Web Concepts

The award winning content management system, which enables you to build web sites and powerful online applications is more than welcome at Lunarpages.  Joomla is all that, and so much more.  For people looking for an easy to use and powerful script to manage their digital empire, Joomla is a good way to go.

At Lunarpages, you have three ways you can get this script installed.  It comes standard with cPanel’s Fantastico, LPCP’s WebApps collection or you could manually install the script too. 

Extensions & Themes – Like some of the other scripts we have mentioned, it comes ready to support a number of extensions that will build upon an already solid script.  You can browse through some of the best at extensions.joomla.org. At the time of writing this, they have over 3,537 to choose from. A simple search for “Joomla themes” in Google will give you many choices for slick designs you can use to get your own web site up and running.

Need Joomla Help? You can always turn towards our wonderful web hosting wiki for Joomla help, as well as our user forums. Here are a couple of more places to look for support:

• Joomla Documentation
• Joomla Support Forum

Want to give it a shot?  OpenSourceCMS has a great demo hosted, that will let you play with the Joomla interface, without needing to install it.

November is Lunarpages Script Month!

Keep watching the Lunartics blog all throughout the month on November for even more third party script suggestions, tutorials, tips and more.  You can also get tons of information and details about just a handful of the third party scripts we support on the web hosting wiki.  We also have a special forum dedicated to third party script discussions over at the Lunarforums.  Subscribe today to the Lunartics RSS feed for instant updates when we release a new script suggestion!  

Related Tips and Tricks:

• WordPress Hosting at Lunarpages
• Get bbPress Hosting at Lunarpages
• How to Get Started with an Affiliate Plan

© Lunarpages Web Hosting - Also, don′t forget to follow @lunarpages on Twitter!

Original post by Mitch

All this month, on the Lunartics blog, we are going to be highlighting some of our favorite third party scripts.  From image galleries to message boards, there will be a little something for everybody.  To get things started, I thought I would discuss with you why WordPress is my absolute favorite blogging script.

WordPress truly is a state-of-the-art publishing platform that is easy enough for anybody to use.  It focuses on aesthetics, web standards and real usability.  Also, since it is totally free to use, that makes it even better.

WordPress is Easy to Install

At Lunarpages, you can easily install WordPress via cPanel or the LPCP control panels, so that gives you instant access.  If you would rather install the script yourself, you can do that too using WordPress’s world famous five minute install.

The Extras for WordPress are Awesome

As far as extras go, you can not overlook the WordPress plugins and WordPress themes.

Plugins – You can bring up how great WordPress is, without mentioning the slew of plugins that have been developed for it.  You can easily install plugins from the WordPress administrator interface (after you have it installed) or browse though all the plugins available at WordPress Plugins Directory.

Themes – There are many themes you can choose from too.  The world greatest designers have really given it their all to provide you some great looking designs.  You can browse though many of them at the WordPress Theme Directory, or even build your own theme to use. 

For more assistance and help with WordPress, be sure to check out our web hosting wiki page dedicated to this great blogging script. 

• WordPress Help, Tutorials and Tips on the Web Hosting Wiki!

Also, try the WordPress demo over at OpenSourceCMS to play with the administrator interface.

November is Lunarpages Script Month!

Keep watching the Lunartics blog all throughout the month on November for even more third party script suggestions, tutorials, tips and more.  You can also get tons of information and details about just a handful of the third party scripts we support on the web hosting wiki.  We also have a special forum dedicated to third party script discussions over at the Lunarforums.  Subscribe today to the Lunartics RSS feed for instant updates when we release a new script suggestion!  

Related Tips and Tricks:

• Keep Your WordPress Plugins Up To Date
• Working with WordPress 2.7
• WordPress Theme Design Resources

© Lunarpages Web Hosting - Also, don’t forget to follow @lunarpages on Twitter!

Original post by Mitch

Depending on how many notes or messy modifications you make to your cascading style sheets, you might be about due for a little compression.  By shrinking you external CSS files, you can save the bandwidth it takes to download them, each time somebody visits your web site. 

Now how much optimization should you do?  Well, the CSS files should be small enough to load quickly, however readable enough to where you know what does what where, and why.  You have to balance size with readability.

Here are my three favorite online tools to help optimize and shrink my CSS files:

• CSSCompressor.com
• CSSOptimiser.com
• CleanCSS.com

By using any of these three solutions, you can reduce the CSS code size and make your web pages load faster.  They all allow you to choose from multiple degrees of compression, and they are all very quick too.

Related Tips and Tricks:

• Speed Up Pages by Combining External CSS
• Wizzypage – Great (and free!) Web Site Editor
• Best Web Site Speed Analyzers

&copy Lunarpages Web Hosting - Also, don’t forget to follow @lunarpages on Twitter!

Original post by Mitch

The title tag is by far the most important part of your web site.  It is the first thing people see, and it tells people what they are about to check out.  If your looking for a way to get your web site traffic up, just by doing a little touch up work to your title tags you can see a little boost from the search engines. 

Since the title tags is one of the big things the search engines look at when indexing your content, you should make sure you are doing all you can to make them the best.

What Should My Title Tag Do?

