Compass Designs

Yes indeedy....

Does Wordpress have better out of the box SEO than Joomla?

Discuss.. :)

If you didn't know, Brian Clark is the founding editor of Copyblogger, and co-founder of Teaching Sells. I am a daily reader of Copyblogger and have often used him for inspiration for posts here at Compass.

I have been a charter member of his Teaching Sells site since it launched. Quite simply, it teaches you everything you might possibly want to know about building an launching a subscription online learning site. At $97 a month, some might think it expensive, but I consider the value of what I have been learning there ten times that.

As his site has been growing nicely, I was surprised to get an email from Brian telling me he was closing the doors to TS, and gave me a link to an explanation why. (I should add that Brian has used his own TS site as a living example of how to create an online learning website).

Having a form on your website is incredibly useful. Its the easiest way to get information from your site visitors, which is critical for an interactive site. For such a useful and obvious extension, its always surprised me that there were not many options, and even fewer that work on 1.5.

Are you looking for someone to help you with a custom Joomla extension?

Compass Design now offers expert php coding services for Joomla 1.5. We can create extensions from scratch or work to customize existing extensions to your needs.

I was contacted by the GWO team at Google to try and figure out how to integrate their powerful web optimizer tool with Joomla.

With some help from Anthony from Joomla Performance, we were able to get GWO working in Joomla 1.5 (you need to patch a file). 

We all know (hopefully) that a page that loads fast is a very desirable thing for a website. Users like it, Google likes it.

One issue with Joomla 1.5 has been the relatively large size of one of the files that Joomla will load by default: mootools.js. It clocks in at 75kb, which could easily be the largest thing you are loading on your site!

Fortunately, someone else has done some work on how to optimize this file better for your needs.

Over the weekend I had the pleasure of being invited to speak at a class about Open Source Content Management Systems at Marlboro College Graduate Center. Taught by Jen Kramer McKibben, the course is focused on using Joomla to build online communities.