What kind of website can I have with Joomla!?

Joomla! is extremely flexible and can be used for just about any sort of website you may need. It can be used to manage a simple website, making it far easier to manage and regularly update the site. Joomla! can be used for an ecommerce website, using one of several shopping cart engines. Joomla! can be used for a Intranet site hosting corporate human resource information, discussion forums, company policies and Joomla! can be used to host a blog site. It is unlikely there are many kinds of websites that Joomla! is not flexible enough to handle effectively.

How does Joomla! work?

Joomla! is split into two sections, a public front end which contains the design you have for your site along with all your website content for public consumption and a private back end site only accessible for administration. When you deploy your Joomla! website, you will spend most of your time in the powerful and fun administration back end of your site. Joomla!'s back end closely resembles using a Macintosh computer. It has a menu bar with pull down menus and control panels. The consistent user interface makes it easy to explore your site quickly with powerful searching and sorting of your various site content. All your page creation and editing takes place within your web browser using inline editors that resembling using a word processor like Microsoft Word. The editor allows you to format your page text and insert graphics with ease. When you finish and save the page, it is available to the public immediately.

Why is Joomla! better than using Dreamweaver?

You can still use Dreamweaver for designing the look of your site, in fact Joomla! extensions exist for Dreamweaver making it easier to do so. Joomla! doesn't make your life easier in creating a compelling design for your website, in fact it may make it slightly harder. The benefit is that your entire Joomla! website is driven by a database and is completely interactive. By design, Joomla! has multiple user levels to control access to site content. This includes guests who have not logged into your site. For some sites, you may only want to use this level for all of your general site visitors. If you wish to have users authenticate into your site, you can provide them with site features that are only available if they log in. Further, you can have special users that you promote to a higher level than registered users and provide them with even more limited access content or provide them the ability to submit content to the site. This is where Joomla! becomes extremely powerful. You can delegate the ability to edit sections of the website to those individuals that have the resources for that area. In this way, instead of one person using Dreamweaver to do site updates, the task of keeping content fresh can be delegated out to the staff in each department represented on the website. Another example is if you are a web designer and your client wants to manage their own site once you complete it, Joomla! gives you a tool that you can easily teach them how to add fresh content to their site, while you maintain the authority to make important changes to the basic design and structure.

How do I extend my Joomla! site?

There is a massive online community offering a multitude of tutorials, already built site templates, and Joomla! software that you can install in your Joomla! site to add new features. Some examples include online discussion forums, form design engines, ecommerce, online gallery systems, search engine optimization tools, and many many more some of which are targeted as niche vertical markets like Real Estate, Church websites, and many more examples. The best place the explore is at the Joomla! Extension Directory where you can search and read about various Joomla!! extensions along with reviews posted by other users.

If we have piqued your interested in Joomla!, please contact us to get further information on how you can start using Joomla!! for your own websites.

---

Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites