style to “no wrapping (raw output)”

Step 7

Click on save. Then go to Extensions and click module manager. And then click on your module to open it.

Step 8

Double click on the position text-box and highlight the existing position name and type your new position name, e.g. content1.

Step 9

Make sure your module is enabled and click on save.

Step 10

Go to Content and click on article manager from the top admin menu.

Step 11

Click on new from the article manager menu.

Step 12

Enter your article title. Set section to “Uncategorized” and category to “Uncategorized”

Step13

Type in {loadposition content1} in the article area. Content1 is the name I gave my new position in step8. You will write your position name instead of content1.

Step 14

Click on save. And link your article to the menu.

That’s it you should have your module loading on the article area. Most components don’t give an option to put them on the content area, but this method is a great way to load any module in the article area.

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Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Robert_Bennet

By  T. Payne

If your website is powered by WordPress, then you know the administrators panel is full of different options. I know people who run their blog and barely touch their settings at all. WordPress is pretty much good to go out of the box, but there are a couple settings you should think about tweaking.

1. Privacy – You definitely want to check out this setting. I have heard rumours of people installing a fresh WordPress and their privacy settings are set to block search engines. It is worth a shot just to go into this setting really quickly and making sure that search engines can crawl your site. This is the only option to tweak in this particular settings menu so it is easy stuff. Most people will want to allow search engines because that is where most of your traffic will be coming from.

2. Discussion Settings – You can leave these settings alone if you want but there are a couple things I like to tweak. First off I make sure the top option “Attempt to notify any blogs linked to from the article. ” is clicked. This means when you have a link to another blog you will send a trackback to that blog. If the person allows trackbacks that could count as a back link for you. Back links are good things!

I also like to change my gravatar picture. This is a small step but it can add a lot to the aesthetics of your site. A lot of people who comment on your site will not have a gravatar, so the default will show up. The “mystery man” might be good enough for most, but if it looks bad on my blog I will want to change it. Sometimes I will go with blank and sometimes I will just pick the one that matches my site colors and theme.

3. Writing Settings – In here I like to set my own Default Categories and Link Categories. You can easily run your blog or website without doing this, but I feel it saves me time and effort. I hate having “Uncategorized” show up in my list of categories. If I change my default category to something else, it means I will probably never have to see uncategorized again. Sometimes I forget to categorize my posts and when that happens I won’t have to worry about Uncategorized showing up all of a sudden. Same goes with Link Categories. I only have one category of links that I use in my sidebar, so it makes sense to make that category the default.

This is truly just the tip of the iceberg. There are a lot of settings you can tweak for your WordPress site. The above three are just a couple I make sure to do right away when I set up a site. These simple settings save me some time and I hope they can do the same for you.

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Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=T._Payne

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