I'm Creating a New Website - Do You want to help....

Hey Debbie,
I have no idea the level of your experience with Joomla, so I'll just tell you my experiences, and what I've learned about Joomla from my own trial and error. I had been building web sites on top of a Joomla installation for about 3 or 4 years until I switched almost exclusively to Wordpress or my own Rails concoction - whichever works best.

Joomla is outstandingly flexible among CMS's. You can have an unlimited number of pages, and with module tweaking each page can have a completely look and different feel, all while maintaining the sites overall theme. Or each page can have a different theme if that's your thing.

Flexibility is probably, to me, Joomla's greatest strength, that and the extraordinarily vast pool of third party modules, components and plugins, which can make it very, very powerful.

But, while Joomla! is a great content manager, it has some huge weaknesses, especially in the new 1.5 version. I haven't messed with it in a while, so they may have fixed them in the last year or so.

One of the biggest drawbacks, in my experience, is the creation of pages vs. posts. This is an enormous pain if you're new to the software. Once you get the hang of it, it doesn't take long to realize that the process is kind of bloated. Doable, but bloated.

And that's a word that I like to associate with Joomla, i.e. Bloat.

TinyMC is, the article creation interface (or Wysiwyg) where you write your posts and such, can be very buggy and again, bloated. Write your posts in Notepad (not Word or anything like Word), and then copy and paste them into your Wysiwyg. There are third party Wysiwigs which are worlds better than Joomla's default, but I'll touch more on third party software in a moment.

The administrative panel is extensive, but again, the mere size of every page can slow working in the backend to a crawl. Unless you're on a nice, powerful web server, and using a reasonably fast computer you may experience bloat-lag when working on the backend. It doesn't sound like a huge problem, but when you're working on a deadline trying to make that last tweak, and the page won't load or save fast enough... well you get the picture.

Third party software. Joomla is unmatched in third party, plug and play software. And most of its free. However there is some outstanding paid software out there, so don't limit yourself to the free stuff.

Which leads me to the free stuff. It's great. It's outstanding. It increases Joomla's extensibility, and makes virtually anything possible. There is quite literally a plugin for everythingl. Here's the problem. It's not guaranteed. Joomla 1.0 and 1.5 are promised to be leak free, in other words if you're running straight Joomla! you shouldn't get hacked. However, the third party software? Not so much. Some of them are so open to exploitation that it will only be a couple of days before someone has hacked your administrative side, and changed all of your pages, or worse, deleted your entire mail list... it happened to me.

Themes. There aren't a lot of great free themes available for Joomla. Most of the better ones are the rejects that the paid themers didn't want to persue. There are, however, some very good paid themes, and theme clubs out there, which offer up a web presence that just screams "I paid a bundle for this site!".

Here are a few:

rockettheme.com - is probably the most well known, and successful of the lot. I've used them before, and while the themes are beautiful, and I mean beautiful, I believe they get bogged down by the special effects.

Yootheme.com - is another great themer. Again, gorgeous themes, but they have the same problem as Rockettheme - bloated. There are a few, though, of their minimalist themes MEE comes to mind, which are almost perfect.

Joomlart.com - They've been around since the beginning, and while the themes are simple, it wasn't until about ten or twelve months ago that they got on board with modern web design practices, and began to crank out some really, and I mean really cool themes. They've got some of the same personal issues with drop down menus, java, that the others do, but they're not quite as overdone in my opinion.

shape5.com - is one of the lesser known themers out there. But they make some of the best. Go figure. Their crossroads them is one of my favorite.

I like minimalist web sites. And here are some great themers if you like small web sites:

joomlajet.com - handsdown makes some of the best themes available for Joomla. The web site is on an Australian server, so it takes a while for it to load. But be patient. It's worth the wait.

joomlabamaboo.com - All minimalist. They have some javascript, and such, but it's not over done. Some of their themes are very elegant. They aren't my favorite theme club, but some of their themes are worth the effort.

Anyway, that's my take. In my opinion if the design and layout of the site are the most important factor in your startup, then go with Joomla! You can create some really fantastic sites that offer your visitors a ton of options. However, if you're content driven then Wordpress might be the way to go.

In the past anytime I've started up something on Joomla! the design and layout of the site usually became a bigger focus than the content. Joomla just requires so much nursing in the beginning.

Anyway, I've got a lot of Joomla! experience so if you have any questions shoot me a PM, and I'll help any way I can.
God bless,
Beau

Nevermind. Double Posted.

EDIT: I made this post before I realized that Debbie has everything well in hand. The site looks great so far Debbie. I can help in anyway let me know.

It has now been edited, and condensed, so that I do not feel like a big dope. :-)
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Here are some other great theme sites that maybe you're not familiar with.

rockettheme.com - is probably the most well known, and successful of the lot. I've used them before, and while the themes are beautiful, and I mean beautiful, I believe they get bogged down by the special effects.

Yootheme.com - is another great themer. Again, gorgeous themes, but they have the same problem as Rockettheme - bloated. There are a few, though, of their minimalist themes MEE comes to mind, which are almost perfect.

Joomlart.com - They've been around since the beginning, and while the themes are simple, it wasn't until about ten or twelve months ago that they got on board with modern web design practices, and began to crank out some really, and I mean really cool themes. They've got some of the same personal issues with drop down menus, java, that the others do, but they're not quite as overdone in my opinion.

shape5.com - is one of the lesser known themers out there. But they make some of the best. Go figure. Their crossroads them is one of my favorite.

I like minimalist web sites. And here are some great themers if you like small web sites:

joomlajet.com - handsdown makes some of the best themes available for Joomla. The web site is on an Australian server, so it takes a while for it to load. But be patient. It's worth the wait.

joomlabamaboo.com - All minimalist. They have some javascript, and such, but it's not over done. Some of their themes are very elegant. They aren't my favorite theme club, but some of their themes are worth the effort.

Anyway, I've got a lot of Joomla! experience so if you have any questions shoot me a PM, and I'll help any way I can.
God bless,
Beau

I'll be happy to follow along and learn...thanks.

Jerry

I would simply say: Don't give up!

Doesn't need to be fancy.