What exactly is Joomla?

Joomla! has become 'the' most powerful Open Source Content Management System on the planet. It is a 'free' open source framework and content publishing system designed for quickly creating highly interactive multi-language Web sites, online communities, media portals, blogs and eCommerce applications. The name 'Joomla' is Swahili for 'all together'.

Who uses Joomla!... apart from us?

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
Real Estate Agent Websites
Online commerce
Hotel and Tourism websites
Small business websites
Non-profit and organizational websites
Government applications
Corporate intranets and extranets
School and church websites
Personal or family homepages
Community-based portals
Magazines and newspapers

the possibilities are seemingly 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.

The difference between Joomla! and commercial CMS solutions?

Unlike commercial solutions that offer different versions according to your budget, Joomla! is available in just one 'all encompassing' version - and it is cost free. Many commercial CMS solutions boast a vast array of modules - in some cases up to 80 of them. Joomla! offers an awesome amount of extensions that currently numbers at 4306. Joomla! has an active community of more than 200,000 (validated) friendly users and developers.

A big advantage you should not overlook...

If your company or organization hires a third party Joomla! developer such as 'ewebcraft' or builds in-house software using the Joomla! framework, you are building on an open platform that does not tie you to any one design company, developer or to a proprietary, closed application. You own your site and can develop it with anyone you choose. This is of huge importance if things begin to go wrong with your current design company. Be smart - use Joomla!

Is a CMS website search engine friendly?

CMS offers the 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 ensure that URL's do not have any query strings. The URL's can be of the type www.yoursite.com/pagename.html Such URL'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 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 critical data that makes your company or organization effective. Anybody with basic word processing skills can easily learn to manage a Joomla! site.

Is a Joomla! CMS website expensive?

The emergence of powerful, flexible, Open Source CMS's is truly a revolution in web technology. Firms like Interwoven, Broadvision, and of course Microsoft, have in the past dominated the CMS market with offerings that start at Euro 12,000 (plus plus PLUS)!
Whilst it may seem too good to be true, highly functional CMS platforms are now available without licensing costs. It is true!
Today, 'ewebcraft' can develop a Joomla based (CMS) web site for almost the same cost as a static site.

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.

What about multi-lingual web sites?

Probably one of the biggest advantages of our CMS solution is its ability to run multi-lingual web sites - 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. Of course users may switch to other languages as they wish.
'ewebcraft' has designed and developed a 2 language hotel site for the saborea (including Russian) and maintaining the site is very simple for our client. The site also ranks very well indeed in the Google search engines of all the languages used.

Decentralised Editing on any browser!

Editing can be done with any normal web browser from anywhere in the world - or with your iPhone :)

Peter Russell, Joomla's PR guru and core team member says

"Palheiro Golf website demonstrates the maturity of open source solutions for complex multi-lingual delivery. Less than five years ago a content management system such as Palheiro Golf has implemented would have cost many tens of thousands of euros ... Joomla! delivers (with the assistance of professional developers) for a fraction of that."

"Open Source software such as Joomla! redefines what a small, medium and even enterprise business can achieve without being tied to proprietary software. More flexiblity, more power and more potential without the associated costs. More and more we're seeing people moving to Joomla! and other open source web applications because there is so much scope for extending features right out of the box."

Simply contact us for a hands-on demonstration and see how Joomla! and our professional development skills can help you and your company to become highly competitive on the world wide web.