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Why Joomla is a good first step

Why Joomla is a good first step

Now you've got your hosting, courtesy of Jack-L.com, and although you know what you are going to put on your site, you haven't finalized what its going to look like or how you're going to build it. Well, before you dig out your 'How to build a website' book or try and dust off your old HTML-2 skills, consider this. Consider Joomla. Joomla is an open source content management system (CMS) that is extremely popular and I'm going to explain why you should at least consider using it.

Opensource - Being open source means that anyone can use it for free - this is an huge cost advantage from the get go. Also, this means that anyone (at least anyone with enough programming skills) can help with the development of the software, so the team of developers is huge. A bit like Wikipedia, which while not perfect is still an amazing resource, Joomla has a vast army of hobbyist contributors, far more people in fact work to improve it than any corporation could ever afford to pay.

Flexible look - You can choose from a wide variety of pre-organized looks, or as Joomla people say, 'themes'. There are many free themes out there, from corporate ones styled a bit like www.o2.co.uk to more funky ones for blogs. Don't worry, there are many small and medium sized businesses that use Joomla themes.

Easy as pie - Joomla is extremely easy to use, you could say it is not so much user friendly as user desperate to please. Once you've got web hosting, you can pretty much install a Joomla Blog on it with the press of a single button. Just look for 'One-click install'.

SEO friendly - If you're not familiar with Search Engine Optimisation already, it's definitely time to get with it. This roughly means getting your site to rank higher in the search engine results. In the last five years or so, SEO has become all important for websites - after all, if you don't appear high in the results - what's the point of having great content.

Plug yourself in - While Joomla has fairly basic functionality, you can install a wide variety of plug-ins which will extend this to include many useful gadgets. For example, if you want your Twitter comments to appear on your website homepage, that's no problem.

How's that for a few simple reasons to use Joomla on your new site?