Over the last several months, as new versions of Chrome, FireFox, and Internet Explorer have been released, we have experienced a much higher report of “connection is not secure” messages, especially for sites that collect sensitive or private information. These can be as unassuming as a red unlocked icon near the URL, or as intrusive as a pop-up message indicating pure doom if a viewer continues to the website in question.

Has something changed on the site? No. What has changed is the engineered deprecation of non secure sites on the internet, meaning that your web browser is now reporting sites to you that are not using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), indicated by “https” at the beginning of the URL rather than “http”.

We've now been working with Joomla! for over ten years--since its inception in August 2005. In that 10 years, we have worked with hundreds of web sites and learned a thing or two. One of the tremendous advantages of Joomla! is the vast array of third-party extensions - components, modules and plugins - available to add almost any functionality you can think of to your web site. On occasion, a client requires functionality that cannot be provided by an existing Joomla! extension, so what do you do when Joomla! or one of those extensions doesn't do everything you need?

Just a quick note to celebrate the fact that your 3by400 hosting is based upon one of today's technology leaders, according to Gartner Group.In the 2015 Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service, Worldwide, Gartner placed Amazon Web Services in the “Leaders” quadrant and rated AWS (Amazon Web Services) as having both the furthest completeness of vision and the highest ability to execute. See more about the report here, including the ability to download.This news simply validates what we have come to understand in choosing it as the core of our most stable, reliable, and high-performing hosting platform. We literally sleep...

Not so long ago, you could look at your Google Analytics account and easily see the search phrases being used to find your site. Don't confuse these with keywords, which everyone says are dead...even Google (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/09/google-does-not-use-keywords-meta-tag.html). Metadata keywords in and of themselves are not really of much value, but using them in your content...well, that is the real "Google juice". Google calls these search phrases "queries", but about two years ago, the most critical ones vanished from Analytics, showing "unavailable". If you were using AdWords, you could see them, so it looked like a heavy-handed approach to marketing Google AdWords. It was really more like a repositioning to Google Webmasters Tools.

Yes, it is true that as of January 1, 2015, Joomla! 2.5 is no longer officially supported by the Joomla Foundation (joomla.org). This doesn't mean that Joomla 2.5 sites will suddenly stop working, but it does mean that no additional patches will be developed for it and that extensions will gradually become unavailable for this version. Do Patches Matter? On December 10, 2014, the last patch for Joomla 2.5, bringing it to 2.5.28, was announced. You can read the full announcement here: Joomla 2.5.28 Released. With this release comes the end of support, meaning that future releases, including security patches, will...