Telll what you think. It would be important to me if you mentioned whether you’re a PC geek, or someone trying to market product and not necessarily a programmer..
Hi there,
I would like to start of by saying that I dont have an IT or programming background. I have however operated a number of websites over the last few years and have helped scores of friends with setting up their websites.
I have been involved with setting up Joomla for several ecommerce websites including a very large online travel website.
The benefits of using Joomla as your CMS are as follows:
- Open source so its a free product
- A CMS like Joomla is really easy to use especially if you there is a lot of content and pages.
- There are new Joomla products being developed constantly which can be integrated with the CMS. (not all of those are free of charge though) You can see a list of the Joomla extensions at: http://extensions.joomla.org/
- Easy and fast changes can be made to layout,design, website architecture etc.
Negative Items about Joomla:
- Website visitors can experience a rather slow loading website which can be due to a number of reasons including host.
– Many people complain that all the websites using open source CMS like Joomla all look the same and have the same feel.
- Many industry experts still consider cms systems like Joomla to be somewhat search engine unfriendly due to the dynamic nature of the system and the coding. A website build with a normal html builder such as dreamweaver (http://www.adobe.com/products/dreamweaver/) or Xsite Pro (http://xsitepro.com/) normally produces much better results in the SERPS in both the short and long run.
– Developement and support of a number of open source CMS systems have over the years suddenly stopped leaving website owners with no where to go when their system breaks down or changes are needed.
This has happened to CMS systems which at one time were very popular as Joomla is now. A commercial CMS system will allow for you to receive support fast and efficiently.
Good luck with making the right choice and don’t forget to visit the open source csm website where they offer test versions of all major open source cms systems. You can find the site at: http://www.opensourcecms.com/
2 Responses
George V
2009 Jul 11 1Hi there,
I would like to start of by saying that I dont have an IT or programming background. I have however operated a number of websites over the last few years and have helped scores of friends with setting up their websites.
I have been involved with setting up Joomla for several ecommerce websites including a very large online travel website.
The benefits of using Joomla as your CMS are as follows:
- Open source so its a free product
- A CMS like Joomla is really easy to use especially if you there is a lot of content and pages.
- There are new Joomla products being developed constantly which can be integrated with the CMS. (not all of those are free of charge though) You can see a list of the Joomla extensions at: http://extensions.joomla.org/
- Easy and fast changes can be made to layout,design, website architecture etc.
Negative Items about Joomla:
- Website visitors can experience a rather slow loading website which can be due to a number of reasons including host.
– Many people complain that all the websites using open source CMS like Joomla all look the same and have the same feel.
- Many industry experts still consider cms systems like Joomla to be somewhat search engine unfriendly due to the dynamic nature of the system and the coding. A website build with a normal html builder such as dreamweaver (http://www.adobe.com/products/dreamweaver/) or Xsite Pro (http://xsitepro.com/) normally produces much better results in the SERPS in both the short and long run.
– Developement and support of a number of open source CMS systems have over the years suddenly stopped leaving website owners with no where to go when their system breaks down or changes are needed.
This has happened to CMS systems which at one time were very popular as Joomla is now. A commercial CMS system will allow for you to receive support fast and efficiently.
Good luck with making the right choice and don’t forget to visit the open source csm website where they offer test versions of all major open source cms systems. You can find the site at: http://www.opensourcecms.com/
References :
http://www.ihub.info/
anothersillypersonalsname
2009 Jul 11 2The previous answer was fairly accurate, but I would like to weigh in on the comment about losing support by going Open Source.
I am not sure how much experience they have in vendor supported software, but there is almost always a timeline for when the product support is discontinued. Purchasing software does not guarentee support forever.
By using Open Source the value proposition is that you have the source code so that you might support it yourself if necessary, vendors never do this, they just try to sell you the upgrade.
Joomla is pretty good, I have been using it a fair amount lately. It isn’t the most intuitive software I have ever used. You can also look at Mambo which Joomla was forked from.
If you can write a little PHP and HTML/CSS you can overcome the problem of the sites all looking alike, and Joomla has an option for Search Engine friendly URL’s, but in my experience that isn’t that big of a deal. Google has been dealing with dynamic sites for a while now. Very few relevant sites have no dynamic links/content.
References :
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