One of the best things about Joomla is that it is free and there are many web hosts out there that will install a Joomla system at your website if you host with them.

Another of Joomla's great advantages is that you don't have to know any html or other programming languages to use and alter the look and functionality of the system or to add pages of content to your site. Joomla will allow you to login and work on your site from any online computer. It contains a simple editor that works like a word processor and a media manager to upload or add images to your site.

Although Joomla is fairly simple to use for a simple website it is also built to handle the functionality of running a large newspaper online or a huge news network like CNN. Joomla can have unlimited users assigned to be Authors, Editors, Publishers, Managers, Administrators, Super Administrators and can of course have all those people working on the system at the same time.

It also has a secure area that requires a username and password and can be used to lock down any information that shouldn't be available to the general public. The system allows you to have multiple secure areas with different levels of access all controlled by the administrator of the site.

The administration system for those of you that are not familiar with administration systems is accessed by using your domain name and adding to /administrator to the end like this http://www.YourWebSite.com/administrator
Once inside the administration area the system will show you a number of menus where you can choose to create a new content item or add a new user etc. and all the other functions required to run your site are accessed through this area.

Joomla is very flexible due to many add-ons available for free and commercially. It is very easy to add a component to make your site into a fully functional Real Estate site, an Online E-Commerce Store, a Streaming Video portal, an Online Brochure for your company or almost anything you can imagine.

Joomla is much more that just a website in a box. Most web sites are simply "Pages" that "Link" together. Joomla is a dynamic website, in other words it has it's own database that is used to store all of the pages of your site and really only displays the page when it is requested by someone surfing your site and selecting that page from the menu or calling from a search engine. This database gives you the ability to store thousands of pages or more without having them take up a massive amount of webspace and the best feature is the ability to "Search" within your site.

If you were running a peotry site and had thousands of poems that people had submitted and someone coming to the site only wanted a specific Poet's work they could use the built-in Joomla search engine to find everything they need from the front page of your site. Without a database it would almost be impossible to search through thousands of pages on your site and return the results within enough time to keep the people on the site and still interested.

People always as me how easy Joomla is to work with. I have taught many people to use Joomla in the corporate world and for personal sites and find that once you understand how Joomla works and start using it a little it is fairly easy to do the simple things required to build or maintain your site. I think the toughest part may be getting a Template you like and trying to personalize it so it doesn't look like every other Joomla site out there. As of this writing Netcraft Web Surver Survey found that there are more than 108 million websites on the Internet today, so with there being just over 2 million sites using Joomla, even using a standard Joomla template is going to be that bad.

My Favorite Template site is RocketTheme, I don't think you will find a better product for the price. They have 2 membership options $50.00 for 3 months and $75.00 for a year. When you buy a membership you get all the previous templates and all the new ones that are released during your membership time. Usually 1 template per month is released. The RocketTheme templates are very good looking but the functionality is second to none.

Is Joomla secure? It is secure enough for the many of the United States Government's sites including the House of Representatives and Skype, according to stats there are over 2 million sites using Joomla right now and over 10,000 developers. The Joomla core development team releases an update on a regular basis as required and immediately if there is security issue. If you do a search in Google for "Powered by Joomla" you will see "Results 1-10 of about 2,230,000. This number grows every day as people learn about Joomla.

I hope that helped with a simple understanding of what Joomla is and a little about it.

Jay Addison