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To provide an even better Caerphilly Web Design service we have moved into a new office based in the Valleys Enterprise Centre, Bedwas Industrial Estate, Greenway, Caerphilly. The office move is part of our expansion plan to take on more staff and so we can be located in a more convenient location to service and support our customers.

Interspire Email Marketer (IEM), in my opinion, is the best newsletter system on the market that can be downloaded and installed on your own server. At least, I cannot find any other that comes close to it’s features, and I have looked hard. It does have one drawback though, and that’s the system API does not support integrating it into third party applications so subscribers can update their newsletter preferences from within another system. Interspire stated they don’t provide support on technical aspects of the API, so I have had to create my own API functions until they realise the benefit of this and write one themselves. This blog gives you a quick overview of the files to edit.

Just after publishing my latest blog, Integrating Joomla and Zencart (Sort Of) Using CURL and Standalone Templates, I realised that this method can be used to show Joomla modules on just about any website that you can add code to. The blog is mainly about Zencart because that’s what I use it for, but I realised if you have any other website you can access the code for, then you can follow these instructions to add Joomla modules to your website.

I’ve developed quite a few Joomla and Zencart sites, some clients taking both together for their website. Joomla being great for the website CMS, and Zencart great for the shopping cart. The problem is, no complete, working integration exists between them. None that I have found anyway. A couple have been written and are work in progress in my mind, but still lacking in fundamental functionality. So the website ends up clearly as two separate systems to the website visitor which is not ideal. So I have spent some time trying to think of a way to integrate the two together and have come up with what looks to be a good solution… CURL.

In a previous blog I mentioned that your page title (Browser Title or Title Tag) is one of the most important aspects to rank your website for keyword searches. For example, “About Amity Web Solutions, Web Design in Caerphilly” is better than “About Us” because it not only shows the search engine reader the company name but additional keywords which is important for ranking (see previous blog about 10 basic search optimisation techniques to improve your website rankings).