Why do you need a Custom Contact Us Form? |
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Wednesday, 11 February 2009 |
If you ask me for one single most important aspect that is very easy to change on every website and creates a lasting impression on your visitors I would say "Contact Us Form ".
Other approaches such as linking Contact Us text to your email address
is not recommended as many visitors
to your website do not have their default email client set up on their
computer correctly
and may easily end up failing to contact you. Secondly, spammers love
to
harvest unprotected email addresses embedded in html using automated
web spiders. Thirdly, if they contact you by email, you cannot specify
the initial information that you need.
The contact form should be simple, easy to navigate and to fill out. The worst thing you can do is make it difficult for a new
prospect to contact you or distract them with too much information on contact us pages.
If you really need a quick, cheap and temporary solution, then go with a default Joomla Contact Us Form?
Default Joomla Contact Us forms are not as flexible and thank you page
cannot be specified but it will work until you are ready to complete the following:
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Determine what information is needed from the visitor. Ask for all the information you may need but try not to overwhelm the visitor. In some situations, you may want to keep questions general or very specific based on your products and services.
- Decide what information you absolutely need to have so that these fields will be set as required. It's good to make as little information required as possible.
- Build your form. If you need help building your contact form and thank you page, please be sure to contact us :) Typically we'll design both for $160 (4 hrs). Additionally, this type of form implementation allows for automated storage of form submissions in a database table which you may later export into an excel file.
Bonus: Joomla Default URLs are not nice looking so it's highly recommended that
you use friendly URL variation such as
http://www.ogosense.com/contact-us/ Additionally, set up Google Analytics Goal for your Contact Us Form Funnel to measure how it's performing and see what you may do to improve conversions.
Do you have your own recommendations on improving visitors conversions quickly and efficiently? Please share them in the comments sections.
--
Ogy Nikolic | Managing Director | OGO Sense | www.ogosense.com | Send Me A Quick Message
US tel.+1 (617) 418-4646 | UK tel. + 44 20 7617 7508 | skype: ogosense
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Last Updated ( Wednesday, 11 February 2009 )
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Joomla Text formatting tool stinks seriously!! |
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Tuesday, 10 February 2009 |
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 Recently, one of our clients wrote me about issues he was having with my favorite Joomla Content Editor:
I
have to tell you – I am VERY unhappy about how Joomla deals with text
being pasted into it from text or word – I have been playing with this
interface since I started using it to try and figure out why I have
such MAJOR formatting issues with text. Again, I have just wasted 1
hour of my time getting this very poor text editor to recognize my
spacing. I have allowed this to go on since I started, but today is the
final battle I will play with this terrible formatting tool – I really
need you to tell me how I can better control or get Joomla to maintain
my pasted text spacing.
Here is the advice that I provided which later worked for the client above and I thought other Joomla business users may find it useful as well:
Never copy and paste text into the editor from Word, other website, etc
and expect it to work correctly. When you do so, many invisible and
non-standard html elements invisible to human eye get embedded in the
page and from here you'll fail miserably to format anything in any
Joomla editor.
If you need to copy something from
Word, other website, etc, paste this information first into Notepad (in
windows os) or some other plain text editor. This will clear any hidden
formatting and special tags. Then paste text into Joomla Editor text
area and use Joomla Editor Tools to format the text (to make it bold,
colored, etc).
You may be trying to get down to the next
row by hitting enter key and you end up creating another paragraph with
an extra white line.
You may avoid doublespacing by holding
down the SHIFT key when hitting ENTER. This will not take you to the
next paragraph, instead you'll be able to start typing in the next row.
There are huge issues on websites in page loading time
resulting from images not being resized correctly. Instead of image
being the same size as it appears on the website, they are scaled and
and appear much smaller than they really are. Why is this a problem?
This is very inefficient causing you lost time as pages load slower but
it's much worse for first time visitors to the site as they do not have
those images stored in the browser's cache.
Size
the images correctly during upload or click on it in the JCE Image
Manager, then use icons on the right to perform image
manipulation/resizing.
