Joomla! is a 'free' open source framework and content management system designed for quickly creating highly interactive multi-language web sites, online communities, media portals, blogs and ecommerce applications.

Who uses Joomla?

Joomla! is used all over the world to power everything from simple, personal homepages to complex corporate web applications. Here are just some of the ways this award winning CMS solution is used:

• Corporate websites or portals
• E-Commerce
• Hotel and Tourism websites
• Small business websites
• Non-profit and organizational websites
• Government applications
• Corporate intranets and extranets
• School websites
• Personal or family homepages
• Community-based portals
• Magazines and newspapers
• the possibilities are endless…
  

It can be used to easily manage every aspect of your website, from adding content and images to updating a product catalogue, processing credit card payments or taking online reservations.

What are the differences between Joomla! and commercial CMS solutions?

Unlike commercial solutions that offer different versions according to your budget, Joomla! is available in just one 'everything included' version - and it is released as free software!  Many commercial CMS solutions boast a vast array of modules - in some cases up to 80 of them.

• Joomla! offers an hugeamount of extensions that currently total over 4000
• Joomla! has an active community of more than 200,000 friendly users and developers
  
• This makes Joomla! one of the most supported CMS's on the planet

If your company or organisation hires a third party Joomla! developer or builds in-house software using the Joomla! framework, you are building on an open source platform that does not tie you to a proprietary, closed application, unknown systems. You own your site and can develop it with anyone you choose. This is of huge importance and gives you greater flexibility.

Is a Joomla! CMS website search engine friendly?

• Joomla offers a very versatile best platform to develop sites that meet all the SEO requirements.
• HTML layout is well formed with no nestled tables making it easy to read for crawlers.
• We can apply enhanced SEO configurations to Joomla! that ensure URL's do not have any query strings. The URL's can be of the type www.yoursite.com/pagename.html TheseURL's are extremely Search engine friendly.
• Meta keywords can be defined at a global level (across the site) and also at page level.

Is a Joomla! CMS web site difficult to maintain?

Once Joomla! is installed and running, it is simple for even non-technical users to add or edit content, update images, and to manage the data that promotes your company or organisation. Anybody with basic word processing skills can easily learn to manage a Joomla! site.

Via a simple, browser-based interface you will be able to easily add new press releases, news items, manage staff pages, job listings, product images and create an unlimited amount of sections or content pages on your site.

Is a Joomla! CMS website expensive?

The emergence of powerful, flexible, Open Source CMS's is truly a revolution in web technology. Proprietry CMS's in the past dominated the market with offerings that start at over £ 12,000 and more! Whilst it may seem too good to be true, highly functional CMS platforms are now available without licensing costs.

What is LAMP technology?

As an effective alternative to expensive proprietary software, LAMP technology (Linux + Apache + MySQL + PHP) Open Source technologies are leading the websites and applications development market and have become the platform of choice for developing robust dynamic web solutions at an affordable cost.

Templating with Joomla!

A Joomla template is a series of files within the Joomla! CMS that control the presentation of the content. The Joomla! template is not a website and is not considered a complete web design. The template is the basic foundation that controls how your content will appear to visitors. To produce the effect of a "complete" web design, the template works hand in hand with the content stored in the Joomla databases.

Using a Joomla! templates has a number of advantages:

• There is a complete separation of content and presentation.  This is one of the main criteria’s for a site that meets modern web standards
• Templates can be converted from designs created in Photoshop \ Fireworks \ InDesign to fully W3C compliant Joomla! Templates
• A new template, and hence a completely new look to a website, can be applied instantly. This can even have different locations/positioning of content as well as colours and graphics, an important consideration when the time comes to refresh your site in years to come!
  

What about multi-lingual websites?

Probably one of the biggest advantages of the Joomla!CMS solution is its ability to run multi-lingual web sites with ease and there is only one 'back office' to manage it all! Joomla! recognises a users operating system and automatically displays a site in the users language if it is available

Edit on any browser from any computer!

Editing can be done with any normal web browser from anywhere in the world - or even with your HTML compatible mobile device or iPhone.