With the launch of several new sites, I got to choose some new templates, which I love to do. I know, I get distracted by stuff like that all the time.

But I must say, there are some really hot templates out there now for Joomla 1.5. So, I went hunting. Three new sites, three new templates. They looked and performed beautifully in all web browsers, except one.

And that one browser - AOL. Since the AOL customer base is around 29 million subscribers and most of them actually surf the web without leaving AOL, I need a template that can stand up to American On Line's quirky, bastardized version of Internet Explorer and deal with AOL's need to disable your java scripts.

The customer base is just too big to ignore and after viewing all the new sites in AOL, every single new template had to be discarded. Then it occurred to me, I'd just implemented new templates on all my old sites to freshen them up. I said the F word very loudly, followed by the S word and then the M word.

After I calmed down, and looked at the old sites, I realized I only had two minor templating problems, so here is a public thank you to Joomlashine and PixelBunny for designing complex templates that stood up to AOL. (And also a very public thank you to all of the of designers who've contributed free templates to the Joomla community, even though I’m going to beat you up in this article.)

Now, this is an old problem. Computer people who design programs and templates, by in large, despise AOL and it's users ("get a real browser" is the most polite thing they'll say.) They think the world should be looking at the web from Firefox browser. The Microsoft Internet Explorer leaves you open to all kinds of exploits, and almost any other browser is better. I think IE is up to version 7. AOL uses version 5, a gutted version 5.

As someone who's in business on the web and has had an AOL account for at least 15 years, I have to disagree with the geeks, strongly. Most computer people believe that the end user is much more savvy about computers than they actually are, and that's where all the problems begin.

I'm techie enough to get things done on the back end of a website and run a pretty complex CMS (content management system.) But I use IE to browse and AOL (actually Compuserve, which used to have great tech forums before AOL acquired it,) for personal emails. I have enough things to think about and these two companies make the user experience as easy as possible.

AOL is not going to change anytime soon. They offer safe browsing for their clients, which means their viewer is crappy and they disable everything they can which can negatively impact their end users home computers. Yes, they'll kill your java scripts that run the collapsible menus, and leave your beautiful tableless CSS templates with overlapping elements.

There's a reason WordPress has become popular. Templating is rarely an issue, making it easy for a blogger to move on to other things, like lets say, actually blogging.

I've seen a bunch of major corporations make the same mistake with choosing new templates. Which is why the home pages for websites like AT&T are as simple as you can get. You have no idea of the complex code that sits behind most of these websites. And that's exactly the way they want it to be.

Since I'm greedy, and I want my share of business from AOL's 29 million strong base, I was up until 2 in the morning looking a templates. Then I got up around 5:30 (my eyelid started to twitch when I wrote that) to keep looking for templates. I've found one so far that was perfect and looks great on AOL.

Two more to go.

The trademarks for AOL and AT&T are owned by their respective companies. Joomla! is one of the most powerful Open Source Content Management Systems on the planet. It is used all over the world for everything from simple websites to complex corporate applications. Joomla! is easy to install, simple to manage, and reliable.