Why use Joomla for web design?

The fact,Joomla is one of the easiest ways to quickly design and create your own website. You can easily create a wonderful looking website with loads of functionality. Wordpress is another way to create and manage your own website - but more on Wordpress somewhere else.

Joomla started life as an Open source Content Management System called Mambo. In August 2005 a split took place between the core developers of Mambo and the owners of the Mambo name. The developers decided to continue the development of this software under the name Joomla and most of the community that previously supported Mambo have now thrown in their weight behind the new product.

You can install Joomla from the Fantastico Panel inside the cpanel that comes with all the hosting companies. You need to have PHP and a MySQL database available, but these are also included with ALL the hosting companies, so it really is easy to get it up and running on your site.

If you would like to see Joomla in action, you can check out this demo site:

http://demo.joomla.org

In this demo you will see the front end of Joomla ( in other words, an example of a website that you can build with Joomla).

You can also log into the administrator section, where you would go to add new content (in other words, text, pictures, file downloads etc) to your site. Select the administrator option and use the username and password provided on the site to play around with the back end of the site.

But what if you don't like the look and feel of this site?

No problem! Joomla has literally hundreds of free templates available - one of my favourite sites is this one - Mambo Hut, your source for free Mambo/Joomla templates!

Joomla comes with a lot of built-in functionality but there are also thousands of free components and modules that you can add on to expand the functionality.

The other nice thing about Joomla is that there are lots of forums that offer free support and guidance. The problem normally with freeware is that support is provided not through any licensing fees that you pay, but through a community that all contribute and therefore gain themselves in the long term. Joomla has a very active community, and it is therefore very easy to get support for any possible problem.

The Joomla forum and all the extensions to Joomla in the form of components and modules can be found on http://www.joomla.org

Posted in: Joomla Help