Im looking for a website builder that will be easyish to use for a non techo like me. Any ideas what it is like to use? Are there templates to help or is it all from scratch? Any help or suggestions for alternatives would be great. Thanks Scott
Yes Joomla is a good thing to go with. You can also use Wordpress as it is easier to maintain as compared to joomla
While WP is good & easy, it's not quite the solution for a full blown website. It serves well for blogs or small sites. Joomla isn't quite a website builder though, it's a CMS that allows you to manage your content easily. You'll still need a template or you can use the provided one, you can get them for free or pay for a nice/custom one. It is very extensible though (mods/components), you can develop a fairly good site using it.
Joomla is an excellent open source CMS, however it can be intimidating to first-time users. You will need to be prepared to do a lot of learning before you can take advantage of all it's features. It can also be a challenge to make it seo-friendly. WordPress is actually blogging software and not a CMS, however it can be a lot easier to master when you are just starting. You can build some pretty sophisticated sites thanks to a wide variety of plugins. It may be a better choice if you are just getting started. Both platforms offer a wide variety of templates ("themes" in WordPres lingo) and add-on components, modules and plugins. There is a lot of open source stuff available for both worlds. As mentioned earlier none of these is an actual website "builder", you'll need to choose an open source template(theme) or design one on your own. Bill
I love using Joomla now. When I first started I found it a bit overwhelming but after looking through the file system you soon learn how its internals work. My first site with joomla all I did was go straight into the templates and edit the CSS for my full site which worked fine but wasn't great. After reading some good tutorials etc. i soon realised there was a lot more power to harness with the components and modules you can get free (mostly). These add a lot of functionality to the site without the need to program php etc. Building your own components and modules for joomla is a bit daunting at first also, but when you get the hang of it they are not all that hard (need fairly good knowledge of php).
I tried using Joomla. I failed miserably. I am a bit of a technical idiot. And while I appreciate Joomla can be very straight forward I didn't have the time or inclination to learn about it because I am familiar with wordpress, which as a cms is very effective for a full scale website if built correctly.
Joomla is a great route to go. If you are not technical savy, you may want someone to install it for you. The rest is pretty straight forward.
Having tried Joomla a while back for a few sites, I could never grow to like it. I'm a programmer, and for the amount of effort it takes to really take advantage of what Joomla has to offer, you might as well have rolled your own basic CMS system that's tailored to a site's specific needs. Just my opinion, of course. For starters, I highly recommend WordPress. It's very easy to use, has a large user community that can help you with any customization you'd like to do, and very attractive site templates are easy to find and install. Good luck!
Oh, and will Wordpress offer enough functionality as to be able to have 'forms' so as to capture peoples info or inquiries? Or some sort of data base with it? Cheers