14 years 8 months ago
Hi Anthony. Thank you for looking into this. A subsequent posting suggests that this change should go into the variables.php file. I'm not sure what to make of that.
My hope is to have a template that I can exercise complete control over. Joomla has been terrific because I can change just about anything I want and it is fairly straight-forward. A little bit of CSS, some basic html, some minor PHP file editing, and every aspect of the site is at my fingertips. Using JoomlaBamboo presents a different scenario. I get a beautiful template to start, but to change things like the footer, or the site title, I have to do things that don't make sense, at least in the traditional Joomla functionality world. It is like your templates aren't just templates, they conflate presentation and functionality into a single piece. Perhaps this is just what is needed for a newbie because there are a lot of things that can be manipulated in the interface. But for somebody that is a step above a newbie, your framework adds an impenetrable layer functionality on top of the presentation layer. I'm still trying to wrap my head around it.
I have another project that I am starting today and I'd like to use a Joomla Bamboo template to start, because they are so beautiful (really, your designers deserve some kudos for their work.) But if using Joomla Bamboo means that I will have to spend 2 or 3 times as much time trying to manipulate the site then I will have to go elsewhere. I can take somebody else's template and make it beautiful. That's not too hard. What's hard is taking a Joomla Bamboo template and manipulating it.
Regarding the site title, yes, I have heard the same things as you, that Google reads the site title and if it is the same they think it is the same page. But honestly the Google engine is much smarter than that. I did SEO for Amazon and worked for a subsidiary where we built our own search engine. There are a LOT of factors that go into search engine relevance. Putting the site title in front of the page name won't hurt my SEO. Google's relevance engine will read all of the words in my site title. It won't stop at the first few words. It will even parse them into phrases, taking into account the dashes, and it will combine it all with other aspects of my page such as words in the URL, H1 tags, meta tags, words on the page, and about a hundred other things like link text (ie, what is this page called when you link to it.)
If you want to see best practices for SEO, you just need to look at the top sites on the web. They have top SEO people working with them and they are already doing it right. You'll see that they always include the site title, a dash, and the page name. Or sometimes they reverse it with page name, a dash then site title. See Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Youtube, Wikipedia, Amazon. Regardless, the site name should really be in the title tag.
Thank you again for looking into the issue.