Joomla CMS, an award winning software

Joomla – An Overview

Why CMS?

Content is the most crucial part of any website. It is the things of past where the websites were consisted of mostly static pages. Web portals and web communities have to update their content not just daily but a few times a day. All sorts of businesses need to provide up-to-date information about their products and services on their web sites. So managing and organizing this growth in content has become very critical nowadays.
Development and maintenance of website is a technical task, and if your website is dynamic then constant up-gradation is required. You need to recruit qualified technical people to keep track of your content and website up-gradation. This is a very tedious job and human is error prone, so to overcome this difficulty software called content management systems (CMS) is launched, of which Joomla, a free award winning software.

What is Joomla?

According to Wikipedia, Joomla is a content management system (CMS), which enables you to build Web sites and powerful online applications. Many aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility, have made Joomla the most popular Web site software available.

Features of Joomla:

• Flexible and easy to use: Many web designers wish for a CMS that provides a lot of flexibility while designing a website. Joomla gives them more scope while working on a website. Functions like editing, deleting, adding, updating texts, photos, images, and pages on their website should not be very complicated. Joomla CMS is the answer to all their needs.
   
• User friendly: Basically a CMS enables you to manage and control the presentation of the contents of the website. The contents of a website may include texts, images, music or documents. To manage these contents in a professional manner, the website needs to be designed with a competent CMS. Joomla is a fantastic CMS which is very user-friendly. You needn’t to be an HTML expert or some kind of technical nerd to design any website using Joomla.
   
• Absolutely free: Joomla is absolutely free. It is a free open source CMS, so you do not have to pay a single penny to use this system.
   
• Easy to Install: Many web hosting packages now include the Joomla software and it is very easy to install. Initial customization of Joomla may require some help from a technical person and includes setting up the basic template. The template includes the web site design and navigation system. This template contains a few editable areas but the overall look and flow of the site remains consistent throughout the site. All you need to start using Joomla and become familiar with its features which are similar to any word processing software.
  
  
• Easy to maintain and update: A website designed using Joomla is also very easy to maintain and update. You do not have to depend on any professional to maintain or update your website. You can do it yourself by learning from the Joomla video courses that are available online.
   
• Automated templates: Joomla uses a simple browser-based user interface for managing various aspects of the site. Through easy-to-use web based forms, you can update image or text content, set it up to take sales orders, create new content sections or pages, manage your employee listings as well as contact information, or even regularly update your product catalog. When you want to change the appearance of the entire site, all you need to do is make changes in one template file to have it reflected throughout the site.
   
• Add-on's and plug-ins to facilitate the use of even more features: Joomla has the ability to provide your clients with ample of free plugins, modules and components for their sites. These things all extend the basic functionality of Joomla, allowing you to create anything from a small business website to a fully functioning corporate website with an integrated backend. Most of them can be downloaded for free, offering your clients feature rich and interactive tools for their site bound to keep their customers engaged and coming back for more. Some of them do have a fee but are more reliable as well as more feature rich than other CMS plug-ins.
   
• SEO and joomla: SEO(Search engine optimization) is the key of success of any website, so if you are creating a website that is not accessible to search engines, then you exist nowhere. Since 90% of the traffic comes through search engines only, that’s why web developers were constantly forced to weigh the ease and organization of a Content Management System with the priority of search engine presence. Joomla provides many features which makes your website familiar with search engines like search engine friendly urls that end with .html or .htm and don't have a '?' or other special characters, using Joomla each page can be easily customized for Title and Meta tags that prevent duplication, which is a negative seo-factor. With Joomla, you can customize 404 error page and also keep track of the broken links people are using to surf your site. Since blogs offer a unique personalized tone to your approach towards your target traffic. Joomla offers user-friendly tools to post your blogs online without much effort. Submission of sitemap to Google, Yahoo, and other popular Search Engines will help to index your site quickly, with Joomla, a sitemap(component or extension)of your website, html or xml based can be automatically generated. Newsletter forms a vital ingredient of a successful commercial website. You can remain in touch with your customers and prospects with this feature, which can be integrated through a customized newsletter extension in your Joomla.
   
• Simple to add new features: Joomla also makes it very simple to add new powerful features to your web site with just a click of a button. You can choose from any of the hundreds of extensions available - document management which allows you to index the kinds of documents on your web site, track the changes in them and make them easily searchable; image and multimedia galleries; forums and chat software; blogging software; mailing list management; shopping cart and complete e-commerce software; Web standards upgrades; Workflow management and many more.
   

 Summary: In all, Joomla is a very powerful software that allows users to develop and maintain dynamic web sites. If you're building a new web site or renovating your existing site, you can take the help of Joomla CMS software. While non-technical users can use Joomla to manage various aspects of the site including the content very easily, more technical users can use add-ons to make the site more powerful and actually build large-scale online applications. Joomla is being used to power all kinds of web sites - simple, personal or family sites; small business web sites as well as more complex corporate intranets and extranets; community portals; magazines and newspapers; government applications and so on.