Get the 411 on Joomla!

Before content management systems became widely available, every part of a website needed to be meticulously developed by a programmer. This was lucrative for web designers, but expensive for their clients!

With the advent of content management systems like Joomla, it suddenly became possible to obtain pre-packaged specialized website capabilities (called extensions) that could be installed on an existing website with the click of a button, with no need to code anything from scratch. This drastically reduced the need for hand coding and saved a significant percentage of the time previously required to develop a website. It also meant that many tasks previously left to web designers could now be accomplished quickly and easily by website owners themselves.

10 Reasons we love Joomla!

Even a highly sophisticated website can be built for a few thousand dollars using Joomla! and a basic business website costs significantly less than that. There are many advantages to using Joomla!

1. Professional: Joomla gives you a professional website that complies fully with today's web design standards and regulations.
2. SEO-Friendly: Joomla websites are SEO-friendly by design and additional tweaking to SEO can be done right in your site's Administrator area.
3. Cheaper:  Joomla sites are relatively quick for designers to make, and additional functions come pre-packaged as free or low-cost extensions that do not require significant coding expertise to install or configure. Less development time means lower cost to the client.
4. Extensible: The Joomla! community offers thousands of free and low-cost ready-to-install extensions that can be added to your website quickly and easily: blogs, forms, email marketing, business directories, membership sites, portals, and just about anything else you can think of.
5. Quick: Joomla sites can be deployed in days rather than weeks or months.
6. Non-technical: Free yourself from having to know or use HTML, CSS or web publishing software (DreamWeaver, etc.), because Joomla uses a simple wysywig content editor much like Microsoft Word.
7. Independence-creating: Stop having to rely on (or pay) a web designer to make day-to-day content changes/additions for you.
8. Portable: It is fast and easy to move a Joomla website from one host to another, or to clone a copy of your existing website.
9. Fresh and Modern: A complete aesthetic make-over of a Joomla website (to give it a brand new new look and feel) can be accomplished in hours, and there is no need to redesign the entire website.
10. Open Source: Joomla! is open-source software (rather than proprietary), and the Joomla! development community is huge! This means there is a great deal of support - by tens of thousands of users - for the creation of new Joomla extensions, and for the continual development and improvement of the core Joomla software.

In case you're wondering, here is a comparison of Joomla to WordPress and Drupal

WordPress: If you are creating a blog, and a blog is all you ever want, then WordPress is a great choice. It is simple to use but is still essentially a blogging platform and is not very scalable in terms of how you can make it grow. This is slowly changing as WordPress adds functions in order to play catch-up with Joomla and Drupal, but it is still essentially a blogging tool.

Drupal: If you want a highly sophisticated and scalable website that will require PHP development expertise (or the money to pay for it), then Drupal is the way to go. Drupal is favored by many programmers and coders:  it is highly sophisticated and scalable,  but is best suited to tech-savvy users or clients with the money to pay a programmer or coder.

Joomla!: If you want a website that is sophisticated and scalable like a Drupal site, but developer-friendly like a WordPress site, then go with Joomla! Joomla combines the best features of the other two content management systems.  

With more than a decade of development under its belt, Joomla! now has the largest support community on the web and the largest repository of free and commercial extensions available for any CMS. This growing community continues to produce ready-to-install website extensions (components, modules and plugins), as well as highly professional pre-designed websites looks, called "templates" or "themes", that can be modified and customized to create a custom style very quickly and with minimum effort. Using Joomla! allows web designers to eliminate virtually all custom coding and graphic design, which saves you time and money.

Joomla is so much more than just a powerful content management system.

Here is a list of features "out of the box," but the true power of Joomla is in its extensibility.

• User Management - Joomla has a registration system that allows users to configure personal options. There are nine user groups with various types of permissions on what users are allowed to access, edit, publish and administrate. Authentication is an important part of user management and Joomla support multiple protocols, including LDAP, OpenID, and even Gmail. This allows users to use their existing account information to streamline the registration process.

• Media Manager - The Media Manager is the tool for easily managing media files or folders and you can configure the MIME type settings to handle any type of file. The Media Manager is integrated into the Article Editor tool so you can grab images and other files at any time.

• Language Manager - There is international support for many world languages and UTF-8 encoding. If you need your Web site in one language and the administrator panel in another, multiple languages are possible.

• Banner Management - It's easy to set up banners on your Web site using the Banner Manager, starting with creating a client profile. Once you add campaigns and as many banners as you need, you can set impression numbers, special URLs, and more.

• Contact Management - The Contact Manager helps your users to find the right person and their contact information. It also supports multiple contact forms going to specific individuals as well as groups.

• Polls - If you want to find out more about your users, it's easy to create polls with multiple options.

• Search - Help navigate users to most popular search items and provide the admin with search statistics.

• Web Link Management - Providing link resources for site users is simple and you can sort them into categories, even count every click.

• Content Management - Joomla's simplified system of article storage makes organizing your content a snap. You can organize your content any way you want and not necessarily how it will be on your Web site. Your users can rate articles, e-mail them to a friend, or automatically save a PDF (with UTF-8 support for all languages). Administrators can archive content for safekeeping, hiding it from site visitors. On public Web sites, built-in e-mail cloaking protects email addresses from spambots. Creating content is simple with the WYSIWYG editor, giving even novice users the ability to combine text, images in an attractive way. Once you've created your articles, there are a number of pre-installed modules to show the most popular articles, latest new items, newsflashes, related articles, and more.

• Syndication and Newsfeed Management - With Joomla, it's easy to syndicate your site content, allowing your users to subscribe to new content in their favorite RSS reader. It's equally easy to integrate RSS feeds from other sources and aggregate them all on your site.

• Menu Manager - The Menu Manager allows you to create as many menus and menu items as you need. You can structure your menu hierarchy (and nested menu items) completely independent of your content structure. Put one menu in multiple places and in any style you want; use rollovers, dropdown, flyouts and just about any other navigation system you can think of. Also automatic breadcrumbs are generated to help navigate your site users.

• Template Management - Templates in Joomla are a powerful way to make your site look exactly the way you want and either use a single template for the entire site or a separate template for each site section. The level of visual control goes a step further with powerful template overrides, allowing you to customize each part of your pages.

• Integrated Help System - Joomla has a built-in help section to assist users with finding what they need. A glossary explains the terms in plain English, a version checker makes sure you're using the latest version, a system information tool helps you troubleshoot, and, if all else fails, links to a wealth of online resources for additional help and support.

• And best of all... Powerful Extensibility - The real power of Joomla is in the way you customize it. Visit the Joomla Extensions Directory to see thousands of ways to enhance Joomla to suit your needs.