Although I have been involved in IT for more years than I care to mention, one area, until recently left me cold, namely website design.
Having spent sometime a few years ago learning HTML I just felt that it was too ungainly a way to design a website. Options such as investing in Dreamweaver had too much investment, both in terms of time and cost.
A few years on and the market has changed completely, products such as Joomla (www.joomla.org) have brought website creation and design within reach of many.
For me, the biggest benefit of Joomla is the separation of design and content. The “look and feel” of the website is defined by a template, of which there are many available. www.yootheme.com and www.rockettheme.com are two I have used. The content is held in a database (MySQL) and is accessed via an administration back-end.
The system is very modular and third-party add-ons are abundant. Community support for the product is excellent with a very active forum.
Once your site is up and running, you can hand it to your content creators and let them run wild, creating content as easily as writing a Word document. This is a great way to hand power to the people that require it. I am a great believer that content is king, and this enables non-technical users to keep website content bang up to date.
As far as administration of the back-end system goes, true, you still have to learn the ins and outs of LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) if you want to host your own solution, but there are many great hosting packages available that will install all the required back-end software you need to get Joomla up and running.
