One of the first questions we often get when talking to potential clients is “Why Joomla?”
In modern web development a content management system of some sort is essential. Web design firms take different approaches to this reality - some build their own, others use commercial solutions, and others utilize open-source software.
When we first went into this web design business, building static HTML sites worked for a while. However, we soon realized our clients needed a way to update their sites themselves, and for most people using Dreamweaver or editing HTML wasn’t practical. So we looked at our options for content management systems. For us, building our own wasn’t practical, we didn’t have the time or resources, and soon realized there was no reason, since many solid solutions already existed. We also focused on open-source software since many of clients are nonprofit and appreciate being as cost effective as possible.
After evaluating many of the open source we settled on Joomla! which at the time was a relatively new CMS. What we found:
- Although Joomla! was a new project, it was a fork of Mambo, which was a stable and mature CMS.
- Joomla! seemed to have a engaged and active developer community. Over the years this proved to be true, as Joomla has continued to make vast improvements. With the release of Joomla 1.7 this year, Joomla took another giant leap in quality.
- Joomla had a good balance of ease of use and flexibility. Some CMSs are much simpler and streamlined, however at the price of being rigid in their structure and setup.
- Many extensions were already available. Over the years the extensions and add-ons available for Joomla have increased in quality immensely - there are now excellent extensions for calendars, e-commerce, galleries, multimedia, online donations and much more. These add-ons create features and functionality on a website that only a few years ago would have been cost-prohibitive.
Five years later, we are very pleased with our choice. We now have over 120 clients using Joomla and managing their websites, some on a daily basis. We are able to offer robust and feature rich websites for clients on a budget that otherwise wouldn’t allow it. Joomla has become a leader in Open Source software, and is used by millions of people throughout the world. This large community of users insures a bright future for Joomla
