Foggy Bottom Web Design

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We have had an "on-again" "off-again" relationship with Joomla for the past 5 years. We tried it back when it was Mambo. Then after Joomla emerged we tried its content management system. It was slow, buggy and easily hacked. We decided to wait until it was ready for prime time. Interestingly, it was always the requests of clients that got us to look at it again. Once I told a client that building sites in Joomla! is like playing the piano while wearing leather gloves. It's harder to get a good feel for what's underneath. That's a PHP programmer's bias because most like to isolate problem causing code and that's harder to do in Joomla! Joomla! uses a MVC architecture that is as sophisticated as any out there. And the fact that it is written in PHP makes it accessible, once one is past the learning curve for how it likes to assimilate and access the different components, plug-ins and modules that make a site work. The people for whom Joomla! is great fit are those who publish large amounts of information that needs to be categorized for ease of retrieval. If you are building a website for articles on better nutrition or baseball players then Joomla can save you many hours and dollars through its ability to easily retrieve and present the information. Joomla is NOT a good fit for beginners. Just setting up a simple menu link will seem alien to those with experience in static HTML pages. The nomenclature can also be misleading. For example, the "Front Page" may or may not be what people see when they come to your site. it's up to you. Joomla! is so flexible that sometimes that overly complicates getting comfortable with it. Joomla! boasts "Search Engine Friendly" links. They can be. They can also be a source of perpetual misery, depending upon how deeply nested your categories are. If you are committed to having a Joomla! site we recommend the following: 1). Budget at least $200.00/month for general site maintenance. Joomla updates, table repairs new module installations, not to mention site backups can easily consume 3 to 5 hours. You will generally find it cheaper to hire a Joomla pro than to train an employee to keep things up. 2). Hire someone to custom write components and modules for you when the "off the shelf" stuff doesn't work as you want it to. Joomla! has matured to the point that you can probably find relatively inexpensive extent ions that will do most of what you want, but you should not settle for something cheaper if the work it needs to do is critical to your success. You already saved a bundle on the FREE Joomla! code. Spend some savings on making sure things work properly. One word of caution: TEST ALL NEW SOFTWARE LOCALLY before you deploy it on your live site. Even then, the subtle differences you may encounter in a shared hosting environment can mean that the component that worked on your testing server will not work without adjustment on a shared hosting setup.

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