If you have any further or other
questions or issues with editor usage, please contact our friendly Joomla website designer.
Ogy on Twitter
Joomla Consultant
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Last Updated ( Thursday, 08 July 2010 )
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Is Joomla 1.0 dead? Joomla 1.0 vs 1.5 |
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Saturday, 03 January 2009 |
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 Now
that joomla.org has announced that it will discontinue support for the
aging Joomla 1.0.15 this summer, many businesses are thinking if they should build their new website using this "dead" Joomla 1.0 technology or what to
do next about their nice looking and well working Joomla 1.0.15
website if they already have one.
For the future website projects that OGO Sense
starts in 2009, we are going to use the following criteria when
determining if Joomla 1.0 or Joomla 1.5 should be used:
Use Joomla 1.5 for building the following sites:
- Big projects with completely custom component integration and/or few existing Joomla extensions.
- Small projects with few 3rd party extensions.
- Projects for which critical 1.5 components exist and Joomla 1.0 extensions do not.
- Available budget is big enough for fixing bugs in existing Joomla 1.5 core and extensions. Additional required testing, maintenance and human resources would not represent an issue.
Use Joomla 1.0 for building the following sites:
- Big projects with many 3rd party extensions.
- Small Businesses and Organizations with a need of a very stable site for a fairly small or fixed budget.
- Large projects where there are many customizations and where fewer upgrades are desirable to keep the maintenance expenses fairly low.
I know hard core supporters of Joomla 1.5 may challenge this article
below in the comments but I would certainly be happy to point them in a direction of small business owners who
are frustrated and lost sales and profits because of their initial love as well
with Joomla 1.5 and its extensions. Obviously, if a larger budget is
available for testing and troubleshooting, I have no problem with using Joomla 1.5 except most businesses and organizations do care about their
budget and ROI.
Our recommendations and decisions were based on:
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Designing Joomla websites completed over the past 2 years.
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Maintaining and upgrading Joomla 1.0 and more recently 1.5 sites over the past 2 years.
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Joomla site migrations completed from 1.0 to 1.5
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Joomla security and hosting.
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Website budget and best ROI for our clients.
From the business perspective, many business users or
I do not see enough functional or financial incentive to migrate to or
even build sites in Joomla 1.5. Therefore, I have decided that OGO
Sense will continue to support any Joomla 1.0.15 website for up to 3
years after the official Joomla.org support for 1.0.15 is discontinued.
Then within the following 3 years, as businesses and
organizations need to make major changes to their website (design,
functional or seo), we'll offer to migrate it to Joomla 1.5 when we
find it cost effective and when Joomla 1.6 is already out at least in
beta form. So
while Joomla 1.0 is officially discontinued in summer 2009, you should
continue maintaining your Joomla 1.0.15 website with OGO Sense.
For a new website design with OGO Sense or maintenance of your existing Joomla website, please contact us.
--
Ogy Nikolic | Managing Director | OGO Sense | www.ogosense.com
US tel.+1 (617) 418-4646 | UK tel. + 44 20 7617 7508 | US fax +1 (617) 446-1468 | skype: ogosense
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Last Updated ( Wednesday, 14 January 2009 )
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Energize your business with Joomla! CMS in 2009 |
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Saturday, 27 December 2008 |
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 As the global economy goes bad and small business cut expenses, Joomla! CMS could assist in making your business much more productive and profitable. To operate at existing business levels with fewer people and resources you need to automate many of the manual tasks so using Joomla! looks good now particularly for small businesses and organizations. As you have less money to spend on employees and other resources, it is the perfect time to build a Joomla! site that will increase automation and profitability in the near future.
Joomla! is an award winning, web based, Content Management System(CMS) that gives website administrators the power to control their website by adding, editing and deleting content. To request a private demo on how our Joomla! solutions could improve your business, please contact us.
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Last Updated ( Saturday, 26 December 2009 )
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Looking for Professional Joomla help? |
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Sunday, 21 December 2008 |
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Here is a small video featuring how technical support was provided in Dark Ages:
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Last Updated ( Sunday, 21 December 2008 )
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