The latest Joomla 3.x website created by Webilicious® is for The Eco-Hamlet, Greenmount. The Eco-Hamlet is a property development in the Perth foothills where there is a focus on community and sustainable development. The property is just under an acre with an existing dwelling and zoning for another seven dwellings at an average of 450 sqm each.
Web Design
As usual, I have used a RocketTheme template, this time "Anacron" which has a nice scrolling feature on the header where it scrolls out of view as you scroll down the page, providing the maximum page view. The header pops back into view when you scroll up.
I have made various customisations to the template such as:
- the main content background has been made transparent to help show off the background slideshow
- the menu font size and spacing has been optimised for each responsive screen width
Web Development
Apart from the standard extensions such as Akeeba Backup and Akeeba Admin Tools that I install on every website, I have discovered and installed the misnamed but excellent "Event Gallery", "Noo Google Map" and "PRI Background Slideshow" which are all free or have free versions.
Event Gallery
This is a very nice looking gallery from professional photographer Sven Blüge that has nothing at all to do with events except that you might take a set of photos at a particular event. "Event" can be better interpreted as "Folder" in this case. Apart from the misleading name, this is an excellent responsive gallery which displays images of different proportions very well together. Captions and image e-commerce options are available but were not needed for this particular website.
Noo Google Map
My preferred Google Maps extension has always been the plug-in from Mike Reumer but I wanted something that would work better with a responsive template and found the "Noo Google Map" module which is also free. It is very easy to configure and looks great. You need to work out the latitude and longitude of the target destination but this is fairly easy to do by entering the address on a free geo-coding website.
PRI Background Slideshow
Full screen background images and slideshows seem to be quite popular now and it's easy to see why. I mistakenly believed that this functionality would need to be built into the template but found a couple of free background slideshow modules that proved me wrong. "PRI Background Slideshow" and "Fun Supersized" are both excellent. I chose "PRI Background Slideshow" in this case because I found it slightly easier to set up and because it seemed to load a little bit faster. The "Fun Supersized" background slideshow has more options if you need them but I just wanted something simple for this website.
The background slideshow needs to be anchored to a particular CSS element. body is selected by default and this worked fine on the RocketTheme template.
I installed the module to the "debug" module position but had to add #rt-debug {display: none;} to my custom CSS file to prevent the default module padding and margins creating unwanted space on the page.
Search Engine Optimisation
Basic on-site SEO has been completed using standard Joomla search engine friendly URLs, unique page titles, meta description and meta keywords for each page.
Feel the Quality
Checking the score in the Nibbler test tool reveals a score of 7.5 which is excellent considering that little to no social networking has yet been done.
