Compass Designs .net

Joomlashack's Inspirion Joomla Template is one of the most innovative templates currently on the market. Its built using the 960 grid, a CSS system that gives you a tableless layout and a fast loading site, great for SEO!

Its one of the first commercial professional templates to validate XHTML Strict. This is a high benchmark to meet, and provides a great foundation to help you site rank in search engines.

On top of that, Inspirion has a full set of core Joomla template overrides. This means that your Joomla Joomla 1.5 site will be shown with no tables at all and makes use of semantic headings (h1-h3). I'll give you one guess why that is good!

I think that the Inspirion Joomla template might be the best template around for SEO right now. Making sure your template helps your SEO efforts, rather than hurts them, involves lots of factors, tabless layouts, valid code, semantic headings, SEO-friendly logo replacement- Inspirion has it all.

Joomla 1.5.11 has been released, and it includes security patches, so its important to update. But getting your Joomla Joomla site upgraded to the new version can be tricky, especially if you are using FTP.

Fortunately, there is an easier way, check out Joomlashack's tutorial How to Update Joomla 1.5 Versions.

I was excited to come across a recent blog post about free Joomla templates, and their quality. Excited because Joomlashack managed to snag not just the #1 for Jamba, but also the #4 spot for Optimus!

Of course, having people validate how great you think your stuff is is great and all, but with respect to the free templates, I was especially pleased.

Joomlashack takes its free templates very seriously. We don't consider them commercial link-bait, or poor quality PR engines. Since 2005 we have seen our free templates as our contribution to the community. In fact, we have 14 free templates available, 18 if you include the Joomla Template Tutorial ones, and only 14 commercial ones! Not only that, the quality is top-notch, what many expect from a commercial Joomla template, for example:

Follow @compassdesign on Twitter and you might just find yourself winning awesome prizes from Joomlashck and Joomla Simplweb - over a $1,000 given away yesterday. How do you get in on the next Tweetaway?

Last week we held our first Tweetaway, and it didn't disappoint. Over a couple hours we gave away more than $1,000 worth of prizes, including:

• Five copies of Inspirion, our new Joomla 1.5 template, at $39.95 each
• Five of any Joomla 1.5 commercial templates, at $39.95 each
• One Developer Club Membership, a $399 value!
• Three "Websites for Life" from our friends at Simplweb.com, valued at $24.99/month for the life of the website!

You may have noticed that Joomlashack is now running on Joomla Joomla 1.5. We did a stealth migration yesterday.

We had one problem we needed to address, and it took a while to figure out, so we thought we would share the solution for others.

Our old site used Joomla Joomla 1.0, as I have mentioned before, we wanted to make sure we did a 301 redirect of the Joomla URL's so Google would quickly pick up the new ones and pass the pangerank to the new pages. The problem however was that our 1.0 site used the raw URL:

http://www.joomlashack.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=37

We rapidly discovered that mod-write unfortunately will basically ignore all the php parameters here. You can't get rewrite to pay any attention to them.

Support these five charities, but vote for just one!

Last month we asked our Joomlashack community to nominate their favorite charity for a $1,000 USD cash prize. Within 10 days, we had nominees from all corners of the globe and doing incredibly diverse work. Our team carefully reviewed every entry and then narrowed our list down to the five nominees below as our favorite five.

Please check out and then support each of these excellent and deserving organizations with an online contribution, and then vote for the charity that you think is most deserving of our $1,000 USD cash prize.

Voting ends Sunday, January 4th at 11:59pm EST

We wish all of you peace on earth and goodwill toward men, women, children, animals, and our precious planet.