Creation of a website is multi-stage process. If you are looking at a fully custom solution, it includes system modeling, creation of a functional specification and a prototype, creation of a testing plan, graphic design integration and development, multi-tier testing, bug fixing, deployment, configuration and, finally, acceptance. All of these activities easily sum up to long weeks and months of work that you may not have. However, a whole lot of users don’t need complex custom solutions with an advanced backend and tons of unique features and would rather prefer a clean and professionally looking site that would deliver their message to the target audience, sell their products or services and allow the site owners to update the online content on their own if need be. This is a common situation among small and medium businesses, non-profits and other organizations where no significant financial investments are possible or planned. In this case, a website based on an easy to use content management system becomes an ideal variant. A content management system is a web-based application underlying an actual website and enabling even inexperienced users to control various aspects of its appearance and behavior using a user-friendly administrative interface. Although there are dozens of content management systems (CMS) available on today’s market, both free and commercial, Joomla is clearly one of the most popular ones.

Joomla is a free open source content management system used in dozens of thousands of websites. It’s popularity can be attributed to the ease of its deployment, flexibility, abundance of configuration options, keen support of the Joomla developers community and a multitude of extensions of all kinds allowing to transform a Joomla-based site into anything you want – from a news website to a full-fledged online store with a searchable catalog of products and various payment gateways. Joomla is written in PHP, an extremely popular online language, and relies on MySQL databases, which simplifies the task of finding a developer for site maintenance and generally lowers its TCO. Every CMS – Joomla being no exception – is based on templates that enable you to modify the content of your pages simply by editing text, adding images and other types of content using a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor. The great thing about this approach is that you don’t have to be a programming guru – in fact, you may not even know how to program – to perform these daily content updates. A template-based engine also enables users to completely change the look of the site simply by applying commercial or free visual themes widely available on the Internet.

The default Joomla package contains everything necessary to configure a standard website and deploy it on your hosting. However, its functionality can be significantly expanded at any moment using third-party modules and add-ons. Owners of international websites will appreciate the ability to quickly install additional languages into the system using downloadable language packs. Joomla offers secure multi-level user authentication and fully-configurable module layouts for all pages. The site admin can manually specify metadata for each dynamic page and enable SEO-friendly URL’s for improved indexing by search engines, set publishing periods for all on-site materials, configure access rights by user types, create multiple contact forms, distribute newsletters to subscribers and fully control all of the additional modules installed in the system. The range of extras that can be installed on Joomla is by no means limited to guestbooks, counters, galleries, statistical tools and other minor plug-ins. Some products, such as VirtueMart, turn any Joomla-based site into a fully-functional online store and enable you to sell your products and services from the same site you used to publish news and articles about your business.

If you are looking for a reliable, scalable and expandable platform for your site, but are not ready to invest fortunes into a custom solutions with all the bells and whistles right away, try Joomla and gradually build upon when necessary. Our team will gladly develop an affordable Joomla-based website for you and your business. If you don’t know where to start, just let us know how you envision you website and how you want to use it. We’ll take care of the rest: hosting, the choice and installation of the right templates, language packs and add-ons, customization, deployment, configuration and training. You will be surprised to see how easy it will be to update your site’s content without changing a single line of code and will never regret choosing Joomla as the foundation of your website – with over a thousand modules available on the market, its capabilities are virtually endless. Give us a call or contact us by email for details about Joomla development and we’ll get back to you right away!