Med-Psych.com

I had the site offline for a few days as I was thinking about how to handle the website layout.

I realized I could spend months deciding on which software to use and how to organize the layout. Instead, I have opted to just start using Joomla and PHPBB3-SEO and seeing how it works.

I have Joomla set-up as the index page content management software. I initially had thought the software was perfect, but after playing around a little, I now have some concerns. Specifically, the SEO URL's seemed okay, but then I realized that if I set-up different menu items pointing to different news categories, suddenly the news URL's change. I'm not sure why having a menu item should effect an article's URL. I'm sure to most people who view this site, this article will be Greek. If you skim over this article and skip it, I won't be offended.

At this time, I will just avoid having any menu items, and hopefully if I add them down the road, there will be a way to keep the same URL's for the news articles. If not, so be it. I can't spend all of my time on the SEO options of the software I like. Unfortunately, SEO is a necessary factor when setting up a website.

I had also looked at Drupal for the content management side of the website. I have looked at Drupal for a long time, and I think I even tried it once, but found that it was a bit cumbersome to set-up how I wanted. Sites that are designed with Drupal do seem to do very well in the search engines though. Even their forum sections rank very well. Too bad they don't seem to have all of the nice options of a fuller forum.

That brings me to the forums section of this website. I used PHPBB-SEO as it has all of the features of PHPBB3 and has what appears to be excellent SEO. While it looks very elegant, I'm not sure how it will actually rank in the search engines. I'm going to give it a shot and see what comes of it. Of course, I have to also figure out which articles I will write in the bulletin boards and which articles I'll write in these blogs. I'm thinking it's actually probably better to do these articles in the bulletin boards. I will see if I can add a simple module to joomla to show the most recent forum articles on the home page.

I would like to get back to posting summaries of interesting news articles related to medicine and psychiatry - and that type of information seems to work best in blog. Perhaps I'll keep the main joomla blog for news articles, and keep the bulletin boards for everything else. The blog does allow for comments, but the forums allow for far better interaction.

I'll just have to see how this all goes. Feedback is always appreciated.

I wound up only using Joomla as a way to show the most recent threads of the phpBB forum on the home page. As I finally figured out how to get the recent threads to show up on the index page of phpBB (and they have the SEO friendly URL's to boot), there was no reason left for me to keep Joomla around. I understand that down the road I may want to have additional features that only a CMS can offer. However, I have quite a bit experience with web sites at this point, and I'm just thinking that good SEO forum software is the main thing I need. So far, I've been very impressed with how well phpbb-seo works. We'll see if the recent changes of getting rid of Joomla and moving the forums directly to the root level pays off.