Compass Designs

You may have visited one of the other popular blogs about 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 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 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's first non-template club!

One of the most difficult parts in creating a 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!

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!

It seems over at Alledia they have started to do some daily blogging, and much of it seems to be about Joomla SEO. They have another site that's dedicated to that topic. I was browsing it and their SEO recommended tools and saw they had JPromoter at the top of their list. Developed by JoomlaEquipment. I thought I might grab a copy and do a review, after all, I am always interested in anything that will help me with my Joomla SEO ;).
  

We have carried out an extensive comparison of common shopping cart/merchant account solutions. Read more about other providers such as Paypal, or Yahoo, or to learn more about selling online. We have distilled hours of research and price comparisons to help you make the best decision on what path to take. Think of this as your compass!

Over the next few weeks, as promised in our Joomla email newsletter review, I'll be looking at some of the best of breed option for non-Joomla hosted solution for email marketing. As well as functionality and pricing, I'll also be carefully looking at how well they all can integrate into Joomla.

So far we have reviewed Constant Contact, Get Response and Intellicontact.

If you have been around at Compass Designs recently, you will have noticed I have done a redesign. I was using the WordPress component for my blog. I was finding it very difficult to use, so I set myself the goal of trying to set up a blog using just the default features of Joomla and the minimum number of components.