This is an easy question to answer.  What should you title tag be doing?  It should be answering who you are and what you do.  For example – lets take a look at the title tag here:

Web Hosting Blog | Lunarpages Lunartics

From that, you know you are on a blog about web hosting, it is called Lunartics and it is from Lunarpages.  Be sure to always include your web site or company name, and a few keywords about what you do. 

Can you over do it? Yes, you can.  I would say try to keep the keywords under five at the most.  Also, make sure your keywords in your title tags are relevant to the content on that specific page or web site.  For example, this would be a bad execution in title tag writing 101:

My Blog Paris Hilton Cute Puppies Lindsay Lohan

See, that might seem like you are going to get more people in because you are using popular phrases, but search engines will bump you down because your web site doesn’t have anything to do with those keywords.  

So to sum things up:

• make sure that your title tags are relevant to your web site content
• make sure you give your company or web site name
• don’t include keywords that are not related to the web site’s content

Some might say that search engine optimization is a confusing art, that they do not understand.  However, as the years have gone by, a lot of it comes down to common sense. 

Related Tips and Tricks:

• Keyword Suggest Made Easy
• Find Free Icons Faster
• Make it Easier for Google Searchers to Find You!

© Lunarpages Web Hosting - Also, don’t forget to follow @lunarpages on Twitter!

Original post by Mitch

I’ve seen a lot in dot-com business. One of my hosting directories used to make me $4,500 5 years ago by having only 300 daily unique visitors. You can imagine how quality was the traffic it used to send to advertisers. Well, five years later it is still good one, but it lost the race […]

Original post by Your (optional) podcast author email address (http://hostingblog.b10wh.com/)

Hope you have all had a happy April Fools’ Day thus far. Keeping with the theme of the day, I bring to you the Swiss Spaghetti Harvest of 1957. 

According to the Museum of Hoaxes, “The Swiss Spaghetti Harvest hoax generated an enormous response. Hundreds of people phoned the BBC wanting to know how they could grow their own spaghetti tree. To this query the BBC diplomatically replied, ‘Place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best.’”

For more April Fools’ Day fun, be sure to check out our April Fools’ Day thread over on the Lunarforums.

© Lunarpages Web Hosting - Great web hosting with unlimited disk space and bandwith for only $4.95 per month? Check out the Winter Special!

Original post by Mitch

Mitch “Loves Site Analytics” Keeler

How does your web site stack up?  Here are two great web site analysis tools you can use to find out, without having to install a script or copy and paste any code into your web site.

Dataopedia - All You Need to Know

I have found a resource that will tell you almost everything there is to know about any web site or domain out there today.  The name?  Dataopedia.com.  From Google PageRank to popularity on the various “best of the web” resources like Alexa, you get a view of how your domain is doing around the Web in just seconds.

Web Site Grader - Great Web Site Review Tool

So how does your web site stand up to some of the biggest ones out on the Web? It doesn’t matter if your coming in first or last, this web site review tool is a great one to use not only to figure out where you stand - but how to make your web site rank even higher out there.  WebsiteGrader.com gives you more output options than you could ever want or need. It tells you how you rank in just about every way, shape or form out there on the Web.

As a bonus, if you have an RSS feed powered by FeedBurner, give Blog Perfume’s feed analysis tool a shot.  It will give you a lot of information on your past subscription history, as far as the numbers go and what you have to look forward to with pretty on-the-spot projections.

© Lunarpages Web Hosting - Great web hosting with unlimited disk space and bandwith for only $4.95 per month? Check out the Winter Special!

Original post by Mitch

I was searching for a good story to start in 2009 when I found the this: A U.S. prison inmate sued Intel for $5 billion! What a wonderful start of the new year for Daw Blog :).
The 43 year old Matthew Young insisted that the Intel’s Core 2 Duo chip and its virtualization technology are based on […]

Original post by D.Avramov

By Mitch “New Year, Baby!” Keeler

Happy New Year!  What, what do you mean I am a day early?  Ah well, hope you all have a safe yet enjoyable night tonight, and your 2009 is ten times more Lunarful than 2008 was.  To help you count down the clock, here are some of the most popular posts from the past month.

• 20 Awesome Paint.Net Tutorials
• Setup Your Lifestream with WordPress
• Come Join Lunarpages on Facebook!
• 25 Color Tools for Any Webmaster
• Minimize Sidebar in WordPress 2.7
• Top 10 Most Popular Support Topics
• Free Watermark Tool for Your Images
• Quick and Easy Online Surveys for Your Web Site
• Marketing Your Brand on YouTube
• Follow the Web 2.0 Traffic Trends

Have a safe and happy new year, everybody!

&copy Lunarpages Web Hosting - Great web hosting with unlimited disk space and bandwith for only $4.95 per month? Check out the Fall Special!

Original post by Mitch

Just got an email from a frind whoi refered Zen Photo. This is a simple but very elegant Web 2.0 generation image gallery software. It is best for bloggers as well as for anyone who want to manage online photo galley.

The version 1.1 of the software allows users to create Subalbums, to add Tags to images, […]

Original post by Your (optional) podcast author email address (http://hostingblog.b10wh.com/)