These days it's becoming much easier to create your own website. Building a high quality, search engine and user friendly, usable website that is easily maintainable from anywhere in the world would seem to be a different story.
Content Management Systems (CMS) are software designed to make maintaining a website easier and less demanding for the owner or even the developer. There are many CMS that you can choose from. Some of these cost upwards of $1000, but there are many free options.
Most CMS systems suffer from the same problem, usability. This prevents you from getting the most out of your site.
But With Joomla! ANYONE Can Do It
Joomla! offers near limitless flexibility and expansion, giving it a significant edge over most systems. After splitting from the Mambo CMS project in 2005 the developers introduced the Joomla! project as a freely available open source program. Since then it has been used for everything from simple personal pages to massive corporate sites. This, and many other powerful features have won it numerous awards.
Joomla! can be used - by YOU or any novice user - to very easily manage your website - be it adding new written content or images or updating downloadable documents, taking online reservations or even enabling credit card payment processing.
Joomla! in the real world
Corporate sites, schools, newspapers, magazines, churches, hotels, ecommerce sites and more all make use of Joomla to power their sites.
Why Not A Commercial CMS?
The biggest difference between Joomla and a commercial system is you don't have to pay a penny for all of this power! Few other systems can boast as active of a community as Joomla. There are hundreds of users active every day on their forums providing help for almost issue you could ever face. There are also several thousand extensions written for Joomla, all designed to significantly enhance the capabilities of your site, something you are unlikely to find with any paid system.
What If I Already Have A Site?
If you don't have a team already working on your site that are used to a certain program, Joomla! will almost certainly improve your website experience. You won't need a team anymore, you won't need to learn a lot of programming, the system will just work for you, basically out of the box. It doesn't matter what kind of site you're running now.
If you're looking to update your site faster, and for less money there is no reason not to be using Joomla! It's easily maintainable, very cost-effective and you don't need to rely on expensive designers or developers to update your site.
What About Hosting Joomla Sites?
Most hosts these days can run a Joomla site, but that doesn't mean that most should. You want to make sure to do research on any host you're interested in. Looks for hosts that optimize their servers for Joomla and ask questions to judge if they actually know the software. Try to avoid hosts that practice oversellling. These hosts can generally be recognized by offering hundred of gigabytes of storage and bandwidth (or even unlimited) for just a few dollars per month. By making these offers these hosts are forced to put huge numbers of sites on each server and have a very difficult time running the servers well. People don't realize how much storage they really need. Most Joomla sites will never use more than a few hundred megabytes of storage. If you need a Joomla host check out these guys.
Also check out and Protect Your WordPress Admin
