Compass Designs .net

Over the last year, I have seen a continuing trend in Joomla Joomla templates that are being produced; they seem to be getting bigger and bigger in file size and filled with more and more widgets and gizmos. This thought occurred to me again when Steve of alledia.com launched "The World's Fastest Joomla Joomla Template" (a claim we'll put to the test shortly).

Steve and I (and Google as it happens) agree that light is good, heavy is bad. I would even go so far as to say that source ordering is important as well (aka tableless layout) so you critical content appears as close to the top as possible.

Now, when you try to compare load times, its easy to get in a mess quickly. You can't just check the demos of Joomla template sites. The demos are full of rich image eye candy. Speed will be server dependent too.

So, I tried to get my hands on as many templates as I had appropriate licenses for, and decided to load up a single site, with consistent content and see what we found.

Every now and again, you find an extensions for Joomla Joomla thats so simple and just does its job perfectly. No fuss or mess, it just works.

I recently was hunting around for a shoutbox, one of those little Ajax widgets where people can just type in comments and it appears. Kind of like a persistent chat.

Answer: When the traffic goes elsewhere!

A review of my Joomla book was on Slashdot.com earlier today. Fortunately, there was no links to my site, that would have crushed the poor VPS I run on.

You may have visited one of the other popular blogs about Joomla Joomla at alledia.com. It's written by a fellow Brit living in the US, Steve Burge (he is going to be a fellow instructor at the upcoming Joomla University in Chicago). He recently wrote a post phpBB3 Integration Can Be The Joomla 1.5 Killer App. As we often seem to do, he scooped me on a post I had started to write about the exact same topic, thinking about what Joomla Joomla 1.5's Killer "must have" application might be.

I think I might offer some different answers than his thoughts about forums though.

I feel I am pretty knowledgeable here at Compass about SEO, heck, I even wrote a Joomla book or two about it. I also know a good deal when we see one.

Last year Steve Burge of www.alledia.com came up with a new club concept, the Joomla SEO club. He had already written a great ebook about SEO, and then he bundled it together with online access and a forum to create Joomla Joomla's first non-Joomla template club!

One of the most difficult parts in creating a Joomla Joomla website is achieving a professional looking layout on your pages. This has a lot do do with how you place your content, images and white space. Joomla sites tend to look the same and be locked into that portal look. You can always tell a site that has been created by a professional Joomla developer/designer, because it won't look like Joomla Joomla!

This is first of a series of reviews that look at how you can break out of that Joomla look, without having to pay a designer. After all, the point of Joomla is to save money by doing it yourself!