There are an increasing number of companies that want to have their own website that they want to manage by themselves. Creating a website takes a lot of work and if you don’t have a website designer onboard your team, you will have to hire a freelancer to do it for you or seek professional help from the many website design companies out there.

This is okay especially if the freelancer or company has a huge reputation in building quality websites that suit your needs, but when your website needs updates to keep your visitors informed, you will need to rely on them once again and that means more money spent. To solve this problem, more experienced freelancers and web design companies set up CMS or Content Management Systems so that after everything is all set up, users can control and update varies areas of the site without the need of web designing knowledge. CMS is basically a web interface that makes adding and removing site content much easier. Some content management systems are created from scratch and are more expensive if you ask for a custom CMS while others use free open source alternatives like Joomla.

Joomla is based on another open source content management system called Mambo. Since it hasn’t been updated in the past year, Joomla continues to dominate as one of the leading free content management systems available primarily because of its ease of use and installation. It has won several awards including the Packt Publishing Open Source Content Management System Award for two consecutive years.

Joomla! Features
Joomla gives the freedom of users to place all kinds of different content on their website including ordinary text for articles, photos for galleries, music and videos for sharing, and other documents and downloadables. On its own, it can be used to create full community portals that are very informative to users. All of the content can be updated by people who have access to the administrator’s account.

Joomla also has a templating system that allows different themes that are shared by the Joomla community and developers to be used to add uniqueness to the website or to match it with any logos that are used to make things match more. Advanced web designers may customize the template to their liking, but with so many free Joomla templates available, first time users should have no trouble finding a perfect layout and theme for anything that they are setting up on Joomla.

Through the use of extensions, additional functionality is provided allowing webmasters to use for E-commerce purposes or any other functions that are needed for small businesses and communities to operate fully online. Many extensions can be found on the Joomla website and should open all kinds of different possibilities in designing a feature-rich website.

Joomla! Requirements
Joomla is powered by PHP and the content utilizes MySQL databases for storage so your host must have PHP version 4.2 or above and MySQL 3.23 or above. Apache 1.3 or greater is also required for Joomla to function correctly. Be sure to check your host’s cPanel because it might have Joomla available as a one-click installation.

Joomla is an excellent cost-saving option in making a fully functional website. If you study the documentation enough, you can independently set up your own website and template independently.