If you are new to content management systems, you might get lost when you try to use Joomla. While one of the most powerful open-source CMS platforms available today, Joomla is very complex. Some professional web designers and developers love using it, but once turned over to the client, many businesses and business owners find themselves overwhelmed by the many screens necessary to complete simple website modification tasks. At ZakGraphix we find ourselves with the same conundrum. We make it our goal to give our client's the best products, and that means products that work for them. Joomla rarely makes the cut.
Cons:
- Higher learning curve than most CMS's.
- Backend is difficult to use.
- Non-standards based naming system for pages and plugins.
- No upgrade functionality.
- Generated URLs not re-writte/dynamic by default with server engine. (Not an extremely big issue, but they do look nicer.)
- For most business owners, this CMS will be frustrating if they don't have the time to invest in learning it.
This doesn't mean Joomla isn't worth the investment. Due to it's powerful flexibility and expandability, Joomla is the perfect choice for businesses that are willing to put the effort in to wading through the hundreds of tutorials and how-to articles provided by the Joomla community. The open-source extensions available to Joomla actually make it a very powerful solution, but in many cases are virtually a requirement to install. Unlike WordPress, Joomla's URLs aren't SEO friendly. This means that your website have a harder time showing up on the search engines than a site designed in a blogging software. Open source third-party SEO extensions like Smart SEO are your solution to this issue, but they do require maintenance. Since there is no update function for both Joomla itself or its extensions, you have to manually upgrade everything - and this takes time and knowledge
Pros:
- The Joomla Community has terrific resources for those willing to learn.
- There is a number of open-source extensions that extend the functionality of Joomla.
- Joomla is very powerful and can even be turned into an ecommerce store through using extensions.
- Joomla is free!
Doing a search on the web for Joomla review will almost always deliver positive reviews. Please note that all of these reviews are focused towards would-be designers or developers who are thinking about using Joomla to create a website, NOT for a business owner who just needs a website and wants to make his own updates via a simple, user-friendly medium. We've been on the other side of this discussion, receiving hundreds of phone calls from people who are very upset about the steep learning curve and the difficulty they have trying to make the simplest of changes.
Conclusion:
Joomla is perfect for web designers and those companies that have a web design department, have someone with web design knowledge on staff, or outsource their web design modifications to a professional web designer. We do not recommend Joomla for business owners that are looking to use a simple program to make modifications to the pages of their website.
ZakGraphix - "Raising the Standard of Design, One Website at a Time."
Micah Zak
St. Louis Web Design - ZakGraphix.com