Joomla! - the quickest, easiest way to build a website
If you’ve heard of Open Source software, you’ve heard of Joomla. Well, okay, you may not have heard of Joomla but you have probably heard the concept of Joomla because Joomla is open source. Open source is free and openly available software applications for your personal or commercial use. Yes, you heard it right. Free. Open source consists of software applications that are free and many of them are good. One in particular is Joomla!
Joomla! is a content management system often commonly referred to as CMS. CMS is your best friend when it comes to managing any website with content. Joomla! in particular is easy to install. Customizing how your content will be displayed will likely be the most time consuming thing but it will be the most time consuming thing regardless of the application you use to setup your website.
Joomla! can be installed typically two ways: through your hosting provider or uploading the Joomla! files and running the install on the hosted server. Of course, the latter is easiest because it’s literally point-and-click. WebMom Domains offers Joomla! and other open source applications with every hosting package. Of course, other hosting providers also offer Joomla! and other open source apps as well. You’ll want to check the hosting provider before purchasing a hosting package to ensure they have these apps if that’s your interest. You should also ensure that your hosting provider has Linux running PHP 4 or 5 (5 is recommended) and Apache 1 or 2 (2 is preferred). You can use Windows hosting but personally I think Linux will give you less headaches. Check out Joomla!’s technical requirements.
Just to give you an example of the simplicity of Joomla!, take a look at www.byebyediapers.com. I created this website in TWO hours. Of course, it’s not stellar nor is it complete but what you see took me less time I would have imagined. I installed it through my WebMom Domains hosting account by clicking the Install button.
Just to give you an example of the point-and-click ease of using my WebMom Domain’s hosting, take a look a these screen shots:
When I logged into my hosting account, I selected “Your Applications”
And then I clicked on Content Management on the left and then Joomla!
And then I clicked the red Install button.
For my website ByeByeDiapers.com, during the installation I chose to install Sample Data (which is essentially the Joomla! Demo Website you see on Joomla!). Ideally, you would not chose install Sample Data but I wanted to see what it looked like out-of-the-box.
I made a few changes such as changing the template under Template Manager and what took me the longest was how to figure out the Category, Article and Section Manager. Because I had installed the sample data, I had to disable or rename most of the information (that’s why I wouldn’t recommend installing Sample Data unless you want to play around with it and learn it).
With Joomla! you can get free Joomla! templates or you can pay to purchase premium templates. Just search “joomla template” on Google or your favorite search engine. Also, you can pay a PHP developer who is familiar with Joomla! to customize your Joomla! website. If you’re familiar with elance.com, you can hire a freelance Joomla! expert for a reasonable price.
Also with Joomla!, you can find an endless amount of extensions which really allow for the greatest customization of your website straight out-of-the-box. For example, you can add a Google AdSense Module or extension to display Google AdSense on your site. Or you can add Photo Galleries, Calculators, Maps, Rating systems…the list goes on and on.
You don’t need to know any programming nor do you need to know any HTML to install Joomla! Of course, the more you know, the faster you can get things done. :)