Elxis Team suggestions for your site

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This is a list of our suggestions for your site.
Taken from the Elxis 2008 installler.

Things you should avoid in your site

• Do not install Elxis CMS in a subdirectory.
• Do not create ugly sites! A web site is a mirror of ourselves, or of our company. Spend a little time or money to have the best site possible.
• Do not create an insecure site. Check PHP settings, Elxis CMS settings and your file system. If you are unsure hire a professional.
• Do not install incompatible with Elxis software.
• Do not use modules that you really don't need and most probably none of your visitors use. (i.e. No one visits your site to see what time it is!).
• Do not set PHP in Safe Mode.
• Do not allow user registration except if you really need it.
• Avoid too many javascript and flash in Front-End.
• Do not use gzip except if you see improvement in benchamrk tests.
• Do not use other character encoding than UTF-8. Elxis is optimized for UTF-8 and you can display any language with UTF-8.
• Do not use templates with massive PHP code. A template should be almost only html without PHP logic.
• Avoid using Elxis default template. This is just a sample.
• Avoid the use of the PDF generation feature. It is too CPU consuming.
• Avoid tables and complicated html in your articles.
• Do not use HTML to format text. Use CSS instead.

Things you should do

• Find a good hosting company with good support and secure environment. Don't go to the cheapest one. Imagine what will be the trouble and cost if you loose your site. Consider GO UP Inc. hosting services.
• If you are not familiar with site creation, Content Managment Systems, web, templates, editors, etc., hire professionals. It will cost you some money but it will save you valuable time that you can spend somewhere else. At the end you will have a great site that will be an asset for you and your company.
• Take a database backup regularly using the Elxis CMS backup tool, or other external application.
• Use Elxis CMS "SEO Pro" option. Select good SEO titles related to content.
• Add META keywords and META description everywhere. Don't add too many keywords and long description.
• Use cache. If you do not allow users to register/login in your site and/or you have not many published languages raise cache time to more than 900 seconds (even to 1 day is ok for some sites).
• Use as less Bots as possible and unpublish the ones that you don't need.
• Optimize/Vacuum your database regulary.
• Hide administration login page and/or enable Logins Recorder tool (inspect logs regulary).
• Use FTP access over files. For maximum security disable FTP access when you don't need it and re-enable it before you need to work with files.
• Use xhtml, css valid templates. Validators:
        http://validator.w3.org/,
        http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/,
        http://validator.w3.org/checklink
• In your articles use as less html as possible. Use html elements that have some meaning like h1, h2 and p.
• Your site should give emphasis to content (text).
• Update your site when an update is available from elxis.org.
• Update third party software when an update is available.
• Make a support contract with GO UP Inc. or other authorized partner for your site if you want to be sure that anytime, any problem, will be solved by professionals.
• Buy Elxis book. It will save you time and it will help you a lot.
• Make needed folders and files (like /tmpr and /cache) writable by PHP.
• Use Firefox web browser to administer your site.