What is Joomla?

Well, first Joomla is a CMS, which means a Content Management System. You will notice that the first word in CMS is "content", that is very important. Joomla allows you to put content on your site through the use of a build in word-processor program. With Joomla, you can log in to the site and edit the site directly in your browser. You can even assign different people to manage various parts of your web site.

You Don't Have To Start From Scratch

There are thousands of templates in every color of the rainbow and in hundreds of styles. These templates are often free or low cost. The template gives you a starting place or in some cases you can just use the template as is. With the average web site development starting at $250 and going as high as thousands of dollars, this represents a hugh savings. You do not have to know programming or HTML. However, it must be noted that Joomla places the responsibility for updating the site to you the client, but the trade-off is you have an easy way to do that...the word processor that is built into Joomla.

Open-Source

 Joomla is open-source. Open source means that there is a hugh community of people, over 200,000, constantly working to make Joomla better, and these improvements are provided for you for free.

Functionality

 Another advantage of Joomla is its increased functionality. If you wanted to add a forum, e-commerce, image gallery, blog, or other functions to your web site often a simple download of something called a "module" or "plug-in" will add that functionality to your site quickly and simply, again saving you hundreds of dollars in redesign cost. Speaking of redesign, because content is stored on a database you could change the "look and feel" of your site simply by downloading and installing a different template.

But why not just use another CMS like Word Press. While Word Press has its merits, its scope and flexibility is more limited. It is mainly a blogging platform and as such is best suited for that kind of web site. While Joomla can be build as a blog site, it can handle all sorts of tasks as mentioned earlier.

Too Good To Be True?

 Yes, Joomla has its detractors. One of the biggest short-comings is with specialty sites with complex dynamic layouts. Some web sites would be a daunting task no matter what you try to use, and trying to force fit them to a template would take just as much development time as doing them from scratch. Another reason for not using Joomla would be if special handcrafted applications need to be incorporated into the site.

When Good is not Good Enough

Something to be noted is from my experience while many people start with a template, few are happy with just leaving it at that. This means that the average person needs help to develop the initial site fully, that is where we come in. We at BIZWEBTECH are experts in developing Joomla sites and recommend it to many of our clients.